These days we carry out all kinds of tasks from our favorite internet browser. These refer both to work in professional environments, as well as in our leisure moments. As surely many of you already know, these modes of use include games, something that is growing little by little. Therefore, the developers of Chrome, Firefox or Edge are working to improve our experience in this regard.
We tell you all this because the most used browser in the world at the moment, Chrome, is receiving important improvements for its next stable version. And it is that recently Google launched the first Beta version of Chrome 94 with important news for game lovers. This version brings with it a series of new web standards designed to improve games in the browser.
How Chrome 94 will improve your gaming experience
In particular here we are going to find the WebCodecs API that can make cloud games faster. At the same time, the experimental WebGPU technology has been included that should facilitate the developers of these titles in the browser, the use of the computing power of the device.
Thus, WebCodecs is an API that provides developers with more convenient access to the browser’s encoding and decoding codecs that are already included. Say that these are the ones that determine how to work with streaming video in real time. Chrome previously had methods to play videos, but they are not as suitable for cloud games , mainly due to latency. At the same time WebCodecs technology is designed to solve this problem.
This allows avoiding overload and also allows the incoming video stream to be displayed on the screen as quickly as possible. All this largely thanks to hardware decoding. In theory this will also improve the performance of cloud games, something that will be especially evident on low-end computers.
What is WebGPU technology in the browser
As for WebGPU, we will tell you that this is an even more experimental technology than WebCodecs. It allows web developers to connect to the native graphics API of a device and interact directly with the graphics card. Thus, what is achieved is avoiding the need for other layers that can slow down the process. It could be said that it is the new generation of WebGL, which in the future will make it easier for developers to create heavy games to run in the browser. For all this, all the hardware capabilities of the users themselves will be used.
It is worth mentioning that both technologies can be applied to more than just games. For example, at the time Google pointed out that Zoom is interested in using WebCodecs for videoconferencing. At the same time WebGPU can be used to render 3D models in the browser, or to accelerate machine learning. Say that both technologies are developed by the W3C consortium and are open standards. This allows developers of other browsers to test and implement them as well.
Once we know all this, it is expected that WebCodecs will be enabled by default in Chrome 94, although it will take some time for developers to implement the technology in their projects. Meanwhile WebGPU will remain an experimental feature until early 2022.
