Google Stadia could sidestep latency issues by predicting button presses

Google Stadia will eventually have traditional consoles beat when it comes to responsiveness, according to the platform's VP of engineering Madj Bakar. 

Speaking in the latest edition of Edge magazine (via PCGamesN), Bakar explained Stadia will utilize something called "negative latency" to sidestep any potential lag between player and server. 

Bakar uses the term to describe a predicted latency buffer that will result in lag mitigation measures such as rapidly increasing frames per second to reduce latency between player input and display, or perhaps even predicting which button a player will hit next. 

"Ultimately, we think in a year or two we’ll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally," Bakar told Edge, "regardless of how powerful the local machine is."

It's unclear how exactly the system would anticipate players' next move, but it'll be interesting to see if it's something that eventually comes to fruition further down the line.