A number of publications have tried out Stadia at E3 and have been kind enough to share their impressions from the show floor.

The cloud server used for the Stadia E3 demo is located in San Francisco. It was not erected near the convention center specifically for E3. For the demo, Stadia was running Doom Eternal on a Pixelbook at 1080p and displayed on a Samsung TV. The laptop featured a wired connection via ethernet, which Google claims was about 25 Mbps.

The Verge reflected positively on their Stadia experience.

At 1080p and 60 fps, Doom Eternal worked pretty much flawlessly. . . I could not detect any noticeable input lag. Nick Statt, The Verge

The Verge did note, however, that there were a couple of issues. At one point, the writer the connection with the Stadia controller was lost; and at another, the stream was severed entirely.

Tom’s Guide tried out Stadia as well. “I was mostly impressed with the experience,” Marshall Honorof writes. “However,” he notes, “the Wi-Fi connection at the event wasn’t perfect, which gave me a glimpse of how Stadia deals with disconnections.” According to Honorof, Doom Eternal needed about a minute to ramp up to 1080p at 60 FPS, displaying in lesser quality while the connection stabilized. But once it did, Honorof did not “recall any kind of lag or screen tearing.”

Beyond performance, the reporter learned that Stadia will pause your game for up to ten minutes if you lose your connection. When your connection resumes, simply push a button to return to where you’d left off. If your connection drops for more than ten minutes, you’ll need to reload your game from your last save point.

Gizmodo was pleased with their impressions for Stadia.

And while I suck at playing Doom, the stream itself didn’t suck. It was as smooth as playing on a traditional console. Alex Cranz, Gizmodo

Gizmodo’s information concerning the connection time-out differs from the information provided by Tom’s Hardware. Gizmodo cites a Stadia representative saying the connection drop will be “10 to 15 minutes”, not a maximum of 10. Ultimately, the Gizmodo reporter wasn’t entirely “sold” on Stadia, “not by a long shot.” But, he said, “if the final product works as smoothly as this controlled demo, then Stadia could be mighty appealing.”

We’ll post again tomorrow with the day’s impressions of Stadia, as well as any other news that should arise.