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shadow is a company with an ambitious goal

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they're gonna kill off the traditional gaming pc

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and do it without gamers either caring or in

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many cases even noticing how is it that they intend to do

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something like that without becoming about as popular as this blanket i'm

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sitting on here in their lobby well that's a terrific question and they

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sponsored our trip down to their san francisco office to answer it for you

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this is a shadow ghost basically what it is

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is a super low powered Linux computer

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that leverages the power of the cloud to

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enable it to perform like a high performance gaming rig so right here

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i've got one of these and i'm running rise of the tomb raider at very high

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settings 1080p and getting in excess of

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a hundred frames per second and this is all on a seven watt fanless ARM based

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system it's not exactly a new idea though is it

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thin clients which are low spec machines that use a remote server to handle

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heavier workloads have been around for decades and even in the gaming space

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this is old news on live the world's first commercial cloud gaming service

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was announced at gdc nearly 10 years ago

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but as we're about to see not every cloud is created equal

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so let's head over to shadow's west coast usa data center to check it out now to

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say that cloud gaming is a bit of a nebulous maybe even buzzword-worthy term

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would be a gross understatement you could ask a dozen different people

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all smart and informed people and get 13

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different answers about what exactly it means

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some of them might only see the value in synchronizing save states across devices

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others might see it as a way to augment limited local storage for high quality

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assets i mean i still remember when NVIDIA launched the grid which was this

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server full of special gpus that could be virtualized or carved up to allow

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multiple users to run off of a single card for lighter workloads and when

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microsoft first launched the xbox one when they were talking up this hybrid

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approach even to 3d rendering where some of it would be done locally and some in

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the data center and then the resulting combined image would be displayed on

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your tv but a shadow is fundamentally

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different from what anyone else is doing right now so rather than using an existing cloud

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platform like aws they're actually building out their own co-located data

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centers like the one we're standing next to right now so everything inside this

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cage actually belongs to them

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and when you subscribe to their service you're not getting like a a chunk of a

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GPU or a netflix-like interface with a

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limited selection of games you can stream inside of every single one of these

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custom built boxes is 16 CPU cores

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48 gigs of system memory and four

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performance grade gpus typically gtx

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1080s or quadro p5000s which are about

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equivalent in gaming performance shadow is then using their own tuned

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version of red hat's kvm hypervisor running on Linux to allocate the cpus

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and the RAM using virtualization and then when it comes to graphics

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each shadow actually gets its own

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dedicated GPU passed through to it this is actually really similar tech to what

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we used in our seven gamers one CPU project a couple of years ago and for

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gamers who subscribe what it means is near bare metal performance with support

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for 1080p 144 hertz or even 4k 60hz

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gaming at least in theory because the truth of

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the matter is you can have all the hardware in the world but the user

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experience is still going to suck unless you can solve the problem with cloud

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services the latency

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and shadow knows this and takes it really seriously so as part of their

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ongoing journey to get the delay between a mouse click and an action taking place

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on screen as close to local gaming as possible they've even developed their

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own special hardware this right here is called a betty and what it basically

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does is issue a command to their software that's just a spacebar input

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that inverts the color of the screen then it uses this sensor on the back to

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measure the delay so to put their claims to the test i actually asked them to

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give me a copy of their latency testing software and put it on my machine then

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install their shadow client on my machine so we can do an apples to apples

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comparison here a wired connection is ideal but you can get away with five

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gigahertz wi-fi assuming that you have a good fairly recent access point but they

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really don't recommend 2.4 gigahertz i mean especially some of the older stuff

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it could be 20 milliseconds of latency just between your wi-fi card and your

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router which is really going to hurt the gaming experience okay so we're all set

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up we've got their latencyinsight.exe here

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so we're running this locally on the machine

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we're gonna do our multiple test and

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here we go

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all right 91 milliseconds

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now

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we are going to use

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a shadow machine so this is running off of

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that data center one of the racks in that data center that we were just at so

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we're gonna fire up latency insight here

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all right what did we get about 91

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let's go ahead and

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moment of truth

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okay

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so the long and short of this is and

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remember that these are fairly ideal conditions they've got a pretty decent

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connection here and we are not far from the data center the long and short of it

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is it adds only about five milliseconds

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of total latency if the server's running on the same local network and that's for

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all of the image capture encoding transferring and decoding and then plus

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whatever your internet latency is here and these are really impressive results

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like i wasn't expecting that i was expecting at least the 5 to 10

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milliseconds on top of what we got natively but

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depending on how tight everything is and whether that latency can be hidden by

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the refresh rate of the monitor itself you can end up with the same results

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remotely so those results are really impressive and it's no accident

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shadow believes that it's their tuning of both the hardware and the software at

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every link in the chain that gives them their key advantage

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everything is tuned to optimize latency for example the routers that they use

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are bgp routers these allow them to find

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and hold the most optimal path to the end user rather than fighting through

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the traffic at a typical internet exchange and they have been hard at work

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building their own software clients for a wide variety of platforms so that you

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can access your shadow on any device that you want

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they've even managed to work with folks like logitech to ensure that you can use

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whatever peripherals you want so this racing wheel equipped demo right here

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force feedback and everything has project cars 2 looking pretty slick

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and it's running off of that same data center that we were in before back in

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the other demo room things get even more interesting though so this is the same

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shadow ghost that you guys saw before but

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as you might have realized by now it's actually totally optional so let's

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say for example i'm tired of looking at a small screen and i want to play this

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same game on my tv i grab my controller

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press this button and bippity bopty

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there it is now i'm on their Android client this is

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an Android powered tv and i am actually

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decoding the signal using the processor

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built right into my tv i'm using this controller a little something like that

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crazy right okay now i've been gaming for a while or

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whatever i'm hungry i want to run over to the kitchen i don't want to put down my game

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easy solution thank you got an Android tablet here

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got my controller paired to it now i'm playing on this

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that's how quickly it switches now let's say

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okay i don't know my battery ran out or something uh now i'm gonna switch to my

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phone here we are this is the iOS app now running that

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same game that we left off on from before

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completely seamless switching then oh i don't know i i i dropped my

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iphone who knows what i got to keep coming up with more and more contrived

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reasons for me to keep switching devices here and as a last resort i go okay

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i guess i'll i'll game on the macbook here go ahead and plug in my mouse and

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uh oh look they already pressed the button for me thank you for that and

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there we are now we're running on the mac and

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actually the implementation here is particularly interesting to me because

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not only have they actually found a purpose for the touch bar so you can

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change some of your options you can adjust your bitrate some kind of cool

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stuff like that but i'm going to go ahead and put the desktop here because

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this is crazy with a simple three finger

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swipe i can go from a full fat macOS

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experience high performance natively running obviously

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to a full fat Windows 10 experience now

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this one isn't running natively but imagine the things that you could do

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with this kind of functionality i mean this is not just for gaming anymore you

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could install and run anything like if you were let's say you were editing a

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video in adobe premiere you could do your heavy lifting on the shadow and

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then you could even save your battery life since your laptop CPU is hardly

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doing anything it's just running over the network so sounds pretty cool then

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right without the upfront investment that comes with a typical gaming tower

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for 35 bucks a month you're getting a gaming pc with a gigabit internet

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connection that rips through modern games and not only that that shadow

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promises will continue to receive upgraded hardware over time so you're

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always gaming at high settings what's the downside

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okay i mean nothing in life is perfect so one is image compression

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while your shadow can fine tune its encoding settings for your connection

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on the other side not all decoders can deliver the same

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experience and you guys might have noticed this especially with the tv

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from my experience h.265 at their maximum supported bit

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rate of 50 to 70 megabit per second delivered the best experience with

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minimal compression artifacts and blocking even on challenging color

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gradients like the sky but not every internet connection or

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device will be able to handle this so you're going to have to try it out for

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yourself naturally of course we have a link below for that including a 10 off offer code

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for the first month and in much the same way that even in a

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future where uh ride-sharing services have mostly

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overtaken individual car ownership there are still going to be people who want to

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own a lamborghini and rock around in it on the weekend as cloud gaming continues

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to gain traction among mainstream users there will still be people probably some

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of which are watching this video whose bleeding edge desires outstrip what's

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possible through the cloud and notable limitations today include HDR

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multi-monitor support and vr gaming the

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last of which is particularly sensitive to latency which isn't to say though

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that they won't be working on those things and that there might not be new

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gaming experiences that are worth trading them for i mean here's a

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hypothetical for you what if data center technology continued to advance in such

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a way that entirely new gaming experiences could be created like

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massive or photorealistic environments that simply couldn't be rendered by one

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or two gpus in sli in a box next to you

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if all that cost you was 10 to 30 milliseconds much of which could be made

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up with faster display technologies in the coming years

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things would start to get really interesting wouldn't they

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in the meantime though if you want to try it out check out the link to

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shadow.tech down below a shadow is just 35 bucks a month with no usage fees

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outside your regular data rates and they've got seven data centers worldwide

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with two more coming i would love to hear your guys's thoughts in the

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comments below so thanks again to shadow for sponsoring

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our trip down here and thanks to you guys for watching if you disliked this video you guys all know where that

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button is but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider

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checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below also down

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there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should definitely join