Google Stadia is set to shut down for good just a month from now, but a developer kit has now surfaced showing off what was used to get games ready for the now-defunct cloud gaming platform.
Gamers Nexus on YouTube obtained a Stadia “Dev Node” which is what Google called the hardware developer kit used for creating games on Stadia. The machine was sent to game studios to prepare games for the service and optimize it for the hardware that ran Stadia’s backend.
The machine’s shell was customized off of , customized with a white finish and a Stadia logo, with custom hardware inside for Stadia.
For the CPU, the machine runs on top of a high-end Xeon processor alongside a customized AMD Radeon Pro V320 for the GPUm, which was based on the Vega 10 core. The GPU also had a slick blue paint job which stands out in the otherwise industrial-looking kit.
Interestingly enough, the host says that machine was booting up with Windows 10, despite Google Stadia famously requiring specialized Linux ports for bringing games to the platform, which was one of the biggest roadblocks in building out Stadia’s library. That said, documentation visible in the video says that the machine was using a version of Debian Linux, so it seems possible it was switched to Windows after the fact. The “dev node” couldn’t be activated without a developer account.
With Stadia set to shut down in the near future, this hardware obviously doesn’t have much of a purpose anymore, but it’s still a neat piece of history. Perhaps it can join that infamous “gaming’s greatest failures” display next time someone wants to showcase it.
More on Stadia:
- Google Stadia hardware refunds are already rolling out to many
- Stadia has gotten its last Assassin’s Creed Valhalla update; Ubisoft ‘working on’ PC copies
- Hello Engineer, a Stadia exclusive, will arrive on PC via Steam next year
Author: Ben Schoon
Source: 9TO5Google
