There might actually be enough incentive to do away with personal computers

May 28, 2014 07:31 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA's GRID initiative has been around for a couple of years or so at this point, but it's mostly stayed theoretical. Now, though, the corporation is offering 24-hour demos of the virtual desktop.

NVIDIA first used the GRID brand to refer to a new type of graphics card that was made squarely for cloud servers.

The idea was that GRID would allow NVIDIA, and other content providers, to set up a computing- and graphically powerful server that clients could access.

It was intended that, eventually, all games and programs, even high-resource ones like Crysis and 3D Studio Max, would be run in the cloud.

Thus, you, the customer, would only require a normal computer with a decent Internet connection to enjoy all that content.

Now, NVIDIA has come far enough that it can offer certain parties the chance to test GRID for themselves.

It's an early demo, to be sure, and it will have to go through a whole bunch of refinements before it's truly viable from a marketing standpoint, but it delivers on NVIDIA's promises.

In fact, one test run reached the conclusion that the Virtual Desktop Interface did better than onlookers would have had cause to expect.

The test systems use a GRID K520, which uses two GK104 Kepler GPUs and 8 GB of RAM. So, in theory, it's like having an SLI system.

The virtual desktop environment apparently allows you to install programs if you wish, and run benchmarks. Sandra 2014 was used in this case.

There was some visual quality loss when compared to the software tests run on a local, high-end desktop, but nothing too drastic, especially when you take into account the fact that this is, in the end, an early demo, and that NVIDIA will improve things significantly over the coming months.

All in all, it was established that the NVIDIA GRID can definitely make virtual desktop environments usable for everything that a normal PC can do, instead of being a mere tool for remote assistance. Even HTML.5 applications ran smoothly.

Maybe it actually will happen in our lifetime: households that only need a PC with a decent monitor and a good Internet connection in order for those living there to enjoy the same benefits as owners of hardcore, multi-GPU, high-end personal computers. Hopefully, the service won't cost too much in the long run.

That's the one question that hasn't even begun to be ironed out yet: will we have to pay a fortune for continued access to an NVIDIA GRID data center?