Stadia

Stadia ‘dev node’ teardown shows off the hardware Google sent to developers [Updated]

Ben Schoon | Dec 8 2022 - 11:53 am PT

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 a Lenovo workstation, 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.

Update 12/8: Linus Tech Tips has now published a hands-on with another Stadia dev node, and that video gives us more insight on what the hardware brings. 64GB of RAM are mentioned, and the GPU has 8GB of RAM, half that of the “standard” for this GPU in particular.

According to the developer they spoke with, Google’s dev node was a bit less powerful than the actual cloud hardware in testing.

The software on the physical machine wasn’t working due to the fact that it couldn’t be plugged in to Ethernet, but the video gives us a peek at the website developers would have been able to use. It also brings out that even the dev node had to wait 15 or so minutes to reboot on games crashing, just like Google’s own servers. Notably, the software shows a Stadia logo and nothing that suggests Windows, which hints that the other machine mentioned in this article may have had its original OS swapped out.

The video goes on to discuss Stadia’s shutdown more than the hardware itself. Apparently, developers got a new version of the Stadia SDK just days before Google announced the shutdown, and one studio had a conversation with Stadia about the platform’s future just a day beforehand.

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.