Nvidia announces GeForce GRID cloud gaming platform

Gaming enters a new era with the launch of the Nvidia GeForce GRID cloud gaming platform, which allows gaming-as-a-service providers to stream next-generation games to virtually any device, without the lag that hampers current offerings. With the GeForce GRID platform, gaming-as-a-service providers can deliver the most advanced visuals with lower latency, while incurring lower operating costs, particularly related to energy usage. Gamers benefit from the ability to play the latest, most sophisticated games on any connected device, including TVs, smartphones and tablets running iOS and Android. This concept is similar to what OnLive started years ago, but sadly, never really caught on. The idea is simple, the games are rendered on the service provider’s end and then the rendered frames are streamed to the client on any device, so all you essentially need is a good Internet connection.

Taking gaming to the clouds

“Gamers will now have access to seamlessly play the world’s best titles anywhere, anytime, from phones, tablets, TVs or PCs,” said Phil Eisler, general manager of cloud gaming at Nvidia. “GeForce GRID represents a massive disruption in how games are delivered and played.”  GeForce GRID was introduced at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), as part of a series of announcements from Nvidia. The key technologies powering the new platform are Nvidia GeForce GRID GPUs with dedicated ultra-low-latency streaming technology and cloud graphics software.

Using the highly efficient Nvidia Kepler architecture, Nvidia GeForce GRID GPUs minimize power consumption by simultaneously encoding up to eight game streams. This allows providers to cost-effectively scale their service offerings to support millions of concurrent gamers. Featuring two Kepler architecture-based GPUs, each with its own encoder, the processors have 3,072 CUDA technology cores and 4.7 teraflops of 3D shader performance. This enables providers to render highly complex games in the cloud and encode them on the GPU, rather than the CPU, allowing their servers to simultaneously run more game streams. Server power-consumption per game stream is reduced to about one-half that of previous implementations, an important metric for data centers.

Fast streaming technology reduces server latency to as little as 10 milliseconds by capturing and encoding a game frame in a single pass. The GeForce GRID platform uses fast-frame capture, concurrent rendering and single-pass encoding to achieve ultra-fast game streaming. A range of leading game developers also announced their support of GeForce GRID, like EPIC Games, Bitsquid AB and Tripwire Interactive.