Mar 19
In fact, the pamphlet specifically tells children not to lie to authorities.
Mar 19
Google’s new Stadia game streaming service may be great for people who don’t own a powerful PC or console, but those games have to run somewhere — specifically, in a Google datacenter. And the hardware they run on will be largely powered by a custom graphics card from AMD that, on paper at least, puts the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X to shame.
In its presentation at GDC today, Google touted its partnership with AMD, which created the unnamed card for integration with its Stadia “instances,” the Linux-based computers that will actually run the games players stream.
The actual specs shown on screen don’t mean much to hardware fiends — teraflops are how supercomputers are rated, not graphics cards, which have sophisticated custom units and pathways for different effects and calculations.
So although it’s impressive that this one produces 10.7 TF, more than the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X combined, unless you’re using this hardware for sequential logic operations, it’s more important to know its actual game-specific chops. Of course, I’m sure the GPU is also quite competent there — it has to handle both running a modern game at 4K and 60 FPS and may have some extra load from streaming the video as well.
The 16 GB of “total” RAM is also suspicious. The way it’s phrased suggests it may be inclusive of video RAM, i.e. that in the graphics card, which makes the most likely combo 4 GB in the card and 12 for the system. That’s just speculation, though.
Interestingly, shortly after announcing the single-GPU system that the Stadia will use, a multi-GPU instance was teased in order to show the possibilities of fluid dynamics in games. It’s unclear how this would come into play — perhaps it’s necessary for 4K instances of some games, or would be an upsell for performance-obsessed players.
Whatever the specifics, this gives an idea of what kind of power and cost the Stadia backend infrastructure is going to necessitate. Every concurrent player will require a dedicated instance, which at the scales Google hopes for means at least a couple hundred thousand of these things, increasing to millions if it takes off. Call the bill of materials $150 plus $50 a year in maintenance and upgrades (this is all just napkin math) and you’re easily looking at a hundred million dollar bottom line, probably way more.
As of this writing (the presentation is ongoing) there’s still no mention of how Google plans to make money from this whole… situation. Show ads every 10 minutes of play? Take a cut of game sales? Publishers pay Google to make instant games available? Perhaps, as with plenty of other Google products, they’ll just release it first and figure out how to make money later. That works sometimes.
Mar 19
Google just unveiled Stadia at a conference in San Francisco, its cloud gaming platform. While most of the conference showcased well-known games you can play on your PC, Xbox One or Playstation 4, the company also announced that it is launching its own first-party game studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment.
Jade Raymond is going to head the studio and was here to announce the first details. The company is going to work on exclusive games for Stadia. But the studio will have a bigger role than that.
“I’m excited to announce that, as the head of Stadia Games and Entertainment, I will not only be bringing first party game studios to reimagine the next generation of games,” Raymond said. “Our team will also be working with external developers to bring all of the bleeding edge Google technology you have seen today available to partner studios big and small.”
Raymond has been working in the video game industry for more than 15 years. In particular, she was a producer for Ubisoft in Montreal during the early days of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. She also worked on Watch Dogs before leaving Ubisoft for Electronic Arts.
She formed Motive Studios for Electronic Arts and worked with Visceral Games, another Electronic Arts game studio. She was working on an untitled single player Star Wars video game, but Visceral Games closed in 2017 and the project has been canceled since then.
According to Google, 100 studios around the world have already received development hardware for Stadia. There are over 1,000 engineers and creatives working on Stadia games or ports right now.
Stadia uses a custom made AMD GPU and a Linux operating system. Games that are already compatible with Linux should be easy to port to Stadia. But there might be more work for studios focused on Windows games.
According to Stadia.dev, the cloud instance runs on Debian and features Vulkan. The machine runs an x86 CPU with a “custom AMD GPU with HBM2 memory and 56 compute units capable of 10.7 teraflops”. That sounds a lot like the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, a relatively powerful GPU but something not as powerful as what you can find in high-end gaming PCs today.
Google will be running a program called Stadia Partners to help third-party developers understand this new platform.
Mar 19
The Google Stadia announcement showed a unique sort of gaming platform where gamers, developers, and streamers (and streaming viewers) are combined. Their wants and needs are all in the mix, and YouTube is also onboard. This is streaming high fidelity AAA games to any Chrome web browser instance, even with low latency. This is the continuation of Project Stream, and … Continue reading
Mar 19
Now that Google Stadia is out in the open, the question of control comes to mind. When you’re playing on a PC, controlling games through Stadia should be pretty straightforward, as you’ll simply use your computer’s mouse and keyboard. What about when you want to play on a tablet, phone, or TV? For that, Google has created a controller specifically … Continue reading
Mar 19
Google Stadia is a streaming game platform that works cross-platform by hosting games on Google’s servers and streaming to devices of many sorts. Users will be able to play with ease and without needing to worry about toxic players, cheaters, and/or hackers. Using new technology that takes advantage of machine learning, Google will monitor gamers and make certain they’re not … Continue reading
Mar 19
Anker Finally Brought USB-C Power Delivery to a Smaller Battery Pack – Get It For $9 Off
Posted in: Today's Chili
Most USB-C Power Delivery battery packs we’ve seen so far have been designed to keep things like laptops charged on long flights. Anker’s newest, on the other hand, is built with portability in mind.
Mar 19
In the pantheon of climate change solutions, some are more fraught than others. Reducing carbon emissions? Not so risky. Blocking the sun or banking on sucking carbon out of the air? Pretty dicey.
Mar 19
Google is taking on the big guys. In a keynote at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today Google announced a new service, Stadia, that will allow gamers to play the biggest games on any Android or Chrome-based device (including any device with a Chrome browser).
Mar 19
Scientists Might Have Found a Way to Thwart Deadly Superbug Outbreaks in Space
Posted in: Today's Chili
For years now, scientists have sounded the alarm about a potential nightmare for astronauts on the International Space Station: antibiotic-resistant superbugs that could be even more dangerous in space than they are on Earth. This week, research say they’ve found a way to better prevent such hardy bacteria from…
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