Amazon Luna supports “existing Windows games” on Turing-level GPUs

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  The now-standard streaming-game-service shot of titles running on many different kinds of screens. [credit: Amazon ]

Amazon's newly announced Luna streaming service will run games on a standard Amazon Web Services EC2 G4 instance, the company told Ars Technica in a roundtable discussion. Those server instances sport Nvidia T4 GPUs equipped with 320 Turing Tensor cores and support for Nvidia's GRID virtualization drivers.

Luna's server architecture is significantly different from that of Google's Stadia, which uses Linux-based data servers and Vulkan's open-source graphics APIs. That means extra work for Stadia developers who have to port their existing games to Stadia's environment, which can sometimes lead to apparent graphical snafus.

The precise amount of porting work needed for a Stadia port can vary. A game like Doom (2016), which already supported Vulkan graphics, reportedly took only three weeks of full-time work by two developers to get running on Stadia. But Cyberpunk 2077 will be coming to Stadia after its Windows and console launches, according to publisher CD Projekt Red, likely due to the extra porting effort.

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