'Gaming Chromebooks' With Nvidia GPUs Apparently Killed With Little Fanfare

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google and some of its Chromebook partners decided to try making "gaming Chromebooks" a thing late last year. These machines included some gaming laptop features like configurable RGB keyboards and high refresh rate screens, but because they still used integrated GPUs, they were meant mostly for use with streaming services like Nvidia's GeForce Now and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming. But there were also apparently plans for some gaming Chromebooks with the power to play more games locally. Earlier this year, 9to5Google spotted developer comments earlier this year pointing to a Chromebook board (codenamed Hades) that would have included a dedicated GeForce RTX 4050 GPU like the one found in some Windows gaming notebooks. This board would have served as a foundation that multiple PC makers could have used to build Chromebooks. But these models apparently won't be seeing the light of day anytime soon. Developer comments spotted by About Chromebooks this week indicate that the Hades board (plus a couple of other Nvidia-equipped boards, Agah and Herobrine) has been canceled, which means that any laptops based on that board won't be happening.

is ChromeOs even build for gameing and NVIDIA?

[Joe_Dragon]

is ChromeOs even build for gameing and NVIDIA with the way they want to control drivers will make it suck even more.
and then after 3-4 years the OEM stops doing updates and all along the way you need to hope that the OEM builds have driver updates as on Chrome Os you can't install drivers on your own.

Re:

[DrXym]

ChromeOS can run Android apps so there are a lot of games that could benefit from hardware acceleration. A bigger issue is many Android games SUCK on mouse & keyboard, or even controllers. Too many of them assume that people are using a phone sized touch screen. I don't get why Google didn't produce some decent SDK to support lots of control mechanisms.

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

ChromeOS got a lot of VM infrastructure now. They probably planned to run in an optimus type mode where the VM got the dGPU via hardware passthrough, blitting the framebuffer to the iGPU on the host for display.

It's a bit fragile if you have to DIY it, but on a fixed hardware platform it's a lot easier for Google.

NVIDIA breaks the primary use case

[Anonymous Cward]

There is no currently Chromium support for VAAPI on NVIDIA GPUs and Vulkan does not work properly with PRIME when it comes to XWayland. The closest we have to a solution is using Firefox with a custom add-in by someone called elFarto, and even then, it only covers decoding not encoding, so your typical Google Meet use case would still remain garbage compared to other OSes with the same hardware.

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

Google Meet would be running on Chrome on the iGPU on the host. They are big enough to get NVIDIA to make PRIME work with XWayland/Sommelier, especially since NVIDIA could concentrate on a couple system configurations.

Re:

[wierd_w]

ChromeOS isn't but linux is.

See also, Mrchromebox.tech and the coreboot based UEFI alternative firmware they roll there.

Any intel chip newer than a Brasswell has Vulkan support on Linux, and can "Sorta" do DX12, with hardware acceleration.

A surprising number of games can be convinced to play using Lutris this way.

(Windows drivers for those chips are purposefully crippled, because Intel does **NOT** want to release new ones, go through the onerous MS HWQL vetting process for them, tell OEMs to update their d

Of course they were..

[Voyager529]

Chromebooks became popular because they are very inexpensive, and because they are basically disposable.

People who play games on a Chromebook are typically fine with poor framerates (my nephew loves Roblox and plays it at 9FPS on his school issued Chromebook with no problem), or they're playing casual games that don't require an nVidia GPU.

People who play games that require nVidia GPUs have Steam/Origin/Battle.Net/UPlay libraries that need Windows...and if you have Windows, you have Chrome. There is an extraordinarily small amount of software that works on ChromeOS, but won't work on a gaming PC running Windows.

GeForce Now is hanging on, but OnLive and Stadia are both gone...and even if you *are* using GeForce Now, the whole draw to the service is that it'll play high end games on low end hardware...and if you have to pay $600 for a Chromebook with a discrete GPU *and* a subscription to a gaming platform that largely ignores it *and* a higher end internet subscription that can handle the bandwidth...$900 will get you an entry level MSI Katana with an i7 and RTX4050, and it'll play all the Windows games.

Why anyone thought these would ever become popular is beyond me.

Re:

[drnb]

Why anyone thought these would ever become popular is beyond me.

I'm sure school kids who are issued those low cost Chromebooks for schoolwork dream of being able to play "real" games. But such a popular idea seems in conflict with other more important things.

Re:

[DarkRookie2]

Steam/Origin/Battle.Net/UPlay libraries that need Windows...

Need is a pretty strong word.

Re:

[wierd_w]

Indeed. All of those can be convinced to work with Lutris + GE wine proton.

Re:

[narcc]

Ask a teacher. When those things came out you'd have thought they were a major technical leap forward the way they raved about them, rather than the overpriced junk they actually are.

Also, Google Classroom is absolutely awful. It's now my go-to argument for the importance of dogfooding.

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

You are not wrong. When my nephew graduated from high school this year, the school told him to keep the chromebook instead of turning it back in, which he wanted to do - they're such junk that even a cash strapped public school district doesn't want them back.

Re: Of course they were..

[wierd_w]

Most of the problem is actually chromeos itself.

Modern chromebooks can have fairly midrange components inside them, and even today, can still be liberated from the great google mothership with mrchromebox uefi firmware.

In terms of 'gaming' on one...

Once you get onto a REAL operating system, they can do a surprising amount for how little they cost. Is your money better spent elsewhere? Absolutely.

But if you got one 'for free'?

A 20$ 'suzy-q' cable, and about 20min, will get you out of the google tractorbeam,

Re: Of course they were..

[LindleyF]

I think Stadia-like services were targeting the wrong niche. Don't aim for high-end games on low-end hardware; aim for OBSOLETE games on the browser. Stuff that's so old it won't work on your machine. There's a market for that.

Re:

[Waccoon]

Chromebooks are basically Netbooks v2.0.

My eyes bugged out when I saw a Chromebook selling for $1,200 in a store, as I thought to myself, "Doesn't that defeat the whole point?"

Zero fanfare

[RandomUsername99]

Apparently released them to little fanfare as well because I'd never fucking heard of them.

Re:Zero fanfare

[93 Escort Wagon]

It's funny how often I'll see a story here stating that "Company X is cancelling Product Y" and my first thought is "Product Y? I didn't even know Product Y was a thing!".

laptop

[awwshit]

Add enough hardware and features and your Chromebook is no longer cheap and you can call it a laptop. Is there a market for a half-assed laptop at the wrong price point? I'm guessing no.

The idea wasn't bad exactly,

[pecosdave]

but overdone.

I've got an Nvidia Shield TV - it's great for gaming. Having an Nvidia GPU is great for MPEG compression/decompression and other redering efficiency, the idea is sound for both movies and games. Love my Shield. There's even handheld consoles like the Logitech G-Cloud with game streaming in mind.

RGB keyboards are just flash but I get it, going full GeForce RTX 4050 is just killing the whole Chromebook thing. Chromebooks are supposed to be light, efficient, affordable and overall a useful appliance. If they were to make a series of Chromebooks with the same Nvidia tech that's in the Nintendo switch and/or Shield I could see a very sucessful thing happen. Once you got RTX4050 you just have an expensive under-speced laptop. Start over - do an ARM and Nvidia setup....

Re:

[supremebob]

I thought that the Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU wasn't out yet. Did they mean the 4060, or was this something that was supposed to come out this fall?

Re:

[pecosdave]

I wasn't sure, but a lot of the time a "weird numbered" chip is a portable one or special one. As far as Nvidia goes, 50 is usually a desktop card. I just chose to not dig too much. I know they have embedded GPUs and have forever - that's what I'm saying a gaming system from them should have, good enough to dominate the Android-like games, and good for MPEG compression/decompression.

Re:

[alvinrod]

There hasn't been a desktop 4050 released yet, but there's a mobile part released earlier this year that's labeled as a 4050. It's based on the same chip that the desktop 4060 uses, but it's cut down slightly (had ~83% of the shaders) and doesn't have quite as high of a boost clock, but it's otherwise fairly similar to the desktop 4060.

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

I have a Shield TV as well and it's been badly hobbled by Google. Unless you buy into Nvidia's GeForce NOW streaming game service, there are hardly any games to play on it. I was hoping I would be able to install native Android games from the Play store, but so few games support the Shield that it's practically useless for Android gaming. It's really a pathetic state of affairs. It's a great device otherwise, but could've been so much more.

Re:

[pecosdave]

I know you can do a lot of emulators and what have you on it, but I haven't, not yet, but I do have the paid for version of LaunchBox if I ever get around to playing with it.

I did find an unexpected issue with playing Android games on it. The Secret of Mana, which was awesome on the SNES, has buttons on the title screen you have to touch to activate. It's not just controller only, which means you have to hook up a mouse to play it.

I've found a lot of Android games are buggy as hell period when you break o

As a developer I wouldn't write software

[rsilvergun]

that depended on an nvidia GPU in a chromebook. I'm going to limit my game because otherwise my market's way, way too small...

a gaming chromebook?

[FudRucker]

if you consider playing solitaire gaming

Re: a gaming chromebook?

[wierd_w]

I have a Celes (samsung chromebook 3), and it can run stuff from the early 2000s just fine. Considering the fact that this model has 'numerous known issues', and has the 'avoid' verbiage with it, and can STILL do light gaming, --THAT ISN'T SOLITAIRE-- (talking more Stalker, tes 4 oblivion, openmw, systemshock 2, and pals), I'd say you are barking more about chromeos's lack of exposing vulkan on hardware that supports it, than about the hardware itself.

A 20$ cable and mrchromebox firmware will set you on the

AI

[Njovich]

NVidia needs their fabbing capacity for AI chips. AI stands for 'Artificially Inflated pricing, where they will sell server chips for 20-40k

apparently launched with little fanfare too

[lusid1]

didn't even know they existed.

An early term abortion for the Google Graveyard

[The Evil Atheist]

Indiana's going to arrest Google for not carrying "Gaming Chromebooks" to term.

Fuck Chromebooks

[sinkskinkshrieks]

They're even worse than the IKEA of disposable cameras. Disposable devices like Chromebooks should be banned.