Hmm...what to do on a boring Sunday morning? How about running through the same section of the visually impressive Metro Exodus on two cloud gaming services, to see if I can make any decent observations about differences in performance between the two?
Without planning to do so (I started out just making a recording of Exodus on Luna), I decided to play through the first ten minutes of Metro Exodus on both Amazon Luna and Google Stadia. And what did I find?
Well, as expected, both of these platforms deliver a very nice looking experience with a high-end game like Exodus. There is certainly no shortage of power on the other end of these streams (and be sure to flip your YouTube playback to hi-def if you want to play along). I'm obviously a big fan of both platforms (none of that "Stadia is dead" nonsense around here), so a lot of this is just nitpicking. But a few observations from my very unscientific study:
Winner Round 1: Amazon Luna
I'm going to continue to try to find interesting and fun ways to compare these platforms to the best of my ability - and I would love to throw X-Cloud into the mix if I can. This little experiment doesn't begin to take into consideration things like business models (or poorly timed tweets by employees), but I may start to mull that stuff over a little bit too as we move forward.
Obviously, I'm just a layman - I don't have the setup to monitor framerate or resolution. But, at least with the conditions my house allows for on a quiet Sunday morning, I'm going to give this round to Amazon Luna - just slightly edging out Google Stadia.