What is Google Stadia's NEGATIVE LATENCY

Since Google has started to promote its Stadia game cloud streaming service, negative latency was the thing sounded off the most.

What is "latency"

For the sake of understanding this article, first in order to understand "latency".

So, latency is time between action and reaction.

In a video game, action is press of a controller's gun shoot button and reaction is when gun shoots. Because we are talking about Stadia, a streaming service, there is another latency - internet's latency. There is an action - a request, which you send to some remote server (for example by typing a search to Google) and it's response back to you (found results).

Both are usually in single digits or tens of milliseconds. And that's perfectly fine. We are all 

NEGATIVE LATENCY literally

What would that mean? That a reaction happens BEFORE an action. Sorry, ain't happening, it would be against the laws of physics.

Imagine, in extreme case of course, you already killed every enemy on the island before you even think about shooting.

What is it really

It's just a nice marketing phrase.

Google's detailed explanation is actually a good, helpful and realistic.

It's basically a prediction based on your playing habits. Stadia would prepare multiple reactions, render them and send you that branch of stream.

In a simple example, you play chest and have three available moves. Stadia prepares stream for all of those moves and as soon as you push the one button, you immediately see the result.

Cool idea, bad phrase.