Introduction and details
Nvidia is in a privileged position. Whether the team there believes it or not, every innovation that comes out of its research and development department will show up sooner or later in hundreds of mainstream titles and technologies.
Don't believe me? Look at the GPU.
Twenty years ago the concept of a discrete graphics processing unit wasn't something that consumers had much interest in. But, come 1999, that story changed when Nvidia launched its 256 card. In the time since its launch, Nvidia has produced dozens of cards, each improving on that early model. The point here is that the original wasn't perfect, but it didn't matter. It was innovative and, in the end, that's what made it ubiquitous with gamers.
When trying out Grid, Nvidia's game-streaming service that's 10-years in the making, this is exactly how I feel: It may not be perfect but, along with its console counterpart PlayStation Now, it's the beginning of something big in a way that services like OnLive never were.
Prerequisites
Before we can dig in with comparisons of how Grid performs under real-world conditions, we should review what Grid is, how it works and what you'll need to try it out for yourself.
Grid, like PlayStation Now, is a cloud game-streaming service. Using remote, proprietary servers, Nvidia performs the graphics-heavy processing needed to play AAA titles and then streams the results to your Shield Tablet or Portable. It's constantly doing this dozens of times per second, as well as taking input from your controller and sending it back to the server.
As you can imagine, you need a pretty fast wifi connection to make this all happen. Nvidia recommends connection speeds of at least 10Mbps for 60fps, though, you won't see really smooth, console-like quality gameplay until around 30Mbps. So long as you have an 802.11n or 802.11ac "game stream-ready" router and a mid-level Internet service package you should be fine. However, anything less than that, and the quality of your stream will completely detract from the gaming experience. Here at TechRadar HQ, we had around the 30Mbps connection speed, and at home could muster around 25Mbps down and 7Mbps up - but neither of these two connections were through game-stream ready routers, which is important to note for the performance section coming later in the review.
Lastly, before we continue, the service only works on Shield Tablet or Shield Portable and is limited for the time-being to North America, though there are plans in place to roll it out globally over the next few months starting with the rest of North America and Western Europe and ending with Asia Pacific.
Game library
While it may sound irksome to wait a few months for service, I can promise you that when it does come to your territory you'll be getting an even better experience than the one here in the US. Nvidia plans on adding several games every month to reach "a PlayStation Now-sized library of over 100 games by this time next year."
However, that doesn't mean US gamers will be left out in the cold until then. There's about twenty games on the Shield Hub available right now. They include: Alan Wake: American Nightmare, Astebreed, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Brutal Legend, Darksiders, Darksiders 2, Dead Island, Dirt 2, LEGO Batman 2, LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, Race Driver Grid, Saints Row: The Third, Street Fighter x Tekken, Strike Suit Zero, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, Trine 2 and Ultra Street Fighter IV. This is the initial launch lineup in its entirety, though I was told to expect the Tim Schafer sleeper hit Psychonauts to be along sometime in the next month or so.
Nvidia is clearly leveraging its relationship with publishers to get AAA games on here from the very beginning. Yes, the point can be made that a few too many of these are from 2010, but it's impressive that the service is launching with many of the games we're still waiting for on PlayStation Now. What's going to push the platform moving forward the most, however, are consistent updates that bring more recent and popular games to the Hub page.
Pricing, stream quality and verdict
Spend a few minutes with Grid and you'd be hard-pressed to avoid comparing it to PlayStation Now. Both systems stream games from the cloud and take up zero space on your hard drive. But, look a bit closer at the two and some differences become painfully apparent.
Nvidia's service both starts up faster than Sony's and plays at 60fps, though, once the service launches you can count on buttery-smooth performance for the entirety of the session. Conversely, Grid, even on the best wireless networks, doesn't have the same guarantee.
Where PlayStation Now has an entire ecosystem at its disposal (PS4, PS3, PS Vita and PlayStation TV), Grid is only available on two machines, the Nvidia Shield Tablet and Shield Portable. But, while PS Now will cost you $2.99 for four hours of game time, Grid is absolutely free until June 2015.
Pricing
Pricing is where Nvidia has a serious upper hand: it's free. For now.
Now that may raise some ethical concerns, like "what about the developers," and "if we're not paying for the games, do the developers go unpaid for their hard work?" No. Absolutely not. Nvidia is paying them on your behalf for every session. How much this will cost them in the end is unclear, but you can rest easy at night knowing the developers are getting a living wage.
But that's only in the interim between now and June 2015. Eventually Nvidia told me they may adopt a Netflix all-you-can-play model for payment that would include some new and some older stuff, and a potential Netflix-plus model that would allow gamers to get access to more recent games for more money every month.
While there are a few problems with the service (don't worry, we're getting there), pricing isn't one of them. Nvidia should have no problem finding plenty of folks willing to shell out for a collection of games so long as it a.) keeps the cost under $20 per month and b.) continues to make new games available. While the games there are impressive, a compulsive player could probably make their way through the catalog in about two months.
What may ultimately scare users away isn't the software itself, but the hardware it's played on.
Stream quality
The biggest strike against the system are its difficult-to-achieve specifications. In order to play the game seamlessly, i.e. without any screen tearing, hiccups, snags or dropped sessions, you need at an absolute minimum 10Mbps and a game stream-ready router. If you're missing either of these two components, even by just a little bit, the system becomes unwieldy.
Remember how I mentioned that the office has 30Mbps down/30Mbps up? Because I wasn't connected via a game stream-ready router the signal intermittently cut out, often with horrible consequences in the games I was playing. In games like Borderlands this would happen right after I engaged an enemy or, when I was playing Race Driver Grid, right before I needed to make a sharp turn. One hiccup later and I found myself at half health or, worse, was sent spinning out of control after hitting the guardrail at 95 miles per hour. These were fatal mistakes that would never be an issue on PlayStation Now or local game content. They only happened because of the lag time between the systems.
Why does this affect Grid and the Shield Tablet, but not PlayStation Now? Simple, Sony systems have an ethernet port that allows for steady, consistent connection or, in the case you're on Wifi, will put up a simple bandwidth gate that stops users with slow connections from getting at the service. It seems harsh, but it's better to stop someone before they start streaming than it is to let them have a less-than-perfect experience. It's not all bad news, though. Nvidia keeps your instance of the game running on the server if you accidentally get disconnected. You'll have about three or four minutes to reconnect before the system idles out. It's sad that this system came in handy so often but having a way to quickly and easily jump back into the game is far better than losing everything you've accomplished since the last checkpoint.
If you succeed in having the two components mentioned above, you will be treated to 720p gameplay at 60fps which, thanks to the Shield's console mode, looks great on any size TV. The whole experience feels downright futuristic.
We liked
Game-streaming still feels like it's in its infancy, but Nvidia and Sony have shown that this is one viable route for the future of our medium. It's obviously innovative, too, especially when combined with the potential Netflix-style pricing model.
Grid feels more well-rounded than game-streaming services in the past, due in part because of the caliber of titles it brings to the table. As long as Nvidia is committed to bringing more recent and popular titles to the table, there's no reason gamers should feel hesitant about going all-in with the service. And while streaming itself can be a bit haphazard, it is possible to get to near-console quality if you have the right equipment.
We disliked
That said, the performance during streaming wasn't flawless, and the requirements to get it there (a 10Mbps connection and game stream-ready router) may be a barrier to entry for some Shield owners. It's easy to overlook a hiccup here and there, but the near-constant interruptions took a serious toll on my patience. A standard ethernet port would've gone a long way to alleviate some of the headaches caused by the inconsistent wifi signal and even though the tablet looked fairly good in console mode, it's still not on par with later Xbox 360 or PS3 games.
Early verdict
Grid is best evaluated in two ways: what it is today, and what it could be in the future. Today, it's the best feature to come to the Shield, which, considering it just got Android 5.0 Lollipop, is really saying something. Shield owners are getting twenty free games for absolutely no cost, with even more content en route in the coming months. That said, the system today isn't perfect. Compared to PlayStation Now, Grid just isn't nearly as stable due to its lack of an ethernet jack. Connections over wifi, with or without the right equipment, can be finicky. Playing games on Grid isn't on par with playing local content, both graphically and in terms of lag-free play. But that's just how the service works one week into its existence. What's more exciting is the future of the platform.
Imagine if Grid came to every desktop or laptop running an Nvidia graphics card. It'd be more robust than OnLive and backed by a company deeply entrenched in the industry. I'm not saying Nvidia's infallible, but there's real potential to grow in this space. The developers haven't ruled that out. The Shield products, they say, are a testbed for the platform.
Calling game-streaming the next GPU is hyperbolic I'll admit, but if, in twenty years, we're all using cloud gaming services to play Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare 7 or Assassin's Creed: Shogun, we'll be able to look back and point to where it started.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/14MSKOK
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