Google has unveiled a wave of cloud-gaming Chromebooks

Acer, Asus, and Lenovo are shipping gaming Chromebooks backed by free trials of Amazon Luna+ and GeForce Now.

-  MARK HACHMAN

Google is challenging the notion that you can’t game on a Chromebook with…cloud gaming Chromebooks.

We’ve known how to game on a Chromebook (fave.co/3g2evE9) for months now, and Google and its partners (Acer, Asus, and Lenovo) have adopted the same approach for Chromebooks: Adopt cloud gaming from major providers like Microsoft’s Xbox cloud gaming service, Amazon’s Luna, and the GeForce Now service from Nvidia.

What Google is doing, though, is taking modern gaming-class hardware—Core i7 chips from Intel, plus 144Hz+ 1440p displays—and combining them in premium cloud gaming Chromebooks. On a PC, this approach might cost well over $1,000. In a Chromebook, Google executives say they’re targeting $700 or so as the maximum—in part because they can exclude a pricey GPU and let the cloud do all the work.

And, boy, is it. The natural question one would ask is why to build in such high-end displays if the games being streamed to them are only 1080p. In Nvidia’s case that won’t be the situation: Andrew Fear, director of product management for GeForce Now (fave.co/3CbTcJz), said the service will deliver 1600p game streaming at 120Hz with RTX effects on—and you’ll get three months of this service tier, with an Nvidia RTX 3080 backing it up, for free with the purchase of a new gaming Chromebook.