The graphics servers that accompany 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 Stream for Games 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 leaked information, Google seems to be planning to make Stadia and Immersive Stream support additional graphics hardware. This information comes from a modified version of Stadia’s Linux kernel. In a code change last month, Google has added a way for their automated 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 the corresponding support files required for UMD/KMD NVIDIA modules and instances using NVIDIA gpu’s”.
At this time, there is no clue as to which specific NVIDIA graphics cards may be used by Stadia and Immersive Stream. While AMD has long provided open-source GPU drivers for Linux devices, NVIDIA has only recently started providing the same drivers. As such, the newly included NVIDIA drivers for Stadia are (not yet) available for inspection. Despite the lack of details, the implications here are quite interesting.
