Together with the announcement of Google Chrome Beta 94 there were also news of the implementation by Google of some new web standards that could improve browser-based gaming experiences . With the proliferation of cloud gaming , the next generation WebCodecs could help achieve faster speeds, while the WebGPU experimental could make it easier for developers to harness the power of the computer for games running in the cloud.
WebCodecs is a API designed to give developers better access to the video encoding / decoding codecs that are already supplied with the browser. WebCodecs is specifically built to lower latency and avoid overhead , making it easier to get the incoming video stream to the screen as fast as possible, potentially with the help of hardware decoding.
The newer and more experimental WebGPU instead gives web developers better access to the graphics power of your computer , allowing them to hook into the computer's native graphics API. In simpler terms, it makes it easier for the web developers to talk to your graphics card in a language it understands, without having to go through other levels that could slow things down.
Despite being designed for gaming, these technologies will bring improvements in many other contexts such as videoconferencing , 3D rendering from browser and machine learning . Before we see the results of implementing WebCodecs or WebGPU it will still take some time , but while WebCodecs is actually nearing release, WebGPU is only in an experimental phase which should end in 2022 .
