Ooh, I feel all grown up and tech-journo-ey - I'm writing about 'the cloud'! Though, really, at the end of the day, it's no one I haven't talked about before at the center of the story. It's NVIDIA's tech, and it'll streaming HAWKEN to a device near you.
NVIDIA's just announced its new Geforce GRID technology, an in-the-cloud solution to streaming games to just about anything with a screen attached. That means games rendered somewhere else, that you can see and play on your phone, tablet... hell, I guess even an internet fridge if you want to be really weird.
You can get the full spec deets at NVIDIA's site, but essentially NVIDIA's got a range of solutions to make the actual rendering part - currently the slowest part of the first-gen process in services like OnLive - much faster. This includes boosting the frame rate to 60fps, and faster encoding, buffering and frame read-back. The final piece of the puzzle is the new Kepler architecture, and the fact that four Kepler GPUs will be attached to each streaming server.
NVIDIA's promising to get streamed gaming to the same latency as console-based gaming - a bit pover 150 milliseconds from the game pipeline to your eyeballs. In fact, it could be even better than the game box you've got in your living room. Though, of course - it's not even close to PC.
NVIDIA's got the tech, but the actual cloud network running it will run on is gaming service Gakai. It's taken Gakai four years to get their network up to scratch, working with partners like NVIDIA and a mess of game developers.One outfit to benefit from this cloud service is Meteor Entertainment, which has just announced that its first game, HAWKEN, will launch first on Gakai.
“HAWKEN wants to be free and it wants to be everywhere - and with Gaikai, it will be,” stated Mark Long, CEO at Meteor Entertainment. “Their tech is the next level. It's mind blowing to see HAWKEN running on a tablet!”
Uh... yes, I bet it is. Even more impressive that it'll be playing on those tablets and phones - yes, my head is done on - head of the free to play game's 12.12.12 launch on PC.
