Intel has confirmed that it has halted plans for a unified gaming services layer, known as Project Endgame, possibly putting its cloud ambitions on hold while it prioritizes Arc GPU driver development.
Project Endgame is one of those behind-the-scenes projects that Intel never really announced, but hinted at last year. “Project Endgame is a unified services layer that harnesses computing resources everywhere – cloud, edge, and your home, to improve your gaming, and non-gaming, PC experiences,” the company said. “With Project Endgame, we can untether our users from their local hardware specs.”
Intel never clarified what it meant by that statement, though we can make some guesses: cloud gaming simply puts an GPU or a PC on a remote server. Users interact with it remotely, so that any mouse or keyboard inputs have to travel over the Internet, back and forth. What Intel seemed to imply with Endgame was a twist: use a local PC, a remote server, or even possibly a second PC as available hardware resources to power games.
It’s possible that that was the original plan. But Intel’s Arc GPUs had a somewhat rocky launch, as shortly after Intel published its Endgame plans the company had to deal with an Arc notebook launch plagued by high prices and low performance. Fortunately, our tests were a little better, though the first tests of the desktop A380 started off weird until Intel began ramping up its driver development. Intel’s Arc drivers are in a much better place now.
All that may have soured Intel’s management on Project Endgame. After all, developing a unified gaming services layer and improving Arc’s drivers probably fell to the same team within Intel. Prioritizing one probably meant de-prioritizing the other.
So it’s really no surprise that the Intel Graphics team casually disclosed on Twitter that yes, you won’t be seeing any Project Endgame development anytime soon. “Our Project Endgame efforts are on hold,” Intel said. We don’t have any updates to share at this time.”
Oh well.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.