Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Friday January 12 2018, @03:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the ask-Peter-Pan-for-the-details dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is about to expand its cloud gaming service to the U.S. Customers who live in California can pre-order starting today, and they'll be able to access the service on February 15th. The rest of the U.S. will be able to subscribe later this summer.

Shadow is currently live in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. For a flat monthly fee, you can rent a gaming PC in a data center near you. You can then access this beefy computer using desktop and mobile apps as well as the company's own little box. It's a full-fledged Windows 10 instance — you can install Steam, Battle.net or whatever you want.

Behind the scene, each user gets a high-end dedicated Nvidia GPU. The company is currently using a mix of GeForce GTX 1080 and Quadro P5000. Shadow also gives you 8 threads on an Intel Xeon 2620 processor, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Overall, it represents 8.2 teraflops of computing power — as a comparison, Microsoft promises 6 teraflops with the Xbox One X.

In Europe, the service currently costs $54 per month, or $42 per month with a three-month commitment, or $36 if you're willing to pay for a year (€44.95/€34.95/€29.95). American customers will pay more or less the same thing for the cheapest tier — $34.95 per month for a one-year commitment.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/04/shadow-launches-its-cloud-computer-for-gamers-in-california/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday January 12 2018, @09:31PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday January 12 2018, @09:31PM (#621570)

    So IF this service can do the impossible and eliminate lag it sounds like a deal. Given the typical replacement cycle for high end video cards you are basically making notes on one and getting the computer for free. But they can't eliminate the lag so there is that. The only way to push HD video over 15mbps is with compression schemes that will by the nature of how they operate lag one or more than one frames behind. Most PC class hardware doesn't support genlock so there will be a skew between the frame timing on the server and client, more lag. Perhaps they can go the other way and lock the server timing to the client? Assuming they are slow rolling the startup because they are co-locating their equipment at major ISP datacenters they can solve most of the rest of the latency issues.

    And no, you can't mine crypto on them. The website is content free but there will be TOS terms to prohibit it or they can't possibly make a profit. Like all such services the entire model is premised on sharing one piece of hardware across multiple customers. Also, most crypto mining runs much slower on Windows vs Linux and it is also a pretty safe bet they won't be allowing you to blow away Windows and install Ubuntu.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2