Amazon recently announced its intention to enter the video games streaming service market with Amazon Luna, placing it as a competitor for popular cloud streaming service like Xbox Game Pass and EA Play. Rumors abounded about Amazon entering this particular market, and now they're finally proven to be true.
Amazon Luna will offer a cable-style subscription service for streaming video games, and some analysts have speculated that it could prove to be a major competitor for Google Stadia. People already wanting to weigh their games streaming service options with Luna in consideration may be wondering how Luna's servers will be supported, and whether players will be able to stream games at the level of quality people expect from Amazon Prime video streaming and the company's parcel delivery services.
The newly announced Amazon Luna will run games on Windows on servers supported by Nvidia T4 GPU, as Amazon revealed in a discussion with Ars Technica. Amazon Web Services EC2 G4 instances will provide the standard server quality that Amazon often utilizes, running on Nvidia's high-quality GPU and supported with Turing Tensor cores and virtualization driver support. Also, Amazon will offer support for 4k graphics based on the dev's choice, browser optimization, and compatibility for both iOS and Android coming in the future.
Nvidia is at the forefront of GPU technology, and its recently revealed generation of Geforce RTXs boasted high performance and what Nvidia itself calls its greatest internal generation leap. The 3090 especially is wowing even non-technologically-inclined people and proving to be a major competitor on the market. The fact that Amazon is using Nvidia GPUs is a major confidence booster for a lot of people familiar with tech, and even for people who aren't as "in the know" but have absorbed information about Nvidia's prowess just by talking to fellow gamers.
Since Google Stadia devs have already admitted the service has difficulty rendering bigger games, if Amazon can come in swinging with powerful servers run by capable GPUs, Luna will have a major advantage over Stadia. Amazon says it wants to help devs avoid spending a ton of extra time and effort porting games over to Luna, and they can use its existing services instead of having to code entirely new ones.
With browser optimization, a powerful GPU, attention to devs' precious time, and an increasing startup lineup, a lot of what fans have heard about Amazon Luna so far sounds pretty positive, and hopefully Amazon will continue to try to attract customers to its upcoming service with tempting features like this.
Amazon Luna launches in early access this year.
Source: Ars Technica