Google to leverage 14nm AMD Vega GPU for cloud game streaming platform Stadia

Cloud gaming has been a hot topic of discussion since Google announced the upcoming Stadia cloud game streaming service earlier at GDC 2019. And, while cloud gaming is touted as the next revolution in hardware-less gaming; it is nothing new considering Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming platform has been around since 2015.

Since Stadia is all set to go toe-to-toe with GeForce Now and Microsoft xCloud; AMD and Intel seemed like the best hardware partners to power Google’s cloud gaming platform.

Details of the CPU powering Stadia are relatively unknown other than the fact that it will feature hyper-threading, which leads us to believe it will likely be a quad-core Intel chip.

While little information was provided about the CPU, AMD was announced as the official GPU partner with Google confirming its cloud game streaming service would run on a Radeon Vega graphics card with 56 compute units and HBM2 memory. But no details were provided as to whether the Vega card would be a 7nm or the older 14nm GPU.

However, Khronos’ Vulcan API product listings may have confirmed that Google’s Stadia platform will leverage older GCN 1.5 architecture. Google also confirmed that the graphics card powering Stadia would have 10.7 TFLOPS computing power and 56 Compute units. What we’re likely to get is an AMD Vega 56 on steroids.

Google also promised 4K gaming at 60fps, which could be a major hurdle as the Vega 56 card would fail to achieve these numbers in more mainstream titles, even if it is on steroids.

On the other hand, the search giant has already confirmed that the platform will feature scalability, ensuring if the AMD Vega cards will likely be replaced after the first signs of aging.