I've bought a very cheap chromebook this black friday, an Atom X5-E8000 with 2gb of ram. I didn't bought exactly to play Stadia, but I decided to give it a try.
It works, but there are small hiccups happening all the time (sometimes even complain about the connection quality), GPU usage sometimes goes up to 95%, but normally stays at 60%, and CPU is always around 45%. The game resolution goes from FullHD (I think, since my screen is a bit lower resolution than FullHD) and sometimes lower. It is almost playable, and I think a bit of optimization could do the trick to make this cheap chromebook to actually play stadia games.
It's not any network related issue, I think, because on the same network I play flawlessly on Chromecast, on MacBook and on my Linux PC.
CPU/GPU are way too slow, it's a small miracle that it runs that well at all.
The only thing you could try for improvement is running Stadia in a guest session so nothing else is putting load on the processor.
For sure, but maybe if there is some kind of optimization, maybe reducing video FPS on weaker hardware we could have a much better experience
instead of pushing 60 FPS, a 30 FPS video will be a much less work for this cpu/gpu. This could also improve the experience in non optimized operating systems browsers (google-chrome vanilla on Linux) or no capable old computers (heard some people trying stadia on old macs) that needs to software decode the video.