Nvidia Grid Offers Cloud Based Gaming to the Masses

[Shawn Zipay]

Hey guys, remember OnLive? It's ok, nobody will be talking about it anymore now that Nvidia has revealed the Nvidia Grid Gaming System. Each one of these cloud-based gaming racks include 20 GRID servers. This translates to 240 Nvidia GPUs and 200 teraflops of performance.

To put that into perspective, that's the equivalent of 720 Xbox 360's. Yeah, it's powerful and all you need is a controller of your choosing and a connection to the Internet. If this manages to take off, Nvidia certainly seems as though they would have the resources and knowledge to succeed where OnLive failed.

During their CES 2013 presentation, they showed Trine 2 being played on a TV with only an Internet connection to the Grid. After demo'ing on the TV, they were able to bring to bring their controller over to a tablet and play the same games they were just enjoying on their TV. Essentially, if there is a device that has the Grid application, then you will be able to play your favorite cloud based games on it with little to no lag and no performance hit due to your own hardware configuration.

[jimykx]

I find the technology interesting but only when it's meant to be used in devices that can't run the game, such as a tablet, a phone or an old computer.

[Koin-Koin]

I see your point but it also make sense when it come to a generic console/pc/steambox/... kind of device.
It would grant the same experience to anyone whatever the power of the device they use.
It could open a wide range of device solutions as generic ones so if the device fails you can change for another one but not necessary the same one, no generation race anymore (or at least less often).
I never tried OnLive when it was alive but I feel like the main point to success would be a decent internet access to anyone.

[jimykx]

I tried onlive and even though I have a 10mb connection (usually floats around 9 and 6) they would force me to play the games being streamed at 360p and sometimes 240... I mean, I have to play bf3 at 800x600 but the games I was playing there I could perfectly run on my laptop on HD and with decent graphics settings. If my internet allows me to instantly watch 1080p video streams why did they force me to play under such settings? Both the streaming and the game customizations where extremely limited.

[Koin-Koin]

I guess the only test that make sense would be to play the same game via the OnLive like service and on local machine.

[Shawn Zipay]

I tried onlive and even though I have a 10mb connection (usually floats around 9 and 6) they would force me to play the games being streamed at 360p and sometimes 240... I mean, I have to play bf3 at 800x600 but the games I was playing there I could perfectly run on my laptop on HD and with decent graphics settings. If my internet allows me to instantly watch 1080p video streams why did they force me to play under such settings? Both the streaming and the game customizations where extremely limited.

I also tried OnLive. Of the games I tested, Fear 2 let me set whatever options I wanted to all at my native resolution.

[jimykx]

well, I remember trying out batman and just cause 2 and having some settings that were blocked. But I guess that doesn't really matter taking in consideration the constant crashes and that's when I would even be able to login without getting the "can't provide good video quality because your internet connection is slow" or something error