The promise of 4K visuals on Stadia has only ever been realized on Chromecast Ultra. The good news is that it’s a feature that’s coming to Chrome and Google has already started rolling it out to some users.
A post over on the Stadia subreddit shows that one user was able to play games in 4K through the Chrome browser. If you dig a little into the comments you’ll see other users reporting the same.
Though some users are also reporting that it isn’t showing up for them. This means it’s a staggered rollout and may not reach everyone right away. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are a couple of pre-requisites.
4K Stadia gaming on Chrome requires a 4K monitor
An obvious requirement, but one that needs to be mentioned. Not everyone has a 4K gaming monitor. Partially because they aren’t cheap.
If you primarily play on Chrome but don’t have a 4K monitor, then you won’t see these 4K visuals pop up for the games that support the resolution. It’s even possible that it has been rolled out to your account, but again if the monitor isn’t there then you’ll still only get 1080p.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you need to adjust the visual performance settings. This can so far only be done in the Stadia app on your device. So make sure to change the data usage and performance to 4K before loading the site and launching a game.
You don’t need an “excellent” connection to get 4K
As noted by 9To5Google, typically 4K visuals will have the “excellent” connection associated with them. You don’t need this connection though.
4K can pop up with both “good” and “ok” connections too, so really the only requirement you have to meet is having the proper monitor to support it. If you fit into that category, keep an eye out for 4K visuals the next time you launch a game from Chrome.
Hopefully this will be rolled out to all Stadia Pro members by the weekend. But if it still hasn’t shown up for you by then you can still get 4K through the Chromecast Ultra. On the games that actually have 4K graphics of course as not all of them do.
Destiny 2 for example, is 1080p and then upscaled to look 4K, but it’s not native 4K. So you may not notice much of a difference there.