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.

Read Impressions from Day 1 Here

IGN was positive about their time with the demo, writing that “. . . it was just as smooth and stutter-free as you would expect really. . . Running around and blowing up demons felt exactly the same as when I played the game on my personal godlike gaming machine at home.” And though the graphics weren’t at max settings, as the reporter described it, they were “good enough”.

It was just that smooth. Josh Norem, IGN

Trusted Reviews was impressed with the fluidity, characterizing Stadia as “perfectly playable” and that the aiming “felt great.” However, they were disappointed with the consistency in image quality, writing “Upon turning the camera, environments would appear muddy and artefacts obvious as Google Stadia tried to draw in the image at a 1080p target resolution.”

Performance failed to hit the 60fps target I’ve come to expect from id Software’s shooter series. Jade King, Trusted Reviews

Ars Technica spoke highly of their experience. Though they couldn’t speak to the statistical quality of the stream, they were more concerned with the perceived quality. “While I couldn’t swear the control latency was identical to a game running locally,” they wrote, “I will say that aiming, shooting, jumping, and dodging the game’s various demons felt identical to playing the 2016 version of Doom.”

I’d have been hard pressed to point out any differences between the Stadia version and one running on a local PC Kyle Orland, Ars Technica

Tom’s Hardware found the experience satisfactory. ” For the most part, Doom Eternal played pretty well,” they wrote. They noted “slight hiccups” several times, however, and Doom crashed twice for them.

Was it as exact as playing on a PC? Not exactly, but it felt pretty damn close to console play. Andrew E. Freedman, Tom’s Hardware

Metro found the image quality to be poor, describing the textures as “muddier than we’d seen previously.” They did, however, appreciate the frame rate: “. . . it was running at a consistent 60 frames per second, which is vitally important for a fast action game like Doom.”