The announcement of Google Chrome Beta 94 mentions that the search engine is implementing some new web standards that could significantly improve the experiences of gaming in cloud. In particular, WebCodec could help make cloud games faster, while the WebGPU experimental could make the development of this type of video game easier.
Google Chrome Beta 94: great news for cloud gaming
WebCodecs is an API designed to give developers better access to codecs already bundled with the browser, which determine how streaming works. While there are already methods to play videos in Chrome, the latter are not necessarily suitable for cloud games as well, which need the lowest possible latency.
WebCodecs is built precisely to ensure one very low latency, which could theoretically make the browser faster than even some PCs.
At the same time, the new and more experimental WebGPU gives web developers better access to computer graphics power, allowing them to connect to your device’s native graphics API. In simpler terms, this WebGPU makes communication between Chrome and the graphics card easier and more immediate by eliminating intermediate processes.
Of course it is in both cases technologies still being tested, so it is very likely that we will not see them used in the short term. WebCodec is actually not far from its official publication, but the WebGPU is still a rather embryonic project and it will still take several years to spread on a large scale.
That said, it is still a very noteworthy innovation and that could become a new standard for cloud gaming. On the other hand, making the development process leaner and faster does nothing but favor long-term studies.