The Santa Clara, California-based company demos cloud gaming platform

May 16, 2012 07:14 GMT  ·  By

Cloud computing really has turned out to be more successful than people initially gave it credit for, so NVIDIA figured it would be the one to give its next big push.

When talking about the online-stored and run software, companies usually think about enterprise-class products and services, but NVIDIA wants to turn the cloud into something that even consumers, everyday people, call upon on a regular basis.

In fact, the company's vision sees the cloud environment as a substitute for game consoles and even PC gaming.

Running programs in the cloud and streaming them to a PC, tablet or phone happens all the time already.

The problem with doing the same thing for games is that the cloud isn't as fast and high-performing (graphics-wise) as customer-owned consoles and PCs, and that's not even counting latency (the time it takes for data to travel between a server and your device).

That's why even online games, save for browser-based ones, come in PC installer packages, console disks or downloads. A web connection is, thus, used only for authentication, gameplay syncing and updates.

To truly bring about the age of cloud gaming, NVIDIA has announced the GeForce GRID platform, which can render advanced visuals and stream them to any sufficiently able smartphone, TV or tablet.

As one would expect, the GeForce GRID GPUs (graphics processing units) are designed on the Kepler architecture. They can encode up to eight game streams at once, letting game-as-a-service providers support millions of concurrent gamers, depending on how many of these chips are present. It also helps that the power draw of each GPU is pretty low.

Spec-wise, a GRID card has two Kepler-based GPUs, meaning a total of 3,072 CUDA cores and 3D shader performance of 4.7 teraflops. 8 GB of GDDR5 VRAM exist too, for a 320 GB/s bandwidth. The TDP is 250W.

For streaming, NVIDIA has the Fast Streaming Technology, which captures and encodes a game frame in a single pass, thus pushing server latency down to 10 milliseconds (less than 1/10 of a blink of an eye). This compensates for distance in the network, so “gamers will feel like they are playing on a gaming supercomputer located in the same room.”

NVIDIA and Gaikai even demonstrated a “virtual game console” at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), composed of an LG Cinema 3D Smart TV, an USB-connected wireless game pad and an Ethernet cable. It ran a Gaikai program connected to a GeForce GRID GPU in a server 10 miles away and there was no lag on “a highly complex PC game.”

What does this mean for us? For one, consoles will lose relevance if NVIDIA gets enough game developers and providers on board. Epic, Capcom, and THQ have already announced their support for the GeForce GRID, and more will follow.

"Gamers will now have access to seamlessly play the world's best titles anywhere, anytime, from phones, tablets, TVs or PCs," said Phil Eisler, general manager of cloud gaming at NVIDIA. "GeForce GRID represents a massive disruption in how games are delivered and played."

We agree. PCs may be used for loads more than gaming, but consoles... not so much. We're not saying that PlayStation, Xbox or Wii titles will stop being developed completely, but we can't see them hold onto their customer base for long. The disk/capacity requirements have been growing a bit too fast, while the graphics and processing hardware on the inside has more or less stagnated for years.

Now consider that NVIDIA just blatantly said it would make, and to some extent already has made, customer-owned hardware totally unnecessary. Also consider that certain DRMs of today make it so that you can only play a title while connected to the web. That's almost the same as playing straight off the cloud already.

All in all, what we are looking at is a unification or even reversal of roles. Let's take one of today's MMOs: you download or buy a large data pack of several gigabytes and install it, but after playing it, all your progress is saved online. Through NVIDIA's Geforce GRID, you don't need to install anything, although you might be allowed to create local save files, just in case.

The only so-called “downside” is that GRID is a sort of DRM all on its own, but at least game makers won't be able to keep throwing tantrums about piracy. Much. We'll let you all decide if GRID is a good or bad thing.

Photo Gallery (5 Images)

NVIDIA GeForce GRID card
NVIDIA GeForce GRID gaming on everythingNVIDIA-Gaikai game latency chart
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