Today at their GDC 2019 keynote, Google announced Stadia, their upcoming “gaming platform”, a server based streaming game service that runs on any Chrome enabled device. Powered by custom GPUs designed by AMD using Vulkan on the Linux OS and spread across the same networking powering the Google search engine, Stadia promises to bring 4K at 60FPS gaming to the masses, with future support for 8K and 120FPS promised.
Being entirely server side, Stadia offers a number of innovative features. Combined with their newly announced Stadia Controller, you can play games across any Chrome device and seamlessly transition your game between devices. Since all the work, client and server are done on Google’s servers, they claim this will make cheating virtually impossible, while being able to scale existing game play up to thousands of users over night. It also offered unique features like Streaming multiple sessions to the same endpoint, enabling flawless couch co-op, or the ability to use multiple server side GPUs for a single game instance enabling advanced special effects.
Stadia is built on top of familiar developer tools:
Unreal Engine
Epic Games’ official support for Stadia means you’ll have access to the latest technology and features of the world’s most powerful creation engine.
Unity
Unity is the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform, enabling developers to create rich, interactive experiences.
Custom tools
A suite of debugging and tuning tools help you get the most out of our platform, from fine-tuning streaming performance to diagnosing GPU crashes
Industry tools
Current dev tools include Havok®, RenderDoc, Visual Studio, LLVM, AMD RadeonTM2 GPU Profiler, IncrediBuild, UmbraTM 3, FaceFX and Intelligent Music Systems, plus we’re constantly expanding to deliver a familiar development experience
For developers interested in getting started with Stadia, you can sign up at Stadia.dev. For gamers interested in learning more visit Stadia.com for more details. If you missed the GDC keynote, you can watch our condensed developer focused version in the video below. We have done a similar treatment for the Unity keynote as well, available here.