The ecological impact of Stadia

[Phabh]

I'm not sure if this should be on the Gaming side or not, but while watching the Google GDC conference yesterday, I couldn't help but think about the ecological impact of such an infrastructure. Data centers are known to consume a lot of electricity. Is the streaming model going to be better or worse than the actual model for the planet?
Moreover, the fact that a huge company like Google not even mentioning such concerns in 2019 during their conference is baffling to me and shows how little they care.
The excitement of the public and nerds shown during the conference when instant streaming was shown was scary to me, this enthusiasm seemed so strong that any environmental talk would land on deaf ears. Cool tech >>> Earth.
tl;dr: We're doomed.

 

[Herb Alpert]

Thank you for this thread

This is something that is bugging me too and I was thinking about bringing this topic.

All these server farms will probably be an ecological nightmare, and it's telling that Google didn't say a word about that

 

[Troast]

Uh yeah, true for a lot of tech. Don't worry though we aren't doomed, because we can tech our way out of anything! Smart humans.

 

[sir_crocodile]

Dunno how true it is, but:

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/index.html

IF true, it may actually help, as it would stimulate use of renewables if google only buy leccy from utilities using renewables.

I personally have no interest in stadia though

 

[carlosrox]

I read the opposite and people are claiming it's better for the environment to cut out physical hardware.

*shrugs*

(Not a fan of Google or Stadia)

 

[Deleted member 8408]

I see the OP is doing their bit by ceasing to use the Internet.

 

[Turin Turambar]

At first, it's the same. Having a powerful computer at home or at a datacenter to generate graphics, more or less it's the same.

Although, technically, the datacenter is easy to be installed near a a cheap, renewable source of energy, so there's that.

 

[Infinity Times Two]

Quick facts: Google accounts for 40% of the internets carbon footprint. And the sum of all internet activity is on par with aviation.

It's a big deal.

 

[Deleted member 873]

Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological.

 

[Kiraly]

These server farms Amazon, Google and Microsoft are building at the moment would have been built nonetheless. The cloud is the future.

 

[Aostia82]

tl;dr: We're DOOM.

Click to shrink...

corrected

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNRJMYZUzjA

 

[Glio]

Yes, I'm curious about whether it's more or less efficient than having hardware in your house.

 

[eZipsis]

I feel like manufacturing millions of plastic game consoles and millions of plastic game cases is far worse than constructing data centres. At least a data centres can be used for something else if they no longer require them. They won't just bury the data centre in a desert somewhere.

Plus, the data centres could be outfitted with solar panels to cover their electricity needs.

 

[Sec0nd]

Interesting topic. I wonder what the difference will be. It would eliminate a lot of plastic and power running factories that are involved with making the box. Though you would off-set it with data centers running constantly using up lots of electricity. But if I remember correctly they are trying to get these centers a lot cleaner through different ways. Running it in the desert with solar energy, eliminating cooling costs by having them sit underwater, etc.

It would be an interesting topic to explore and find out the facts for sure.

 

[kiguel182]

I'm curious about the amount of heat this will produce. Data farms are already expensive but the fact that this is running such high spec computers will certainly increase cost and heat production right?

I'm curious how it stacks against people owning plastic boxes. But I don't know, seems wasteful.

 

[Get_crazy]

I was wondering the same thing and I came across those articles:

DeepMind AI Reduces Google Data Centre Cooling Bill by 40%

"in 2017 Google will reach 100% renewable energy for our global operations — including both our data centers and offices"

 

[RedSparrows]

I see the OP is doing their bit by ceasing to use the Internet.

Click to shrink...

Oh, come now.

 

[KingSnake]

In theory it should be actually more environmentally friendly. Like public transport vs. cars. The hundred of millions of consoles and PCs are not exactly environmentally friendly either while datacenters are definitely more energy efficient and a lot of them are supposed to run on renewable energy.

 

[Herb Alpert]

I mean, Netflix already counts as 15% of internet trafic apparently.
Stadia streaming 4k at 60fps, let alone 8k lol, will need a hell of Horsepower.

Beside that, the end of net neutrality is a big concern here, as internet providers will have to find a way to let all these flows of data pass, and could therefore give priority to some above others.

I don't know, I'm no specialist, but this future raises a lot of issues...

 

[Deleted member 2809]

Member bitcoin

It was one of my first worries.

 

[Bjones]

A lot less... the data centers are already there and are used for more than just stadia where as the manufacturing process for disks and cases use much more resources and power consumption. Then you have the shipping for those products ( ships, planes, trains, trucks) which also have huge environmental and resource impacts, and finally the resource foot print of the stores themselves.

 

[SigSig]

Those Stadia racks will be a lot more power efficient than your plastic game box.

I see the OP is doing their bit by ceasing to use the Internet.

Click to shrink...

mattbors.png

 

[Deleted member 36622]

These are data centers Google has already built over the years not just for Stadia.

 

[The Curry Witch]

Quick facts: Google accounts for 40% of the internets carbon footprint. And the sum of all internet activity is on par with aviation.

It's a big deal.

Click to shrink...

This are some extremely interesting and concerning facts that I didn't know before. Would you be able to point me towards some interesting summaries of this topic? Not that I don't believe you, friend, I just wanna know more about it.

 

[Mendrox]

Uhm, do you think that making 100 Million of consoles, shipping them, shipping games etc. is better than a Datacenter using its hardware to the best?

You buy a console:
It's manufactured beforehand
Shipped to your region
Maybe you have to drive to the store
You use your console - great!
You don't use it? It's a big waste of ressources.

A datacenter can just alocate it's ressources to other services all the time.

 

[Herb Alpert]

These are data centers Google has already built over the years not just for Stadia.

Click to shrink...

They'll need to build a lot more, won't they ?

 

[Infinity Times Two]

This are some extremely interesting and concerning facts that I didn't know before. Would you be able to point me towards some interesting summaries of this topic? Not that I don't believe you, friend, I just wanna know more about it.

Click to shrink...

Sure

https://qz.com/1267709/every-google...ns-this-real-time-dataviz-shows-how-much/amp/

 

[Wintermute]

I see the OP is doing their bit by ceasing to use the Internet.

Click to shrink...

also, OP has a reasonable point. the amount of resources these server farms swallow is only going to grow exponentially with demand, and personally i've always found a lot of companies claims re renewables somewhat dubious.

 

[Deleted member 36622]

They'll need to build a lot more, won't they ?

Click to shrink...

I guess so, if they want to enter new markets but this is all part of investments Google will inevitably do to bring their services to more countries.

 

[Hitcher]

A quick search would have answered your question - Google solar farms

 

[Eoin]

The lack of any kind of real data makes this really difficult to discuss.

A huge server in a huge data centre is going to require a lot of power, but typically its usage time would be swapped between many different users. A large shift to Stadia would mean more power usage in data centres, but fewer plastic boxes full of electronics scattered around the world (and far less packaging materials, far less shipping costs, etc.) - whether that evens out or whether there's an efficiency balance in favour of one side is not easy to determine.

One other factor is that it's easier to push a data centre on to renewables than it is to push every household and business that use that data centre that might otherwise use local computing devices. How good are Google at powering their data centres with carbon-neutral sources? Do we reliably know?

My inclination is that it won't be much less energy efficient than local computing, and may even have the edge if Google get the capacity planning right.

(One place where I definitely see data centres losing is with smaller games - there doesn't seem to be a way for developers to use less than one instance of Stadia, so I can't imagine that the cost of running and streaming a simpler game would be less than the cost of running it on Switch or something drawing a similarly small amount of power.

 

[Deleted member 8408]

Oh, come now.

Click to shrink...

Let's be real, if one of the big 3 announced a 10tf console I doubt you would see anyone saying "oh but power consumption, the poor environment". Instead you would have a bunch of excited nerds here salivating over the news.

But I guess it's easy to pick flaws and be supercilious when it's something you deem to be a threat to the things you like (or if it's something you don't like at all).

 

[mclem]

I'd assume datacentres don't use significantly more power than that equivalent processing power spread in individual units of client hardware.

But that's purely an assumption, not backed by any data.

 

[Infinity Times Two]

Let's be real, if one of the big 3 announced a 10tf console I doubt you would see anyone saying "oh but power consumption, the poor environment". Instead you would have a bunch of excited nerds here salivating over the news.

But I guess it's easy to pick flaws and be supercilious when it's something you deem something to be a threat to the things you like.

Click to shrink...

That might be true, but I would honestly rather have this discussion in one of the cases, as opposed to none.

 

[DarkDetective]

Stadia has data centers that consume a lot of electricity.

But

Stadia doesn't have hardware that needs to be manufacturered, distributed, and (when become redundant) recycled.
Stadia only consumes energy for players that are currently active. So when the platform has 100 million monthly active users, but they never get more than say, 20 million concurrent users, they only need hardware for 20 million users in their data centers. In other words, the peak concurrent users is much more important than the total number of Stadia 'owners' for their electricity consumption, whereas console manufacturers' waste/power consumption scales alongside the number of system owners.

So I'm not sure at all if Stadia even uses more electricity than the current console platforms. In fact, it may even be less.

 

[karmitt]

Just considering that any energy wasted is money wasted for the business should tell you they'll likely do everything in their power to maintain a tight control over server provisioning. I could see them monitoring usage trends over weeks, months, seasons etc to ensure that things aren't on unless they need to be.

In addition, no doubt these servers are all virtual, which usually means more efficient use of the hardware available - they could allocate instances based on the average demand of the games being played.

Anyway, it's definitely something to care about, but I wouldn't jump to conclusions that it's actually worse. I'm sure there's countless other factors I haven't mentioned

 

[Deltoid]

it'll be better for the environment. all aboard the stadia train.

Let's be real, if one of the big 3 announced a 10tf console I doubt you would see anyone saying "oh but power consumption, the poor environment". Instead you would have a bunch of excited nerds here salivating over the news.

But I guess it's easy to pick flaws and be supercilious when it's something you deem to be a threat to the things you like (or if it's something you don't like at all).

Click to shrink...

facts

 

[Paul]

Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological.

Click to shrink...

Environment has cleaned up amazingly well thanks to capitalism, after socialism fell in my country. Pre 1989 people were regularly wearing shanghai-style veils, and one of the reasons the revolution even started was because people were pissed off about the unbreathable environment. In my hometown in particular the smog was so thick you couldn't see through it more than couple meters, for months at a time. Capitalism is inherently pro-whateverpeopledecidetosupport, which is a huge improvement over the alternative.

 

[Abicus]

Let's be real, if one of the big 3 announced a 10tf console I doubt you would see anyone saying "oh but power consumption, the poor environment". Instead you would have a bunch of excited nerds here salivating over the news.

But I guess it's easy to pick flaws and be supercilious when it's something you deem to be a threat to the things you like (or if it's something you don't like at all).

Click to shrink...

This is an incredibly condescending take to have. It's an issue with every electronic device, and something that we should care about.

Comments like "ceasing to use the internet" is the same comment baby boomers make about how efforts towards climate policies dont work because people drive cars still.

 

[Cugel]

I was think exactly about this.

This is going to be an energy nightmare.

But gamers are very prone to close turn their back on their "beliefs" whe it concerns Something they like.

Reminds me of some self proclaimed ecologist I know which werefarming crypto coins.

 

[Wintermute]

Stadia has data centers that consume a lot of electricity.

But

Stadia doesn't have hardware that needs to be manufacturered, distributed, and (when become redundant) recycled.
Stadia only consumes energy for players that are currently active. So when the platform has 100 million monthly active users, but they never get more than say, 20 million concurrent users, they only need hardware for 20 million users in their data centers. In other words, the peak concurrent users is much more important than the total number of Stadia 'owners' for their electricity consumption, whereas console manufacturers' waste/power consumption scales alongside the number of system owners.

So I'm not sure at all if Stadia even uses more electricity than the current console platforms. In fact, it may even be less.

Click to shrink...

not really true. server farms are hardware. google will have to scale out these data centers to meet demand, that's a huge amount of hardware. just imagine the amount of drives they'll swap out annually, the amount of ram, cpus, server racks that they'll constantly be replacing. that's a huge huge huge amount of physical stuff being made and being scrapped.

 

[Wintermute]

here's an article detailing the amount of energy that data centers use annually. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes...and-rapidly-growing-problem-for-data-centers/

U.S. data centers use more than 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, requiring roughly 34 giant (500-megawatt) coal-powered plants. Global data centers used roughly 416 terawatts (4.16 x 1014 watts) (or about 3% of the total electricity) last year, nearly 40% more than the entire United Kingdom. And this consumption will double every four years.

Click to shrink...

Over the past 10 years, data center power usage effectiveness (PUE) -- the ratio of total power required to run an entire facility versus the direct power involved in compute and storage -- has decreased. Google now maintains an impressive PUE of 1.12 across all of its data centers, including all sources of overhead, which is very close to the theoretically perfect PUE of 1.0.

However, now that PUEs have improved, the low-hanging fruit is gone. Future efficiency gains will be minor and incremental -- or so it would seem.

Click to shrink...

 

[Catshade]

Eeeh, I don't know. Wouldn't a million people sharing Google hardware collectively be more eco-friendly than a million people buying hardware separately but many of them only use it for a few hours per day (and left it unused the rest of the day)?

 

[Nostradamus]

I mean obviously server farms use huge amounts of energy but the question is whether overall energy consumption (and environmental impact) is more efficient than having 100 million individual boxes in people's houses. I guess overall consumption and environmental impact is lower but local environmental impact is a lot higher.

 

[aevanhoe]

Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological.

Click to shrink...

Communist China is just as anti-ecological, if not worse. And they are not the only one.

 

[Gibordep]

Not a fan of game streaming, as I said before I will have a traditional console until the last one, but I think this model will help the environment. The sum of eletricity of all the individual consoles, and the extra parts and all the plastic should be more than the eletricity spent on the data center.

 

[jts]

When the processing is done off-site there's a lot more opportunity to optimize and minimize the ecological impact by for example making the data centers running on sustainable energy in a way that couldn't scale as easily to everyone's homes.
And constant hardware updates to optimize energy efficiency which impact the bottom line of these companies and their eco reports which are getting increasingly more important. I don't see much of a worry there.

 

[BernardoOne]

Manufacturing games, game cases, consoles, controllers, and then the energy those consoles waste is much worse. At least with datacenters the transition to renewables is a lot smoother.

I was think exactly about this.

This is going to be an energy nightmare.

But gamers are very prone to close turn their back on their "beliefs" whe it concerns Something they like.

Reminds me of some self proclaimed ecologist I know which werefarming crypto coins.

Click to shrink...

did you miss every single console so far or something?

 

[RestEerie]

Alot of waste just for chicken so i say...the ecological impact's pretty big..

 

[Deleted member 3196]

In terms of raw materials used, especially plastic, they can probably reach more players with less hardware, as each server will probably be shared by multiple people over the course of the day rather than them all owning a console. Plus Google probably has a plan to recycle/redeploy old Stadia servers when their gaming function ceases (such as if the service fails, or they replace them with new hardware), as opposed to people just keeping their old consoles in storage or dumping it in landfill. So in that sense, it's probably better for the environment, given how irresponsible many individuals are with their old electronics.

But in terms of the electricity/fuel used, I couldn't say. My gut tells me that electricity consumption would be lower, but that these datacenters are huge and require staff to keep them running 24/7, and that these would have a detrimental impact on the areas they decide to put them in.