Google Stadia suspected of adding support for NVIDIA GPU servers

Graphics servers for Google Stadia and Immersive Stream for Games will soon be upgraded to support NVIDIA GPUs. Since its launch in 2019, Google Stadia and its underlying immersive game streaming service have been powered by AMD’s custom GPUs. Researchers generally believe that Stadia’s servers run on AMD’s Radeon Pro V340 hardware or something very close to it.

According to the leaks, Google appears to be planning to support additional graphics hardware for Stadia and Immersive Stream. This information comes from Stadia’s modified version of the Linux kernel. In a code change last month, Google has added a way to their automation builder (“Kokoro”) to include the necessary drivers for NVIDIA GPUs.

In the code, it says: “Add support for Kokoro job scripts to generate disks containing UMD/KMD NVIDIA modules and corresponding support files required by instances using NVIDIA GPUs”.

Currently, there are no clues as to which specific NVIDIA graphics cards Stadia and Immersive Stream might use. While AMD has long provided open-source GPU drivers for Linux devices, NVIDIA has only recently started offering the same drivers. Therefore, the newly included NVIDIA driver for Stadia is (yet) available for inspection. Despite the lack of details, the implications here are rather interesting.

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