Nvidia's cloud gaming service takes on Sony's PlayStation Now

Nvidia's online game-streaming service will launch next week after a year-long beta testing period, but it will only be available to owners of the company's Shield tablet and handheld gaming console.

Nvidia's service will compete with Sony's PlayStation Now game-streaming service, which is still in beta and works with Sony's TVs and gaming consoles. But Nvidia is promising a better gaming experience, with titles streaming out at 720p resolution and 60 frames per second.

The Nvidia GRID cloud gaming service will first be available in the U.S. as a free preview and the company is not saying whether it will become a paid service. It could launch in Europe as early as next month

The service will start with 20 streaming games, including "Batman: Arkham City" and "Borderlands 2,", with more titles added later. Nvidia hopes the service will attract more buyers to the Shield tablet, which starts at US$299 with 16GB of storage. The tablet will be upgraded to Android 5.0 in coming weeks.

There's technically nothing stopping it from working on any device," Fear said.

The service initially won't work on PCs either. But Nvidia could extend the service to desktops and laptops with its GeForce graphics cards.

The streaming service takes advantage of specific hardware and graphics features in Shield devices. It won't work on mobile devices from other companies, though that could change in the future, said Andrew Fear, senior product manager for GRID cloud computing at Nvidia.

 

Streaming games will load in a matter of seconds and the service runs off servers powered by Amazon's cloud infrastructure. Fear said the infrastructure is already in place to deploy the service in the Asia-Pacific region, but he did not share specific launch dates.
"We've been working to deploy thousands of servers in Amazon's cloud," Fear said. "We're leveraging that infrastructure to deploy this."
The online gaming service was in beta for more than a year through servers in California, with users connected worldwide. After it was clear that users far away from California experienced no latency, Nvidia decided the servers were ready to take on more gamers and that there was sufficient bandwidth to handle the service.

 Cloud, remote graphics is an entirely different mind set than local gaming," Fear said.

Delivering games over the cloud is also different than playing games locally. On PCs, the GPUs can be adjusted to change the frames per second. But on cloud servers, the GPUs are running at a consistent frame rate, which if disturbed, could hurt the quality of visuals.
"For us in the cloud, we have to be able to stream and render the game always at 60 frames per second. If we go below it, we're going to get a visual stutter because we weren't able to render a frame at the time the encoder was trying to encode it at 60 frames per second," Fear said.
Nvidia is recommending that the service not be used over LTE connections. It runs best over Wi-Fi routers that support the 5GHz spectrum.