Google Stadia Spec Leak, The Service Might Be Disappointing

Not long ago, Google announced its entrance to the gaming industry with Stadia. With it, Google wants to change the whole landscape by offering AAA games' access without expensive hardware. In the announcement, the chief engineer of Stadia - Majd Bakar stated that the service would allow the gamer to stream AAA games with 60FPS and 4K resolution from their tablet or smartphone. These promises of Stadia has attracted the competitions of Sony and Microsoft into the game. But it seems that Google has promised more than they could deliver.

Vega vs. Navi GPU

According to a recent leak on Stadia's hardware power, which we got via a list of products from a Vulkan API of Khronos Group. It describes “Google Games Platform Gen 1 (AMD GCN 1.5).” We assume that the platform mentioned is Stadia then from the list we have some really important information about the type of GPU will be used.

We all know too well about AMD, who is one of the top suppliers for the gaming chip. And recently they are working on a new architecture for GPUs - with the name "Navi" to power Xbox and Sony upcoming consoles. These new chips are designed to be very beastly, however according to that list then it seems like Google will go for a different GPU architecture. From the listing of Khronos, Google might opt for the “GCN 1.5,” - short for 14nm Vega AMD chip series, which was released back in 2017. While these Vega chips are still capable enough to power many gaming PC rigs these days, with a previous-gen GPU at its center Stadia will find it quite hard to deliver on its promises.

Vs. Xbox And PlayStation

Dr. Lisa Su ( CEO of AMD) has confirmed the usage of Navi GPU on both Xbox Anaconda and PS5 consoles, which will allow them to step to the new era of gaming graphics. They plan to ready the base structure of the chips late this year. There are also many rumors saying that this Navi GPU will deliver a very fantastic performance level.

Some leaks say that PS5 will have the capability of around 12 - 14 teraflops. With specs like that many insiders are expecting that the Xbox Scarlett and PS5 will leave Stadia behind in term of graphical capabilities. But there is still hope for the could gaming platform of Google.

Because Stadia is a game streaming service so they could easily upgrade the whole system with a better GPU if they want to later on, but for the moment, it is probably that Stadia is heading to a kinda underwhelming launch.