GPUs – BIG

Google might be working to add Nvidia GPU support to its servers for Stadia and/or Immersive Stream for Games.

As reported by 9to5Google, a code change from last month shows that Google added a way to include necessary drivers for Nvidia GPUs:

“Add support to the kokoro job script to generate a disk that contains the UMD/KMD NVIDIA modules and corresponding support files required for instances that use a NVIDIA gpu.”

Google’s game streaming services — Stadia and the underlying Immersive Stream for Games tech Google opened up for companies to use — have so far relied on custom AMD GPUs to power games. Researchers have said that Stadia’s servers run on AMD’s Radeon Pro V340, or something similar in power.

The main reason for this is that Stadia uses a modified version of the Linux kernel and, until recently, Nvidia hasn’t offered open-source GPU drivers for Linux.

In other words, with Nvidia offering open-source GPU drivers, it looks like Google is prepping to support the company’s hardware for use in Immersive Stream for Games and Stadia. While Nvidia GPUs aren’t available for the services yet, the inclusion points to intriguing possibilities.

As 9to5 notes, Stadia games are optimized to run on the current AMD hardware. If Google swapped Stadia to Nvidia, it would likely introduce issues for the current lineup of games unless developers similarly optimized for the new hardware.

That said, it’s certainly a possibility. 9to5 says Google might have plans for a Stadia ‘hardware upgrade’ to make it more competitive with other game streaming options from Microsoft and Nvidia. Alternatively, it could just be a way to give developers building Immersive Stream experiences more options.

For now, it’s not clear how this will play out, or what it means for Stadia users. The change could herald a significant upgrade, or could mean little — only time will tell.

Source: 9to5Google

Intel revealed its new Arc A-Series GPUs at an event on March 30th. A-Series GPUs will cover laptops, desktops, and workstations, but Intel put the focus on its laptop options to start.

The main two offerings Intel unveiled were the A350M targeting ultra-thin designs and the A370M for more performance in thin-and-light designs. Both of these fall under the ‘Arc 3’ category, with Arc 5 and Arc 7 laptops coming in early summer. The company also shared a teaser video of its upcoming desktop GPU expected this summer.

Intel says Arc 3 graphics will offer enhanced 1080p gaming and content creation. For A370M specifically, Intel says it can deliver more than 60 frames per second (fps) at 1080p on “a range of popular titles.”

Moreover, Intel says many of the first laptops with Arc graphics will be Intel Evo designs. Evo, for those unfamiliar, is a certification program of sorts — laptops marked as ‘Evo’ meet various performance and hardware criteria set out by Intel, such as being lightweight and offering great battery life.

Intel’s new discrete GPUs bring support for Direct X 12 and dedicated ray-tracing hardware, but the first batch announced by Intel only offer around twice the power of the company’s integrated Xe graphics.

Still, this is the first of many GPUs, and it’s likely that Arc 5 and 7 hardware — which will offer more graphics cores, ray-tracing units, memory, and power — will be more appealing to high-end gamers when they arrive this summer.

Intel also showed off its artificial intelligence (AI) ‘XeSS’ super-sampling system that can upscale games to higher resolutions on the fly. Unfortunately, it’s not available yet but will arrive in early summer. Moreover, based on what Intel has said, it seems like XeSS will rely on developers supporting the tech for best results.

Further, as The Verge points out, Intel largely avoided comparing its Arc offerings to hardware from other companies, namely AMD, Nvidia, and Apple. As such, we’ll need to wait on tests from reviewers to see how these products stack up to the competition.

Still, it seems like some of Intel’s tech will help give it an edge. For example, there’s ‘Deep Link,’ which allows systems sporting both Intel CPUs and GPUs to optimize power-sharing to give hardware the juice it needs to complete a task.

Ultimately, this first showing suggests there’s potential to be excited about, but most people should reserve full judgement for real-world tests and for whatever Intel has up its sleeves for the summer.

Source: Intel Via: The Verge