Google’s release of Chrome Beta 94 notes that Google is adopting several new web standards that might improve browser-based gaming experiences. The soon-to-be-released WebCodecs might make cloud gaming easier and faster, while the experimental WebGPU could make it easier for creators of browser-based games to tap into the power of your computer.
WebCodecs is an API meant to provide developers with improved access to the video encoding/decoding codecs that come standard with your browser and determine what to do with video streams. While there are techniques for getting video to play on Chrome, they aren’t particularly built for things like cloud gaming, which requires as little latency as possible. WebCodecs is designed to minimize overhead, allowing you to get the incoming video stream onto your screen as quickly as possible, perhaps with the assistance of hardware decoding.
A newer and experimental WebGPU, provides web developers with better access to your computer’s graphics horsepower by allowing them to plug into your computer’s native graphics API. it allows web developers to communicate with your graphics card in a language it knows, rather than having to go through additional layers that may slow things down. It is intended to be a next-generation version of WebGL that allows developers to access the OpenGL framework. In the future, the technology should make it easier for developers to create graphically intensive browser games that take advantage of the full capability of current-generation GPUs.
