shadow is a company with an ambitious goal
they're gonna kill off the traditional gaming pc
and do it without gamers either caring or in
many cases even noticing how is it that they intend to do
something like that without becoming about as popular as this blanket i'm
sitting on here in their lobby well that's a terrific question and they
sponsored our trip down to their san francisco office to answer it for you
this is a shadow ghost basically what it is
is a super low powered Linux computer
that leverages the power of the cloud to
enable it to perform like a high performance gaming rig so right here
i've got one of these and i'm running rise of the tomb raider at very high
settings 1080p and getting in excess of
a hundred frames per second and this is all on a seven watt fanless ARM based
system it's not exactly a new idea though is it
thin clients which are low spec machines that use a remote server to handle
heavier workloads have been around for decades and even in the gaming space
this is old news on live the world's first commercial cloud gaming service
was announced at gdc nearly 10 years ago
but as we're about to see not every cloud is created equal
so let's head over to shadow's west coast usa data center to check it out now to
say that cloud gaming is a bit of a nebulous maybe even buzzword-worthy term
would be a gross understatement you could ask a dozen different people
all smart and informed people and get 13
different answers about what exactly it means
some of them might only see the value in synchronizing save states across devices
others might see it as a way to augment limited local storage for high quality
assets i mean i still remember when NVIDIA launched the grid which was this
server full of special gpus that could be virtualized or carved up to allow
multiple users to run off of a single card for lighter workloads and when
microsoft first launched the xbox one when they were talking up this hybrid
approach even to 3d rendering where some of it would be done locally and some in
the data center and then the resulting combined image would be displayed on
your tv but a shadow is fundamentally
different from what anyone else is doing right now so rather than using an existing cloud
platform like aws they're actually building out their own co-located data
centers like the one we're standing next to right now so everything inside this
cage actually belongs to them
and when you subscribe to their service you're not getting like a a chunk of a
GPU or a netflix-like interface with a
limited selection of games you can stream inside of every single one of these
custom built boxes is 16 CPU cores
48 gigs of system memory and four
performance grade gpus typically gtx
1080s or quadro p5000s which are about
equivalent in gaming performance shadow is then using their own tuned
version of red hat's kvm hypervisor running on Linux to allocate the cpus
and the RAM using virtualization and then when it comes to graphics
each shadow actually gets its own
dedicated GPU passed through to it this is actually really similar tech to what
we used in our seven gamers one CPU project a couple of years ago and for
gamers who subscribe what it means is near bare metal performance with support
for 1080p 144 hertz or even 4k 60hz
gaming at least in theory because the truth of
the matter is you can have all the hardware in the world but the user
experience is still going to suck unless you can solve the problem with cloud
services the latency
and shadow knows this and takes it really seriously so as part of their
ongoing journey to get the delay between a mouse click and an action taking place
on screen as close to local gaming as possible they've even developed their
own special hardware this right here is called a betty and what it basically
does is issue a command to their software that's just a spacebar input
that inverts the color of the screen then it uses this sensor on the back to
measure the delay so to put their claims to the test i actually asked them to
give me a copy of their latency testing software and put it on my machine then
install their shadow client on my machine so we can do an apples to apples
comparison here a wired connection is ideal but you can get away with five
gigahertz wi-fi assuming that you have a good fairly recent access point but they
really don't recommend 2.4 gigahertz i mean especially some of the older stuff
it could be 20 milliseconds of latency just between your wi-fi card and your
router which is really going to hurt the gaming experience okay so we're all set
up we've got their latencyinsight.exe here
so we're running this locally on the machine
we're gonna do our multiple test and
here we go
all right 91 milliseconds
now
we are going to use
a shadow machine so this is running off of
that data center one of the racks in that data center that we were just at so
we're gonna fire up latency insight here
all right what did we get about 91
let's go ahead and
moment of truth
okay
so the long and short of this is and
remember that these are fairly ideal conditions they've got a pretty decent
connection here and we are not far from the data center the long and short of it
is it adds only about five milliseconds
of total latency if the server's running on the same local network and that's for
all of the image capture encoding transferring and decoding and then plus
whatever your internet latency is here and these are really impressive results
like i wasn't expecting that i was expecting at least the 5 to 10
milliseconds on top of what we got natively but
depending on how tight everything is and whether that latency can be hidden by
the refresh rate of the monitor itself you can end up with the same results
remotely so those results are really impressive and it's no accident
shadow believes that it's their tuning of both the hardware and the software at
every link in the chain that gives them their key advantage
everything is tuned to optimize latency for example the routers that they use
are bgp routers these allow them to find
and hold the most optimal path to the end user rather than fighting through
the traffic at a typical internet exchange and they have been hard at work
building their own software clients for a wide variety of platforms so that you
can access your shadow on any device that you want
they've even managed to work with folks like logitech to ensure that you can use
whatever peripherals you want so this racing wheel equipped demo right here
force feedback and everything has project cars 2 looking pretty slick
and it's running off of that same data center that we were in before back in
the other demo room things get even more interesting though so this is the same
shadow ghost that you guys saw before but
as you might have realized by now it's actually totally optional so let's
say for example i'm tired of looking at a small screen and i want to play this
same game on my tv i grab my controller
press this button and bippity bopty
there it is now i'm on their Android client this is
an Android powered tv and i am actually
decoding the signal using the processor
built right into my tv i'm using this controller a little something like that
crazy right okay now i've been gaming for a while or
whatever i'm hungry i want to run over to the kitchen i don't want to put down my game
easy solution thank you got an Android tablet here
got my controller paired to it now i'm playing on this
that's how quickly it switches now let's say
okay i don't know my battery ran out or something uh now i'm gonna switch to my
phone here we are this is the iOS app now running that
same game that we left off on from before
completely seamless switching then oh i don't know i i i dropped my
iphone who knows what i got to keep coming up with more and more contrived
reasons for me to keep switching devices here and as a last resort i go okay
i guess i'll i'll game on the macbook here go ahead and plug in my mouse and
uh oh look they already pressed the button for me thank you for that and
there we are now we're running on the mac and
actually the implementation here is particularly interesting to me because
not only have they actually found a purpose for the touch bar so you can
change some of your options you can adjust your bitrate some kind of cool
stuff like that but i'm going to go ahead and put the desktop here because
this is crazy with a simple three finger
swipe i can go from a full fat macOS
experience high performance natively running obviously
to a full fat Windows 10 experience now
this one isn't running natively but imagine the things that you could do
with this kind of functionality i mean this is not just for gaming anymore you
could install and run anything like if you were let's say you were editing a
video in adobe premiere you could do your heavy lifting on the shadow and
then you could even save your battery life since your laptop CPU is hardly
doing anything it's just running over the network so sounds pretty cool then
right without the upfront investment that comes with a typical gaming tower
for 35 bucks a month you're getting a gaming pc with a gigabit internet
connection that rips through modern games and not only that that shadow
promises will continue to receive upgraded hardware over time so you're
always gaming at high settings what's the downside
okay i mean nothing in life is perfect so one is image compression
while your shadow can fine tune its encoding settings for your connection
on the other side not all decoders can deliver the same
experience and you guys might have noticed this especially with the tv
from my experience h.265 at their maximum supported bit
rate of 50 to 70 megabit per second delivered the best experience with
minimal compression artifacts and blocking even on challenging color
gradients like the sky but not every internet connection or
device will be able to handle this so you're going to have to try it out for
yourself naturally of course we have a link below for that including a 10 off offer code
for the first month and in much the same way that even in a
future where uh ride-sharing services have mostly
overtaken individual car ownership there are still going to be people who want to
own a lamborghini and rock around in it on the weekend as cloud gaming continues
to gain traction among mainstream users there will still be people probably some
of which are watching this video whose bleeding edge desires outstrip what's
possible through the cloud and notable limitations today include HDR
multi-monitor support and vr gaming the
last of which is particularly sensitive to latency which isn't to say though
that they won't be working on those things and that there might not be new
gaming experiences that are worth trading them for i mean here's a
hypothetical for you what if data center technology continued to advance in such
a way that entirely new gaming experiences could be created like
massive or photorealistic environments that simply couldn't be rendered by one
or two gpus in sli in a box next to you
if all that cost you was 10 to 30 milliseconds much of which could be made
up with faster display technologies in the coming years
things would start to get really interesting wouldn't they
in the meantime though if you want to try it out check out the link to
shadow.tech down below a shadow is just 35 bucks a month with no usage fees
outside your regular data rates and they've got seven data centers worldwide
with two more coming i would love to hear your guys's thoughts in the
comments below so thanks again to shadow for sponsoring
our trip down here and thanks to you guys for watching if you disliked this video you guys all know where that
button is but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider
checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below also down
there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should definitely join