Does anyone buy CDs or Blu-ray discs anymore? You can stream so much stuff for a few bucks a month that it's hard to make an argument for physical media these days. Those two mediums have nearly leapfrogged the downloading phase that PC games have been in for a decade, since the dawn of Steam. Now Nvidia is making a push for streaming games, too, and its new Shield console is central to that effort. We sat down today for a talk presented by Eric Young, an engineering manager at Nvidia, who gave us some more details about how the Shield handles streaming from the company's cloud-based service dubbed GRID.
Nvidia GRID has been streaming major PC titles to the Shield Tablet and Shield Portable for nine months now, so its existence is probably not news to our readers. In case it is, Nvidia pitches it like this: You can buy a game and be playing it in less than a minute, you can use it on mobile devices that would otherwise choke, games update themselves without you needing to download a patch, and it solves a lot of problems with piracy.
The secret sauce is that the game runs in the cloud itself, then a video of the gameplay is shot down the series of tubes to your computer. You move your mouse, and you see the mouse move in-game, "In half of the blink of an eye," according to company CEO Jensen Huang. If you're close enough to the GRID server farm, Nvidia says that your latency can be as low as 150 milliseconds. That's low enough to play a racing game like Grid 2, which they demonstrated live at the Shield console press event on March 3rd.
Another critical element is hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding. The latest Nvidia video cards have this, and so does the Shield console. It can do both H.264 and H.265. If your Internet connection can handle bandwidth in the 15-25mbps range, you can get 60 frames per second at 1080p. Eric Young says that it takes only 10ms to encode frames on the shield, and the bundled controller's Wifi Direct tech lowers input latency to 10ms as well. The console takes 5ms to send video to your display, which has its own processing latency of a few milliseconds (this last step varies widely from one TV to another). Users of the Shield tablet or Shield Portable will be limited to 60 FPS at 720p, unless you plug in an Ethernet cable via an OTG adapter.
The shield uses its hardware acceleration to also play 4K movies and TV shows, where available. Netflix has just started doing that, so the Shield is ready out-of-the-box.
Developers who want to integrate their games into GRID will be getting access to the GRID Link SDK "very soon." We suspect that it will coincide with the company's GPU Technology Conference happening later this month.
