Pretty much what title says. I noticed VP9 was mentioned nowhere on the new AMD GPUs. I still prefer to use Stadia due to its portability, but I'm sure I won't be the only person building a computer. I would like to play games on Stadia with 1440p on my computer, so this decoding is important.
This image below (have to zoom on it to see it) does not list VP9 for the cards on AMD's site.
Hello @3nigma,
This seems more like a question for AMD (and possibly the Google Chrome team). I don't expect the Stadia team to keep track of every possible set of hardware. I am also interested in learning the answer to this question, though, as are many others, I'm sure.
Lastly, this doesn't seem like a topic that would apply to only the Stadia Founders – perhaps you'd consider raising it in one of the other forums for wider discussion?
I have to disagree. For the sake of duscussion, I'll go into why. Stadia is a little, inexperienced fish in a big pond. They aren't in much of a position to put that responsibility on others right now. Stadia markets themselves on this service working up to 4k 60fps on most laptops/desktop which can run Chrome browsers in addition to mobile and CCU solutions. Yes they have fine print to clue us in that we need to meet a few expectations, but beyond that they don't help the consumer meet those expectations.
The list of hardware is truly not that long. 20% of the work covers 80% of the cases. AMD and Nvidia are pretty much their only concern for GPUs. GPU architectures are even fewer in number, and they could probably just go by architecture. Someone at Google must be in contact with either AMD or NVidia since they use their (maybe just AMD) products in their racks. Since VP9 is only x years old, the products would further be limited by age.
I agree it may be more up the Chrome team's alley, but Stadia has a better line of communication with Chrome than I do. I'm just a consumer. I really shouldn't have to do all of the work to hunt down who owns what at the company. DramaLlama found what appears to be some confirmation on AMD's RDNA2 architecture page, but I didn't even think to look there. You think some parent considering a laptop for their kid is gonna look up AMD's mobile gpu specs? I don't, and I definitely don't think they'll search AMD's architecture pages for that info. They'll see it has a dedicated GPU and think "sweet it can handle some gaming and probably streaming even easier!"
In addition to that, Stadia is marketing this as a super simple gaming solution - attractive to a broader audience. I'm more technical than the average person. I own an AMD gpu from 2018 (so relatively new). My GPU does not handle full hardware acceleration because it's using some sort of hybrid decoding. Sure that's AMD's fault, but why would they care about their card working with Stadia - especially in 2018? That goes back to my first point...Stadia has to be proactive given their position.
It truly does not hurt for them to put the effort into making it very evident to potential consumers that certain products are guaranteed to support their tech. If they are going to market to an audience of people who don't understand tech, then make it extremely easy for those people to know if their hardware works with Stadia.
They want to be big players in the gaming industry. I think they need to know their industry well enough they can highlight to anyone what works well with their service. Otherwise, Stadia look like the liars because they marketed this service to work on just about anything and be stupidly simple. Summing it all up, Stadia have better channels of communication with AMD than I do. They have better channels of communication with Chrome than I do. They have more incentives to make this knowledge easily accessible for current and future consumers. They don't have the clout to expect others to do this type of work for them. Thus, my reasoning is the onus is on Stadia to make this happen rather than their community of consumers. Google as a whole made its name partially on the idea of putting users first. Stadia needs to embody that more going forward. I say that now because it's been a year, so maturity is becoming expected rather than appreciated.
Cheers! Hopefully none of that came off as angry, just disagreeing.
On the RDNA2 architecture page, it mentions that RDNA2 has encode/decode for VP9, AV1 and HEVC - see towards the bottom of the RDNA2 Architecture website. Although that's not a guarantee that every card will have that, it seems to strongly suggest that they will