Nvidia Smashes Together 700 Xboxes for Cloud Gaming

[s0osleepie]

Nvidia Smashes Together 700 Xboxes for Cloud Gaming

The heat coming off these babies could cook an egg.

Nvidia is one of the two leading GPU-makers (graphics processing units) in the industry and they sure haven't been idle these past few years in their battle with rival AMD. Along with continuing to produce high-quality graphics cards, Nvidia has quietly been working in their skunkworks on how to further ingratiate themselves in the gaming community. Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas they already announced a handheld gaming device called "Project SHIELD" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121364-Nvidia-Announces-Project-SHIELD-Portable-Gaming-Device] - Avengers reference notwithstanding - but Nvidia is also dipping its toes into the so-called cloud-gaming space. They've created a massive tower of silicon and plastic that can stream extremely high-quality gameplay directly to your PC or tablet without you having to own an expensive rig yourself.

The tech is called the Grid, and the massive rack has 240 Nvidia GPUs connected together. That's the equivalent of 700 Xboxes, according to the presentation at CES. The demonstration showed one guy playing Trine 2 on a huge TV, then pausing the game and booting it up on an ASUS Transformer Prime tablet using the Nvidia Grid app, picking up exactly where he left off. The promise of seamless streaming syncing up your progress on a game is pretty exciting.

Nvidia said they've been working on the Grid for five years, but other than the announcement, the company provided very few details. How much will the Grid service cost? Will games be separately purchased or will you be able to subscribe to a library like Netflix? Depending on the answers to these questions, Nvidia might be able to compete with Onlive and Gaikai.

And by compete, I mean blow them out of the water.

Source: Gizmodo [http://gizmodo.com/5973634/nvidia-just-built-its-own-gaming-supercomputer-the-grid]

Permalink

 

[DustyDrB]

Yeah, competing with OnLive isn't exactly a lofty goal [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-17-onlive-lays-off-most-of-it-staff-files-for-alternative-to-bankruptcy-report].

But ehh...I'm not sure how much I support I want to give cloud gaming. Seems like another door open to give away more control of the games we buy. I know ownership is a weird thing when it comes to electronic licenses and what not...

We'll see how it goes.

 

[Pinkamena]

I imagine that the lag will be a big problem with a service like this. It will take a long time from your actions are sent to their machines, carried out, and then having the video streamed back to you! And not only that, but not all people have an internet connection ble to stream high-quality video.

 

[mad825]

the company says just that, combining 700 Xbox 360s in one tall box

Uhuh, so I take it that it isn't DX11 compatible?

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Not interested. I play games and then i turn them off and do something else. The whole play on the tv then on the tablet thing is just plain retarded. Is anyone really that desperate to play games? Its like the whole facebook/twitter thing, why do we have to have them on everything. Apart from phones and consoles, now there is tvs and supposedly an apple watch which can do FB stuff. Even google want to make smart glasses that go online. Why is it they try and make people unable to live for 5 minutes without FB or gaming?

 

[Remus]

I imagine that the lag will be a big problem with a service like this. It will take a long time from your actions are sent to their machines, carried out, and then having the video streamed back to you! And not only that, but not all people have an internet connection ble to stream high-quality video.

Only if you're using satellite internet. Blizzard has been doing exactly this for years. It's true, not everyone has high speed DSL yet but there's enough market saturation at this point for a service like this to be profitable if done right.

 

[Pinkamena]

I imagine that the lag will be a big problem with a service like this. It will take a long time from your actions are sent to their machines, carried out, and then having the video streamed back to you! And not only that, but not all people have an internet connection ble to stream high-quality video.

Only if you're using satellite internet. Blizzard has been doing exactly this for years. It's true, not everyone has high speed DSL yet but there's enough market saturation at this point for a service like this to be profitable if done right.

The lag will still be a massive problem. I don't imagine playing with a 50-100 ms delay is going to be very fun.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

I've always wondered what would happen if you took a server mainframe from some corporation and added a few thousand graphics cards into the CPUs, it would be like the greatest LAN party ever, and you'd only need one game to play it on!

 

[Frezzato]

So instead of software as a service (SaaS) we might one day have gaming as a service (GaaS)? To think that the whole cloud gaming idea might one day give us all GaaS.

On a more serious note, I'm still not ready to give up physical media entirely. That's unless companies start to find ways to transmit movie extras like director's commentary online.

 

[The Lugz]

i really wish this technology would just die already, it will never be good because it doubles the latency between your computer and the game and that's already the biggest problem with online gaming latency problems simply wont go away until we get quantum entangled wifi and that's going to be a while in the making

and if someone honestly cant afford a pc but wants to pay monthly installments for the rest of their life they really need
to figure out how loans work and have the best of both worlds you end up owning a pc which you can then sell if you need to

 

[Greg Tito]

So basically nothing in this article and nothing in the technology has anything to do with Xboxes? Do Nvidia news from CES really get so few page hits that the word Xbox needed to be shoved in there?

The personalities in the presentation compared the GPU power of the Grid to 700 Xboxes.

 

[ResonanceSD]

So basically nothing in this article and nothing in the technology has anything to do with Xboxes? Do Nvidia news from CES really get so few page hits that the word Xbox needed to be shoved in there?

The personalities in the presentation compared the GPU power of the Grid to 700 Xboxes.

Yeah but the headline of the article is clearly confusing quite a few people here. He used XBOX in his comparison of the kind of gaming computers people own, and then brought out GRID.

 

[Your Fearless Captain]

I like building systems. I find it really fun. While streaming games is cool, there's nothing like the sound of cooling fans in the morning.