Oregon State students built Stratus for 40ms cloud gaming
Playstratus has documented the architecture of Stratus, an open-source game streaming service developed by Oregon State University students. The system uses Linux-based servers, the WebTransport protocol, and a custom Wayland proxy to achieve sub-2-second startup times and latencies as low as 40ms for 1080p 60fps game streaming. Its components include a Next.js web client, a TypeScript coordination server, and a C/C++ streaming server running on a PlayStation 5 APU-based hardware cluster.
Key Takeaways
- Stratus uses WebTransport over HTTP/3 for video, audio, and controller input between browser clients and streaming servers.
- The streaming servers run on a 12-node BC-250 cluster with PlayStation 5 APUs: 6 Zen 2 CPU cores, RDNA 2 GPUs with 25 Compute Units, and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory per node.
- A custom Wayland proxy intercepts frames for the video pipeline, which then encodes H.264 with FFmpeg and renders in the browser with WebCodecs.
- The coordination server uses TypeScript, express.js, DynamoDB, Google OAuth, and WebSockets to pair clients with nodes and manage session state.
- Each streaming node currently supports one simultaneous stream session, and games are packaged as AppImage files with Linux Overlay Filesystem and Wine for Windows titles.
Why It Matters
Stratus shows one working path to low-latency browser-based cloud gaming: WebTransport, a Linux streaming stack, and a custom Wayland capture layer are enough to hit under-2-second startup and 40ms round-trip latency in the team’s tests. The architecture also matters because it runs end-to-end through standard web clients, a TypeScript coordination layer, and on-prem BC-250 hardware rather than a specialized commercial cloud stack. The next signal to watch is whether the team’s separate performance analysis continues to show 1080p60 delivery at 40ms as the service moves beyond a single-session-per-node design.
Read full article at playstratus.io
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