Zona de Azar USA – Google Stadia Releases Today with 22 Launch Games

USA.- November 19th 2019 www.zonadeazar.com Google Stadia is the internet giant’s long-awaited, oft-rumoured game streaming service. Google has finally confirmed today as the release date, and Rockstar has also finally confirmed that Red Dead Redemption 2 will, as teased, be a November launch title for the service.

Google Stadia availability

At launch Stadia will only be available in 14 different countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, and select European countries.

Google Stadia specs

Stadia will scale up as and when more performance is required. But we do know that each instance will utilise a custom x86 Intel CPU running at 2.7GHz. This will be paired with custom AMD graphics silicon capable of 10.7 teraflops of raw compute, fitted with 56 compute units and HBM2 memory.

Google Stadia games

Red Dead Redemption 2 has finally been confirmed as a launch title after much speculation pre-announcement. Doom Eternal has already been confirmed for the streaming service, as has Cyberpunk 2077 and a litany of other major upcoming titles. Game support will inevitably make or break the Stadia service – so we’re hoping for more big announcements on this front.

Google Stadia pricing

There are two bundles available to get you into Stadia day one: the Founders Edition or the Premiere bundle. The ongoing Stadia Pro subscription will be $10 US, or £10. That will be the only way to access at first, but in 2020 it will open up and offer a free Stadia Base sub.

Google Stadia performance

Google has made progress since Project Stream was first tested, and now Stadia is capable of 4K at 60fps. Down the line, Google has promised 8K and >120fps gaming. But streaming poses new challenges, and a stable internet connection will be required to make the most out of the tech on offer.

WHERE WILL GOOGLE STADIA BE AVAILABLE?
The Stadia platform will only be available in 14 different countries at launch, thankfully with the US and the UK being among the first lucky nations to get in on the game streaming action.

Owners of the Founder’s Edition in Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland will also be part of the initial roll-out.

Google has promised that more regions will start getting access in 2020.

WHAT ARE THE GOOGLE STADIA SPECS?

While a hardware journalist like myself is dreadfully afraid of game streaming ruining my prospects, livelihood, and forcing me into a life of reviewing mobile phones, there’s still plenty to be said about the silicon occupying Google’s server racks. You hear that Google?! It’ll take more than that to be rid of me.

Google has licensed the brilliant minds behind Radeon to create the physical graphics hardware necessary for its streaming platform. The company, headed by Dr. Lisa Su, has an unflappable reputation for delivering the best console tech, and its burgeoning semi-custom division is responsible for the graphics and processing power within both the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro.

The GPU at the heart of Stadia is effectively just a modified version of the Vega 56 that’s now doing the round for around $300 in most good stores. And in some dodgy ones too. That’s not a huge surprise given the note in the Google presentation about the 56 compute units making up the graphics silicon, and the use of HBM2 as well.

But a dig into the Khronos Group’s conformant products page for Vulkan by Tom’s Hardware shows that the Google Games Platform Gen 1 (Stadia to you and I) is using AMD’s GCN 1.5. That means it’s running on the fifth gen version of the Graphics Core Next architecture, which is the same tech as powered the Vega 56.

Edited by: @MaiaDigital www.zonadeazar.com