It’s been two years since Google revived dreams of bringing PC games to Chromebooks. We haven’t heard yet when we’ll be able to fragment in Chrome OS, but we now know that work is underway to bring RGB keyboards to the operating system. And since RGB and gaming go hand in hand, these keyboards could find a way into potential Chromebooks with Nvidia RTX graphics cards.
In April, Nvidia announced that it was working with MediaTek, which makes SoCs for many Chromebooks, to create a reference platform that supports Chromium and Nvidia SDKs, as well as Linux. In a press release, the GPU maker promised to combine RTX graphics cards and Arm-based chips to bring ray tracing “for a new class of laptops.”In 2021, Nvidia showed off RTX on the MediaTek Kompanio 1200, a chip that MediaTek says will be in “some of the biggest Chromebook brands.”
The news comes more than a year after Google announced it was working on bringing Steam to the Chromebook. It doesn’t matter if laptops have RTX graphics if they don’t have PC games worth playing. There hasn’t been much news about RTX or Steam support since then. But at least we know that work is underway on the other part of turning games into Chromebooks: RGB.
9to5Google on Wednesday discovered a new feature flag in Chromium Gerrit, which Gerrit says “enables support for RGB keyboards on supported devices.”And the flag looks like it will do more than hang a colorful keyboard on a Chromebook. It includes per-key color programming and the ability to create your own colors by playing with red, green and blue values. Developers are currently testing RGB features with an internal command, notes 9to5Google.
Three codenamed devices are associated with an RGB keyboard function flag. Two of the laptops use 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake processors and one is from ODM Quanta, which works with companies like HP. The third product, according to 9to5Google, is a detachable keyboard.
This news isn’t as revealing as a Steam or RTX support update on Arm, but it does give hope that developers are still thinking about PC gaming on Chromebooks.