[shmerl]

Being exclusive to Nvidia GPUs doesn't sound like a good idea. What makes it rely on CUDA anyway?

It's cool that it's using Wine though. From these cloud services like Amazon's Luna or Geforce Now, none are running Linux, so this is interesting.

No idea why Stadia couldn't do the same and tried to reinvent the wheel with Windows ABI translation at some point before it shut down.

[Disco30417]

I guess the google team wanted to create an experience that is identical to the console gaming experience, in the sense that the users don’t have to adjust any settings before playing. Because of this requirement they couldn't use windows vms, because they sometimes have some issues like the game not being displayed in full screen. I also guess that Google probably saw some cost saving potential by using Linux instead of Windows.

[cdchn]

I'd guess it does the video encoding on the GPU before it goes back to the PC. GeForce Experience recording does this as well I believe.

[shmerl]

They don't need CUDA for video encoding?

For video they can rely on VAAPI or Vulkan video (the latter might be behind on AV1 encoding options though) which can work on any GPU with video acceleration hardware.

[wudangmonk]

My understanding is that at a certain point the only way to keep climbing the corporate latter at google is for other's projects to fail and yours to make it which explains why they come out with a new messages app every 3 months before killing it.