Shield is progressing, but progress seems too slow. No new AAA game announced and price tag is problem, 100$ for 450 GB of space and 200$ for 16 GB model in comparison with Sony and MS consoles is too much.
Im looking forward to new PS Vita like Shield with mobile modem, this could be realy big hit, isnt Shield TV inst.
I recall Sony just recently making a statement that they are not going to do a PS Vita successor do to the lack of a market. I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Vita is dead because Sony can only afford to do mobile and Playstation. Vita is money loser. Who buys a new Vita every year? There are much more people who buys a new mobile phone every year.
I think the 16GB model is as reasonable ask but the $100 mark up for a 500GB Hybrid drive is unacceptable. If it was a $50 markup it would be a no brainer
SaaS and IaaS are still big things. Obviously, many people can't tell what is practical and makes sense. When we start having companies go bankrupt because an internet connection got cut by a construction crew, then they'll see how bad that idea is.
Cloud services are good for hosting web sites for customer access and offsite backup storage, but not for providing things that should be internal. With Iaas and SaaS, if the internet connection goes down, then the users can't do anything, and productivity goes to absolute zero. If a company has their infrastructure internally, they can keep working, even if they can't do all they need. The company can keep limping along. IaaS and SaaS is placing the very existence of the company in the hand of others, and that is just not practical.
Not to mention the security risk. Hack a server and get access to a treasure trove, it will be much less fruitful to hack a single user system. And as the last few years have shown, corporate IT security is laughably bad. People think it is good but it really isn't. And especially in cloud services, where there are too many holes to plug and make for a secure environment.
We've all had stuff in the cloud for a long time now.. web-based email, videos on Youtube, photos on .. so on and on, you know the drill. So.. why is it that games suddenly make you think there's a high security risk? Speaking of bandwidth used, it's just a video stream. It's no different than spectating a game on Twitch, for instance, at a similar resolution and quality. Why is it that for some reason, this would consume more bandwidth? Latency is a different issue, granted.. but I presume this kind of service is more for casual gamers.. those who want to just quickly surf through a large library, without needing to own every single game (With AAA titles, it can add up very quickly, you know.. in comparison, $8/month is peanuts.) For those who are interested in investing hundreds of hours building any elaborate or competitive skill in a single game, they're better off with a PC (which isn't disappearing anywhere, of course.. )
While gaming on its own doesn't seem to be that much of a privacy risk, cloud gaming will obligatory require user information, some of it potentially critical, such as credit card number, since you no longer simply purchase the game and play it, but use it as a service which will be continuously charged.
So could gaming provides worse experience through the higher latency while also increasing the security risk associated with gaming from non-existent to serious.
man your argument is just bad. People already use steam, GMG, Origin, Apple/Android Keychains and online shopping everyday. All of those services have waaay more identifiable information stored in the cloud than GRID would have.
As long as they encrypt user data all the way down the stack, then information stolen cannot be accessed. The major hacks that have happened over the past 3 years have all been un-encrypted data, not even salted.
Society has learned it's lesson with the sony, and target hacks, and encryption is now becoming mainstream.
I don't think things are improving in this regard. I mean it doesn't take a genius to figure out that personal data should be protected. So then why it wasn't? Year after year we have data breaches, and I'd say if corporations were learning from this, they'd learn the first time.
And how the industry is pushing even less secure authentication methods, such as fingerprints. Heck, you can easily steal someone's fingerprint, or even his finger, and bad, all his accounts and all his data is compromised. That would not happen with a password, because it cannot be pulled out of one's head, furthermore, you can have different passwords for different services, but you have only one set of fingerprints. Needless to say, this is yet another government plot, aiming at collecting used data, in this case fingerprints, to do god knows what with it, and has nothing to do with improving security.
Society keeps making the same mistakes, you can trace people doing the same stupid stuff for centuries, technology changes and with it the form those mistakes take, but people's inability to learn from mistakes does not change at all. Security tech if plagued by "flaws" which are in reaity backdoors left to be exploited, and only get labeled "flaws" the moment someone accidentally discovered and discloses them to the public. Faster computers allow for more and more bloated software, able to hide more and more of those "flaws".
It is pure and utter naivety to believe that things are improving in this regard.
On iOS, Fingerprint data is used as a backup authentication to the passcode. Upon, power up, or reboot, the phone requires a passcode. if you try and use your fingerprint, it fails and forces you to enter your passcode (now 6 digits long) before it will even allow biometrics to unlock. Also after 2 hours of inactivity, a passcode is always required.
Additionally, iOS's fingerprint data never leaves the device. Once a fingerprint is registered, the SOC then uses a algorithm and creates a complex mathematical formula representing your fingerprint pattern. The actual image of your fingerprint is not used nor stored. only the formula, and even then, its stored in a secure enclave that no other hardware or software has access to. I recommend reading the white paper on it.
so wrapping things up, even if there was a backdoor, all they would get is binary data of the mathematical representation of your print.. and the only way they could access that would be to break the device down, sand the layers down on the chip, identify the secure enclave, create a serial interface for it, and download the useless data that cannot be used anywhere else but on that device. iOS uses a 2 key system, 1 key baked into the soc, and the 2nd key on apple servers. Both keys are required to decrypt.
Apple has no secret back door, they are currently being dragged into secret FISA court because law enforcement and NSA are seriously pissed off and playing the "we can't pedophiles or drug dealers" card to try and get them to budge.
on googles side (the only other mobile company using biometrics), i dont know, i dont keep up with their tech, but i do know that google makes a living by selling ads and some of your data, so i don't even consider them.
encryption is being widely adopted by all technology companies.. So even if there is a backdoor, moving forward, they are only going to get encrypted data. nobody can crack encryption short of super secret quantum computers, which do not exist in any meaningful form.
meanwhile if your looking for a good paying career path, security software gigs are now paying 6 figures. they are in demand. there will always be a few dumb websites or companies who get hacked, but what i'm trying to say is, 90% of the stuff people use nowadays (google, facebook, ios, filesharing clouds, etc..) are all using encryption end to end.
Apple sure are a benchmark for security, oh wait, what was it... the "fappening"?
"Apple has no secret back door" - who are you, the guy in charge of backdoors at apple? Ever heard of that thing called "show for the public"? So gullible.
"who are you, the guy in charge of backdoors at apple? Ever heard of that thing called "show for the public"
i guess all of these FISA court subpoena's are just for show. the FBI and NSA are sure making a fuss about apple just to throw us off the scent right?
even jailbreaking teams are having a hell of a time finding exploits and they even have physical access to the device, something a hacker using a backdoor would not have. there will always be flaws in a system, but as long as data is encrypted the damage can be mitigated.
And what if your internal datacentre goes up in smoke?
Or the fibre link to your datacentre or DR site gets cut?
Hybrid solutions are the way forward and how you cover yourself in the event of anything happening (including resilient links out to the internet and to your DR sites). Obviously you can't cover for every eventuality, but saying that SaaS or IaaS doesn't make sense is short sighted. Having all of your infrastructure in the cloud, now that is short sighted, but then so is having it all on a single local site. It's why most businesses are moving towards a hybrid model and why tech that can securely and easily move workloads between locations/datacentres/onprem/cloud is going to be the thing that allows a lot more companies to make that hybrid step.
As for cloud gaming, sure why not. If it's cheap and the latency is good enough where I am then I'm all for it. Hell if I can manipulate a full 3D design in AutoCAD when the server is in NYC and I'm in London, with no real noticeable quality loss, then there is no reason I can't game from a DC that's sat in the same country as me.
Working is not the same as gaming. Latency is an issue when reaction time is of the utmost importance. And in most games it is. It is not a factor only in trivial games, which are not a challenge even for embedded platforms, in such scenarios cloud gaming is a ridiculous overkill.
Personally, I would disagree. I don't think most games are as latency sensitive as people would argue. Until you try it though, you can't really make a decision. And from personal experience I've gotten designers and architects to use GRID remotely without complaint (and they are just a likely to throw a paddy about latency as any gamer) and I've played a few games (like the last Tomb Raider) as demos out of our test lab running in a VM with a GRID vGPU profile and it's been perfectly playable. Your mileage is going to vary, but I do think that it is something that is becoming more realistic as a service.
The only type of games which are NOT latency critical are turn based games or trivial logic puzzles and such. Maybe online RPGs too.
For everything else latency is critical, be that FPS, RTS, driving or flying simulators and such. Even if your connection is fast enough, the overhead of having to encode, transfer and decode the video is TOO MUCH, heck, for professional gaming even the latency of the mouse and monitor is critical and those are wired to your PC with low latency and high bandwidth interfaces, only a completely clueless newb would play such games remotely.
Point is, it doesn't need to be a service, there are a lot of things which make sense to be a service, but gaming is not that. It is the case of a greedy industry exploiting a useless fad.
If I can run a game out of my test lab and it works fine, then NVIDIA can certainly do it. My day job is to provide high end 3D workloads to people remotely and I am telling you, for most games and for most gamers, it's possible. Have you even looked into how good remoting protocols like PCoIP and Framehawk are at handling latency nowadays?
How $8 a month for a service like this is greedy is beyond me.
Seems like there is a lot beyond you. Corporations would never do that if they didn't estimate it will result in more profits. Because spoiler alert, that's what they care for, not your convenience, not your experience.
You might be telling me that, but who knows, maybe you are biased, maybe you are affiliated, maybe you have really low standards of expectation? You telling me holds about zero weight.
I have 15 years professional experience in content creation - audio, video, 3d in software and hardware, games and I am well aware of the "cost", I've also been into pro gaming before that, so I dare say I well know of what I speak.
I work for a reseller and besides my general work of doing presales, design and implementation, a good portion of my job is testing and validation. I get to be vendor agnostic and if it doesn't work, we don't sell it. If your job is content creation, then my job is content delivery, so yeah, I know it works. If you don't want to trust my word that's fine.
Pray tell though, if $8 isn't a fair price, then what is?
I don't play games and have not for a long time. But if I still did, I would not pay a dime for such services. The utter annoyance of lacking control and not being able to perform at your peak and your reflexes and precision being rendered useless - they will have to pay me to use that.
It is not rocket science, the time to encode a frame alone is already more than enough to ruin any game where reflexes matter. And in most it does. And then, you have to transfer that, over what will most likely be below 100 mbit connection, and decode it.
I've tested remote gaming over 2 gigabit local network and it still sucked. So no, I don't think doing that over the internet will be adequate by any means.
Basically, that would RUIN ANY ACTION GAME EXPERIENCE. Now if you are into trivial nonsense such as those lame farming games and such, that might work. But hey, that trivial nonsense runs in your browser, and would run fine even on a 5 year old phone. No need to stream that just to eat bandwidth. It is just silly on its face.
So you are in content distribution - it is understandable, "cloud gaming" is that whole new area on which you hope to rake more money.
But to put it in the form of a metaphor, cloud gaming is like ordering Chinese food from China. Most stuff from China comes in shipping containers, and often ships for weeks. Your food is gonna get spoiled. But hey, you can pay a ridiculous premium to have it shipped over air, it will arrive before it rots, but it will still be stale, and it will cost a fortune.
Which is why people make Chinese food restaurants everywhere, so you can order the food from a local place, and it will arrive in a short while, still warm and tasty.
If you cannot understand it put this way, then it is hopeless ;)
ddriver, I was thinking about cloud gaming the same way as you till a few days back. As part of this launch (which I had to cover since I had the original SHIELD Android TV review unit as part of a HTPC-oriented review process), I had the chance to try some games on GRID / GeForce NOW. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised with the experience. I am on a 75 / 10 Mbps Comcast connection, and I never thought that the game was being rendered in a data center and only the video was being streamed. It might not work for professional gaming / certain input-latency sensitive games, but, for the vast majority of gamers / people playing on XBox and PlayStations, this is very compelling.
As someone else mentioned in the comments section : Don't knock it off until you try it.
It all boils down to what latency you can get. And there are standards for this, not made up by me BTW:
below 10 msec - excellent, can pass for real time above 10 msec - begins to get noticeable above 50 msec - begins to be impeding above 100 msec - begins to be annoying
I highly doubt it will be able to get below 100 msec, whatever the internet connection. What is truly annoying is that empty stupid slogan - "the new way to game", because its missing the "it's worse than the old one, but it is more profitable, so we're gonna make you use it by dressing it up as a fad".
But hey, to each his own. I just don't think this is a step forwards, when it comes to gaming performance it is a huge step back. And will continue to be until 10 gigabit internet connection becomes widely available, because that's how much it takes to stream video output at a decent rate.
Worst of all, I don't see a compelling reason why. Modern SOCs are already powerful enough, a 10$ chip has ample graphics performance for gaming. Because it is so important to play games that people can't wait 10 minutes for the game to be downloaded and installed? Because being able to click and play it is worth the poor gaming experience?
Well obviously this is not for everyone - if you have slow or high latency internet connection then yes, the GRID service is not for you. Does that mean they should not make the product at all? By that logic BMW should stop making series 7, and 6, and probably 5 since not many can afford those cars.
When I can't reliably play netflix or vimeo on my internet connection at home, and used to watch horrible ping rates with EQ back when i used to play it, I just don't get cloud streaming services for gaming. The horror of it is that at my home, I get faster internet on my phone (unfortunately, not unlimited) then I do with DSL. (no competition where I live :( )
I can pay $7.99 for a LONG time before it approaches the cost of a new gaming rig. Latency issues and compression artifacts were mostly a non-issue during the GRID beta. If Nvidia can maintain that level of performance and consistently add new content, they should have a winner on their hands.
"Latency issues and compression artifacts were mostly a non-issue..." ...If you happen to live in an area where high speed / low latency internet is offered and you can afford it (not all high speed internet is sold at Google Fiber prices). Don't get me wrong, I can certainly see how GRID/NOW is a good concept and will probably just continue to get better as the internet infrastructure improves but I think it's still a bit early for the general public to be hopping on the hype train. Best to leave these kinds of high-requirement services to the tech wealthy crowd (such as yourself, apparently) for now.
they don't have to. Read what was posted. It's not the latency from NVidia, it's the inherent crappiness of some ISP's. It doesn't matter how good of a service NVidia makes it if YOUR isp is screwing up.
The latency is around 150ms. I was on the GRID beta and the experience was a generational leap beyond OnLive and a huge achievement. I suspect that most gamers won't care if the system works.
I was impressed with the beta service and the price is good. But why is the UK getting shafted on the exchange rate AGAIN!? $7.99 != £7.49. Please stop doing this companies. even after adding 20% VAT it should only come to £6.34. Okay, not a huge absolute difference, but it's still 18% more in a proportional sense, which is quite a lot.
I agree, seems like its Entoro Pay & VPN time again when it comes to purchasing the subscription :-) Although I doubt I'll subscribe after the free trial as I can just steam my steam library from my gaming rig.
It would take 20+ years of paying $8/month to reach the price of a high-end gaming system($2000+). By then, that system would have become obsolete or have had upgrades to it that have far outpaced the cost of the service.
I'm pretty sure you can continue off with the games you previously purchased, even with lapses in the subscription.
Shouldn't folks be complaining to the FTC or Obama regarding their crappy ISP rather than here? I have gigabit internet (thanks Google Fiber!) and I've previously lived in an area with Verizon FiOS and its awesome. Its like a drug, its hard to go back to slow internet.
Cough up the dough and get the high speed service, or petition your congress critter to fix the infrastructure. Best $$ spent, ever.
By far the most interesting use-case for me demoing the game instantly. Imagine playing a pre-release before pre-ordering, for example. Since there's no binary transfer, there's substantially less risk for piracy than the old shareware days. I wish Steam was onboard with something like this.
I've owned a Shield Portable for close to three years now and have used the GRID service on occasion. I never found connectivity or latency to be huge issues. This was with a 45 down/6 up ATT Uverse connection over dual band wireless-N. I could easily play games with good responsiveness. Sure, I wasn't multiplayer or competitive gaming on it where every twitch may have counted (I don't do that stuff anyway...), but for folks looking to play through a host of titles on the cheap, this service works and works well. If I had teenagers or a college student, I would totally just get them an inexpensive laptop and subscribe them to GRID. $8.99 vs. $1,000 per even a halfway decent gaming laptop? Deal.
Don't knock it until you try it.
Only thing they need to work on is getting more premier and on-release titles. Perhaps offer a premium package for $19.99/month?
As someone who simply hates having to mess with a dedicated GPU of any kind, this is an exciting service and I'm looking forward to trying it on a low-end laptop. I'd love to see the day when I can enjoy ultra high settings in whatever game I want to play on an ultra low cost laptop like an HP Stream 11. The subscription fees are basically nothing compared to the price of keeping even a mid-range gaming computer up with bi-annual upgrades.
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ruthan - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
Shield is progressing, but progress seems too slow. No new AAA game announced and price tag is problem, 100$ for 450 GB of space and 200$ for 16 GB model in comparison with Sony and MS consoles is too much.Im looking forward to new PS Vita like Shield with mobile modem, this could be realy big hit, isnt Shield TV inst.
inighthawki - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I recall Sony just recently making a statement that they are not going to do a PS Vita successor do to the lack of a market. I wouldn't get my hopes up.vision33r - Thursday, October 1, 2015 - link
Vita is dead because Sony can only afford to do mobile and Playstation. Vita is money loser. Who buys a new Vita every year? There are much more people who buys a new mobile phone every year.Aftershocker - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
I think the 16GB model is as reasonable ask but the $100 mark up for a 500GB Hybrid drive is unacceptable. If it was a $50 markup it would be a no brainerddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
Because people love latency and how it enriches the gaming experience.ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
Also, I bet people will appreciate when lousy streamed gaming takes up the bandwidth for the content that will not be ruined by the extra latency.Seriously, can't people really tell what is practical and makes sense from lame fads?
dgingeri - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
SaaS and IaaS are still big things. Obviously, many people can't tell what is practical and makes sense. When we start having companies go bankrupt because an internet connection got cut by a construction crew, then they'll see how bad that idea is.Cloud services are good for hosting web sites for customer access and offsite backup storage, but not for providing things that should be internal. With Iaas and SaaS, if the internet connection goes down, then the users can't do anything, and productivity goes to absolute zero. If a company has their infrastructure internally, they can keep working, even if they can't do all they need. The company can keep limping along. IaaS and SaaS is placing the very existence of the company in the hand of others, and that is just not practical.
ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
Not to mention the security risk. Hack a server and get access to a treasure trove, it will be much less fruitful to hack a single user system. And as the last few years have shown, corporate IT security is laughably bad. People think it is good but it really isn't. And especially in cloud services, where there are too many holes to plug and make for a secure environment.nyqxyl - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
We've all had stuff in the cloud for a long time now.. web-based email, videos on Youtube, photos on .. so on and on, you know the drill. So.. why is it that games suddenly make you think there's a high security risk?Speaking of bandwidth used, it's just a video stream. It's no different than spectating a game on Twitch, for instance, at a similar resolution and quality. Why is it that for some reason, this would consume more bandwidth?
Latency is a different issue, granted.. but I presume this kind of service is more for casual gamers.. those who want to just quickly surf through a large library, without needing to own every single game (With AAA titles, it can add up very quickly, you know.. in comparison, $8/month is peanuts.) For those who are interested in investing hundreds of hours building any elaborate or competitive skill in a single game, they're better off with a PC (which isn't disappearing anywhere, of course.. )
ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
While gaming on its own doesn't seem to be that much of a privacy risk, cloud gaming will obligatory require user information, some of it potentially critical, such as credit card number, since you no longer simply purchase the game and play it, but use it as a service which will be continuously charged.So could gaming provides worse experience through the higher latency while also increasing the security risk associated with gaming from non-existent to serious.
Morawka - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
man your argument is just bad. People already use steam, GMG, Origin, Apple/Android Keychains and online shopping everyday. All of those services have waaay more identifiable information stored in the cloud than GRID would have.As long as they encrypt user data all the way down the stack, then information stolen cannot be accessed. The major hacks that have happened over the past 3 years have all been un-encrypted data, not even salted.
Society has learned it's lesson with the sony, and target hacks, and encryption is now becoming mainstream.
ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I don't think things are improving in this regard. I mean it doesn't take a genius to figure out that personal data should be protected. So then why it wasn't? Year after year we have data breaches, and I'd say if corporations were learning from this, they'd learn the first time.And how the industry is pushing even less secure authentication methods, such as fingerprints. Heck, you can easily steal someone's fingerprint, or even his finger, and bad, all his accounts and all his data is compromised. That would not happen with a password, because it cannot be pulled out of one's head, furthermore, you can have different passwords for different services, but you have only one set of fingerprints. Needless to say, this is yet another government plot, aiming at collecting used data, in this case fingerprints, to do god knows what with it, and has nothing to do with improving security.
Society keeps making the same mistakes, you can trace people doing the same stupid stuff for centuries, technology changes and with it the form those mistakes take, but people's inability to learn from mistakes does not change at all. Security tech if plagued by "flaws" which are in reaity backdoors left to be exploited, and only get labeled "flaws" the moment someone accidentally discovered and discloses them to the public. Faster computers allow for more and more bloated software, able to hide more and more of those "flaws".
It is pure and utter naivety to believe that things are improving in this regard.
Morawka - Thursday, October 1, 2015 - link
your wearing your tin foil hat today i see.On iOS, Fingerprint data is used as a backup authentication to the passcode. Upon, power up, or reboot, the phone requires a passcode. if you try and use your fingerprint, it fails and forces you to enter your passcode (now 6 digits long) before it will even allow biometrics to unlock. Also after 2 hours of inactivity, a passcode is always required.
Additionally, iOS's fingerprint data never leaves the device. Once a fingerprint is registered, the SOC then uses a algorithm and creates a complex mathematical formula representing your fingerprint pattern. The actual image of your fingerprint is not used nor stored. only the formula, and even then, its stored in a secure enclave that no other hardware or software has access to. I recommend reading the white paper on it.
https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_G...
so wrapping things up, even if there was a backdoor, all they would get is binary data of the mathematical representation of your print.. and the only way they could access that would be to break the device down, sand the layers down on the chip, identify the secure enclave, create a serial interface for it, and download the useless data that cannot be used anywhere else but on that device. iOS uses a 2 key system, 1 key baked into the soc, and the 2nd key on apple servers. Both keys are required to decrypt.
Apple has no secret back door, they are currently being dragged into secret FISA court because law enforcement and NSA are seriously pissed off and playing the "we can't pedophiles or drug dealers" card to try and get them to budge.
on googles side (the only other mobile company using biometrics), i dont know, i dont keep up with their tech, but i do know that google makes a living by selling ads and some of your data, so i don't even consider them.
encryption is being widely adopted by all technology companies.. So even if there is a backdoor, moving forward, they are only going to get encrypted data. nobody can crack encryption short of super secret quantum computers, which do not exist in any meaningful form.
meanwhile if your looking for a good paying career path, security software gigs are now paying 6 figures. they are in demand. there will always be a few dumb websites or companies who get hacked, but what i'm trying to say is, 90% of the stuff people use nowadays (google, facebook, ios, filesharing clouds, etc..) are all using encryption end to end.
ddriver - Thursday, October 1, 2015 - link
Tin foil hats - the straw man argument.Apple sure are a benchmark for security, oh wait, what was it... the "fappening"?
"Apple has no secret back door" - who are you, the guy in charge of backdoors at apple? Ever heard of that thing called "show for the public"? So gullible.
Morawka - Thursday, October 1, 2015 - link
fappening was not a hack, it was a exploit."who are you, the guy in charge of backdoors at apple? Ever heard of that thing called "show for the public"
i guess all of these FISA court subpoena's are just for show. the FBI and NSA are sure making a fuss about apple just to throw us off the scent right?
even jailbreaking teams are having a hell of a time finding exploits and they even have physical access to the device, something a hacker using a backdoor would not have. there will always be flaws in a system, but as long as data is encrypted the damage can be mitigated.
l.set - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
And what if your internal datacentre goes up in smoke?Or the fibre link to your datacentre or DR site gets cut?
Hybrid solutions are the way forward and how you cover yourself in the event of anything happening (including resilient links out to the internet and to your DR sites). Obviously you can't cover for every eventuality, but saying that SaaS or IaaS doesn't make sense is short sighted. Having all of your infrastructure in the cloud, now that is short sighted, but then so is having it all on a single local site. It's why most businesses are moving towards a hybrid model and why tech that can securely and easily move workloads between locations/datacentres/onprem/cloud is going to be the thing that allows a lot more companies to make that hybrid step.
As for cloud gaming, sure why not. If it's cheap and the latency is good enough where I am then I'm all for it. Hell if I can manipulate a full 3D design in AutoCAD when the server is in NYC and I'm in London, with no real noticeable quality loss, then there is no reason I can't game from a DC that's sat in the same country as me.
ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
Working is not the same as gaming. Latency is an issue when reaction time is of the utmost importance. And in most games it is. It is not a factor only in trivial games, which are not a challenge even for embedded platforms, in such scenarios cloud gaming is a ridiculous overkill.l.set - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
Personally, I would disagree. I don't think most games are as latency sensitive as people would argue. Until you try it though, you can't really make a decision. And from personal experience I've gotten designers and architects to use GRID remotely without complaint (and they are just a likely to throw a paddy about latency as any gamer) and I've played a few games (like the last Tomb Raider) as demos out of our test lab running in a VM with a GRID vGPU profile and it's been perfectly playable. Your mileage is going to vary, but I do think that it is something that is becoming more realistic as a service.ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
The only type of games which are NOT latency critical are turn based games or trivial logic puzzles and such. Maybe online RPGs too.For everything else latency is critical, be that FPS, RTS, driving or flying simulators and such. Even if your connection is fast enough, the overhead of having to encode, transfer and decode the video is TOO MUCH, heck, for professional gaming even the latency of the mouse and monitor is critical and those are wired to your PC with low latency and high bandwidth interfaces, only a completely clueless newb would play such games remotely.
Point is, it doesn't need to be a service, there are a lot of things which make sense to be a service, but gaming is not that. It is the case of a greedy industry exploiting a useless fad.
l.set - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
If I can run a game out of my test lab and it works fine, then NVIDIA can certainly do it. My day job is to provide high end 3D workloads to people remotely and I am telling you, for most games and for most gamers, it's possible. Have you even looked into how good remoting protocols like PCoIP and Framehawk are at handling latency nowadays?How $8 a month for a service like this is greedy is beyond me.
ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
Seems like there is a lot beyond you. Corporations would never do that if they didn't estimate it will result in more profits. Because spoiler alert, that's what they care for, not your convenience, not your experience.You might be telling me that, but who knows, maybe you are biased, maybe you are affiliated, maybe you have really low standards of expectation? You telling me holds about zero weight.
I have 15 years professional experience in content creation - audio, video, 3d in software and hardware, games and I am well aware of the "cost", I've also been into pro gaming before that, so I dare say I well know of what I speak.
l.set - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I work for a reseller and besides my general work of doing presales, design and implementation, a good portion of my job is testing and validation. I get to be vendor agnostic and if it doesn't work, we don't sell it. If your job is content creation, then my job is content delivery, so yeah, I know it works. If you don't want to trust my word that's fine.Pray tell though, if $8 isn't a fair price, then what is?
ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I don't play games and have not for a long time. But if I still did, I would not pay a dime for such services. The utter annoyance of lacking control and not being able to perform at your peak and your reflexes and precision being rendered useless - they will have to pay me to use that.It is not rocket science, the time to encode a frame alone is already more than enough to ruin any game where reflexes matter. And in most it does. And then, you have to transfer that, over what will most likely be below 100 mbit connection, and decode it.
I've tested remote gaming over 2 gigabit local network and it still sucked. So no, I don't think doing that over the internet will be adequate by any means.
ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
Basically, that would RUIN ANY ACTION GAME EXPERIENCE. Now if you are into trivial nonsense such as those lame farming games and such, that might work. But hey, that trivial nonsense runs in your browser, and would run fine even on a 5 year old phone. No need to stream that just to eat bandwidth. It is just silly on its face.ddriver - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
So you are in content distribution - it is understandable, "cloud gaming" is that whole new area on which you hope to rake more money.But to put it in the form of a metaphor, cloud gaming is like ordering Chinese food from China. Most stuff from China comes in shipping containers, and often ships for weeks. Your food is gonna get spoiled. But hey, you can pay a ridiculous premium to have it shipped over air, it will arrive before it rots, but it will still be stale, and it will cost a fortune.
Which is why people make Chinese food restaurants everywhere, so you can order the food from a local place, and it will arrive in a short while, still warm and tasty.
If you cannot understand it put this way, then it is hopeless ;)
ganeshts - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
ddriver, I was thinking about cloud gaming the same way as you till a few days back. As part of this launch (which I had to cover since I had the original SHIELD Android TV review unit as part of a HTPC-oriented review process), I had the chance to try some games on GRID / GeForce NOW. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised with the experience. I am on a 75 / 10 Mbps Comcast connection, and I never thought that the game was being rendered in a data center and only the video was being streamed. It might not work for professional gaming / certain input-latency sensitive games, but, for the vast majority of gamers / people playing on XBox and PlayStations, this is very compelling.As someone else mentioned in the comments section : Don't knock it off until you try it.
ddriver - Thursday, October 1, 2015 - link
It all boils down to what latency you can get. And there are standards for this, not made up by me BTW:below 10 msec - excellent, can pass for real time
above 10 msec - begins to get noticeable
above 50 msec - begins to be impeding
above 100 msec - begins to be annoying
I highly doubt it will be able to get below 100 msec, whatever the internet connection. What is truly annoying is that empty stupid slogan - "the new way to game", because its missing the "it's worse than the old one, but it is more profitable, so we're gonna make you use it by dressing it up as a fad".
But hey, to each his own. I just don't think this is a step forwards, when it comes to gaming performance it is a huge step back. And will continue to be until 10 gigabit internet connection becomes widely available, because that's how much it takes to stream video output at a decent rate.
Worst of all, I don't see a compelling reason why. Modern SOCs are already powerful enough, a 10$ chip has ample graphics performance for gaming. Because it is so important to play games that people can't wait 10 minutes for the game to be downloaded and installed? Because being able to click and play it is worth the poor gaming experience?
2late2die - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
Well obviously this is not for everyone - if you have slow or high latency internet connection then yes, the GRID service is not for you. Does that mean they should not make the product at all? By that logic BMW should stop making series 7, and 6, and probably 5 since not many can afford those cars.Syran - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
When I can't reliably play netflix or vimeo on my internet connection at home, and used to watch horrible ping rates with EQ back when i used to play it, I just don't get cloud streaming services for gaming. The horror of it is that at my home, I get faster internet on my phone (unfortunately, not unlimited) then I do with DSL. (no competition where I live :( )jm9843 - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I can pay $7.99 for a LONG time before it approaches the cost of a new gaming rig. Latency issues and compression artifacts were mostly a non-issue during the GRID beta. If Nvidia can maintain that level of performance and consistently add new content, they should have a winner on their hands.Fiernaq - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
"Latency issues and compression artifacts were mostly a non-issue..." ...If you happen to live in an area where high speed / low latency internet is offered and you can afford it (not all high speed internet is sold at Google Fiber prices). Don't get me wrong, I can certainly see how GRID/NOW is a good concept and will probably just continue to get better as the internet infrastructure improves but I think it's still a bit early for the general public to be hopping on the hype train. Best to leave these kinds of high-requirement services to the tech wealthy crowd (such as yourself, apparently) for now.Yojimbo - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I wonder if all these people talking about latency issues have ever actually tried the service?Margalus - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
they don't have to. Read what was posted. It's not the latency from NVidia, it's the inherent crappiness of some ISP's. It doesn't matter how good of a service NVidia makes it if YOUR isp is screwing up.OrphanageExplosion - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
The latency is around 150ms. I was on the GRID beta and the experience was a generational leap beyond OnLive and a huge achievement. I suspect that most gamers won't care if the system works.Guspaz - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
A service does not have to be available to everybody to be successful.[-Stash-] - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I was impressed with the beta service and the price is good. But why is the UK getting shafted on the exchange rate AGAIN!? $7.99 != £7.49. Please stop doing this companies. even after adding 20% VAT it should only come to £6.34. Okay, not a huge absolute difference, but it's still 18% more in a proportional sense, which is quite a lot.Aftershocker - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
I agree, seems like its Entoro Pay & VPN time again when it comes to purchasing the subscription :-) Although I doubt I'll subscribe after the free trial as I can just steam my steam library from my gaming rig.fivefeet8 - Thursday, October 1, 2015 - link
It would take 20+ years of paying $8/month to reach the price of a high-end gaming system($2000+). By then, that system would have become obsolete or have had upgrades to it that have far outpaced the cost of the service.jamyryals - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
"so individual games picked up via Buy & Play would not be available if you discontinued your subscription"If you restart your subscription do you still get the games you "purchased"?
webdoctors - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I'm pretty sure you can continue off with the games you previously purchased, even with lapses in the subscription.Shouldn't folks be complaining to the FTC or Obama regarding their crappy ISP rather than here? I have gigabit internet (thanks Google Fiber!) and I've previously lived in an area with Verizon FiOS and its awesome. Its like a drug, its hard to go back to slow internet.
Cough up the dough and get the high speed service, or petition your congress critter to fix the infrastructure. Best $$ spent, ever.
IKeelU - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
By far the most interesting use-case for me demoing the game instantly. Imagine playing a pre-release before pre-ordering, for example. Since there's no binary transfer, there's substantially less risk for piracy than the old shareware days. I wish Steam was onboard with something like this.SpartyOn - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
I've owned a Shield Portable for close to three years now and have used the GRID service on occasion. I never found connectivity or latency to be huge issues. This was with a 45 down/6 up ATT Uverse connection over dual band wireless-N. I could easily play games with good responsiveness. Sure, I wasn't multiplayer or competitive gaming on it where every twitch may have counted (I don't do that stuff anyway...), but for folks looking to play through a host of titles on the cheap, this service works and works well. If I had teenagers or a college student, I would totally just get them an inexpensive laptop and subscribe them to GRID. $8.99 vs. $1,000 per even a halfway decent gaming laptop? Deal.Don't knock it until you try it.
Only thing they need to work on is getting more premier and on-release titles. Perhaps offer a premium package for $19.99/month?
Thayios - Thursday, October 1, 2015 - link
If we could subscribe to the service on a laptop I would be sold.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
As someone who simply hates having to mess with a dedicated GPU of any kind, this is an exciting service and I'm looking forward to trying it on a low-end laptop. I'd love to see the day when I can enjoy ultra high settings in whatever game I want to play on an ultra low cost laptop like an HP Stream 11. The subscription fees are basically nothing compared to the price of keeping even a mid-range gaming computer up with bi-annual upgrades.