Thursday, March 21, 2019

Google Stadia specs: is this our first taste of next-gen?

With the announcement of Stadia, we're off the blocks. The first next-gen platform has been revealed and while Google isn't going into too much depth about specs, we know enough to paint a compelling picture of the new system's capabilities. In terms of its potential performance, there are comparisons points with the consoles to come from Sony and Microsoft, but at the same time, the whole nature of the enterprise is a massive step beyond what is possible not just from the consoles of the here and now, but even future boxes too.

And this is the thing: when we analyse the specifications of a new piece of hardware, expectations need to be offset against reality. Fundamentally, a console has to be built with a reasonable per-unit cost in mind, meaning that you will never get the absolute state-of-the-art. Bang for buck is king. It also needs to deliver excellent performance within a small form factor, meaning it can't be too powerful - PlayStations and Xboxes have very tight thermal windows, after all.

Stadia's cloud-based nature removes some key limitations. Build cost is less of an issue because Google isn't building a box for every user, while the standard server 'blade' form factor opens up the thermal window significantly. For example, Stadia uses a discrete server-class CPU and a separate AMD GPU, rather than the all-in-one system-on-chip we're likely to see in next-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles. It's more expensive and trickier to keep cool, but it's standard form for GPU-equipped cloud servers.

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from Eurogamer.net https://ift.tt/2Jp7Cw9
https://ift.tt/2Y8oF8S March 19, 2019 at 11:37PM https://ift.tt/2CT6urR

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