After a year-long period of beta testing, Nvidia will finally launch its PC game-streaming service, GRID, next week. The service will initially be available only for owners of the company’s Shield tablet and handheld console, PC World reports. The service will initially be available for US customers, as a free preview, between November 18 and June 30 next year. European users will be able to try the new service starting next month.
The new game streaming service launched by Nvidia will be in direct competition with Sony’s PlayStation Now service, also in beta at the moment. PS Now only works with Sony’s smart TVs and gaming consoles. Nvidia promises to offer its users a better gaming experience, a better resolution and higher FPS, hoping to attract more customers to its Shield tablet, soon to become available with a price of $299. At the beginning the service will only stream 20 titles, including Batman: Arkham City and Borderlands 2, with more games to be added later. The cloud game streaming service will not work on other manufacturers’ devices, as it will rely on specific hardware and graphics features only available in Nvidia’s Shield devices, but this could change in the future.
Streaming video games works much differently as streaming video and audio online. The games themselves run on Nvidia’s servers, that transmit the game’s output to the gamer’s device and sends the gamer’s input back to the game. The server’s output and the player’s input are sent through the network encoded, helping to reduce the latency. Nvidia plans to deploy thousands of servers in Amazon’s cloud, but currently works through a server in California. The service underwent extensive testing during the beta period, and Nvidia has decided that it had sufficient bandwidth and performance to allow more gamers to simultaneously using the service.