Quoting: GuestI would almost agree, however Stadia needs a certain quality level of the games for both stability and performance. The Bethesda people (or Doom developers) already had both of that in spades, and help from AMD directly in getting there.

It's still a lot easier for Google to say: "Hey, come release your Linux game for Stadia, we'll help you here if you to need improve quality" than to say "Hey, come release your Windows game for Stadia... oops you need to make sure it works on Linux first and has good quality...".

So growing number of Linux games is beneficial for Stadia overall.

Quoting: GuestAnd Google could _definitely_ help out in getting a few companies together to keep older games running, like what Valve is doing with Collabora. I suspect actually that Google is doing all this, we're just not really hearing about it.

Why would they hide that?

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Quoting: GuestDoes it, though? I mean, does releasing for GNU/Linux in general benefit Stadia?

I think it does, almost directly. Game released for Linux is trivial to release for Stadia (assuming all modern APIs usage like Vulkan which should be the case for modern games either way). Bethesda developers pointed it out in their Stadia talks explicitly. So it's not just expertise, simply the number of Linux games potentially increases Stadia's pool of games. I see it very beneficial for Google to make as many publishers releasing routinely for Linux as possible.

Quoting: GuestOh, and Google could let SDL2 support for Stadia be made more widely available. I think I read somewhere that someone doing work for that couldn't release it to the general public, but I might be mistaken.

I suspected they are using some custom SDL, but if they aren't upstreaming things - that's a major shame and sounds already like a stance that's actually harmful.

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Quoting: GuestBut they do give something back. The HLSL -> SPIR-V compiler was pushed from Google, as my favourite example. They've helped in development and debug tools too.

Something yes, but I feel like big problems require bigger players to solve them. Publisher deadlock is a massive problem. Valve tried to move the needle and it didn't move far. Heavyweights like Google can tip the balance in the right direction, especially if it's in their interest to have more publishers releasing for Linux in general - it clearly can benefit Stadia.

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Quoting: Liam DaweNothing to do with proper or not, you don't have to give back to open source if you use it.

Same as you don't have to avoid criticizing them for not doing it ;) Mutual collaborative relationship is better than someone profiting on FOSS and not improving it in that area.

Tackling the actual publisher deadlock is something I'd consider a contribution fitting for Google.

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Quoting: Liam DaweThey want people to come to them. It's business, plain and simple.

To be blunt, they don't need to "give back" anything. They're providing a service.

First of all, they profit off Linux in it. It's proper to give Linux gaming something back, and I don't find it not fitting to criticize them for not doing more.

Collaboration can be beneficial to all parties, as above and be good for business. So it's not really "about us", it's more about making it "it's not about everyone else", even if it's at the cost of their own benefit. That's an attitude in the gaming industry especially and it's bad for progress of technology.

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Quoting: Liam DaweDepends on your point of view. This does open up more gaming on Linux, if your country is supported and your net is reasonable. I've had a great lot of fun with it.

Sure, it can be useful. But I mean with all the money they put in it, they could give more back to actual Linux gaming. But they didn't want to.

For instance, why not form some kind of coalition with those who want to advance Linux gaming in general (Valve and other Linux gaming distributors) to break the deadlock of publishers not releasing games for Linux gamers. Everyone benefits in result, including Stadia. This a political issue, not a technical one. And big players can influence things for the better.

Collaboration is a weak point in the gaming industry, besides may be something like Vulkan working group and OpenXR which are good examples.

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Google as usual is the best friend and the worst enemy of Linux [gaming] as Aaron Seigo put it about Android. Google could have done a lot more to advance actual desktop Linux releases through the Stadia effort, but they did nothing.

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Also, a shame all of their benchmarks are DX12. Where is Vulkan? DX12 is disgusting.

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If AMD’s ray tracing solution doesn’t take as much on-die space as Nvidia’s, that leaves the Radeon cards more room to cram in traditional rendering hardware—shaders, ROPs, geometry pipelines, et cetera. And if AMD can indeed load up Big Navi with more of that traditional hardware—especially now that CDNA’s arrival means AMD can jettison compute-specific extras from RDNA to focus squarely on gaming—it could indeed potentially bring a big fight to Nvidia, and perhaps even more so at the more common resolutions, where Ampere’s scaling isn’t quite as potent.

Good point which I've been bringing up in the past. AMD are less into adding ASICs and more into improving raw processing power. I consider it a better strategy than what Nvida does.

And they said in the past they expect RDNA 2 to be very competitive so this is very good news.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismIs this Socket AM5?

It's the same AM4.

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