Google Responds To Allegations That Google Stadia Under-Delivered On 4K Quality Promise

Google is currently being bombarded with allegations of false advertising related to their recently launched cloud gaming service, Google Stadia. A number of users and reviewers are accusing the tech giant of under-delivering and exaggerating their claim that “all” games will support Ultra HD 4K at 60fps at launch.

Apparently, Google Stadia renders games at 1080p and upscales it to improve overall quality, which users and reviewers say isn’t what Google advertised and definitely not what they signed up for. According to 9to5Google, a number of games that are known to support 4K resolution, such as Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2, have been proven to run at 1080p and 1440p respectively when played through Stadia.

Google has since responded with a statement maintaining that the service streams games at 40K 60fps and that the developers are free to use different “techniques” to ensure that they deliver the best quality and streaming experience for all their games.

“Stadia streams at 4K and 60 FPS – and that includes all aspects of our graphics pipeline from game to screen: GPU, encoder and Chromecast Ultra all outputting at 4k to 4k TVs, with the appropriate internet connection. Developers making Stadia games work hard to deliver the best streaming experience for every game. Like you see on all platforms, this includes a variety of techniques to achieve the best overall quality. We give developers the freedom of how to achieve the best image quality and frame rate on Stadia and we are impressed with what they have been able to achieve for day one.

We expect that many developers can, and in most cases will, continue to improve their games on Stadia. And because Stadia lives in our data centers, developers are able to innovate quickly while delivering even better experiences directly to you without the need for game patches or downloads.”