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/
(Score: 2) by deimios on Saturday January 13 2018, @06:16AM (1 child)
Well let's see, the typical FPS game has an input lag (time from button press to thing happening on screen) of at least 67ms NOT including display lag.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag#Display_lag [wikipedia.org]
Now you introduce the network lag. Control input->data center.
Then you introduce video encoding lag, which in theory is 0 in practice it needs I/O.
Then you introduce network lag. Video->user PC.
Then you introduce video decoding lag.
This on top of normal input and display lag and if playing online the multiplayer server latency.
Not to mention you will get artifacting due to lossy video encode and as I've heard USians are living on rationed internet so streaming high quality video for a few hours will consume their quota.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @12:58PM
You're thinking of Australians. Nobody in the US has quotas except for mobile.