you know it's funny we've collectively bought into the streaming on demand
concept for movies and TV shows to the point where the idea of going to the
video store to rent a DVD seems so crazy
that South Park managed to turn it into The Shining parody so why then do we as
Gamers have such reservations about letting go of our dedicated gaming box
be it a PC or a console in favor of a
streaming service well let's start with explanations of some of the way that
games can be streamed first is local
network streaming this has existed in the form of Sony's Remote Play for PS
Vita and NVIDIA's game stream for PC for
a couple of years the way it works is a powerful gaming device sits somewhere
rendering your game frame by frame then turning the output frames into a
compressed video stream nearly instantly
before beaming them to a much less powerful and sometimes even portable and
wirelessly connected device sounds like science fiction right
well it's not it actually works I tested
NVIDIA gam stream with a high-speed camera and found that it actually adds
less latency than the image processor built into some televisions so from
there then what if rendering could be done in a data center somewhere
completely remote with the resulting gaming experience beamed to you over the
Internet well that's where industry giants like Microsoft Sony and NVIDIA
are directed in their attention now Microsoft's vision seems to be to use
the cloud for heavy lifting and a less powerful client to do the basics
delivering a bandwidth savings but also increasing the complexity of the process
one reason why we haven't seen them do much with this yet while Sony ran out
and purchased on live and NVIDIA is building out data centers full of
Graphics processors around the world in an attempt to make the video beaming
Paradigm viable now and there's a lot of
cool stuff about this approach it replaces an upfront cost for a new box
every few years with a monthly subscription that particularly for light
users could actually end up being cheaper thanks to bulk licensing of
games being done over by the service provider not to mention that paying only
for the time that you spend with those games could be cheaper than going
overkill on a GTX 15,000 TI Ultra or
whatever just for the games that demand that kind of horsepower when you spend
most of your time playing games that would run on your thermostat if you
turned it down far enough but there are some challenges too for some people the
future is now I mean I'm not a hardcore I'm a decent gamer but I can easily
enjoy third person games and even Fighters with the nearest GeForce now
data center 1500 km away but many people
will need faster speeds lower latency and bigger data caps on their their
internet connections to make this viable although services like Google Fiber are
amazing for making that future scenario
become a reality sooner and another consideration is that not every gaming
experience is ideal for this V for
example will likely need to run locally forever to keep users from becoming
nauseated so as always it's going to be horses for courses which I guess is the
conclusion that I came to when NVIDIA approached us about doing a fastest
possible video about the shield Android TV and I countered with well I want to
talk about game streaming in general with a sponsored bit at the end about
how the shield Android TV occupies a unique position inside this rapidly
changing ecosystem so that's what I did and here's the bit about the shield
Android TV as a PC Gamer with a sick
gaming rig but very little time to sit in front of it I've been an avid NVIDIA
gamestream user since the launch of The Shield portable since I can take that
experience with me to the other places that I need to be like the bedroom or
the living room but that device lacks some of the newer features that this new
gizmo has thanks to its Android TV integration and upgraded internals like
4K 60fps Netflix and YouTube streaming
as well as support for other streaming apps like sling Plex Cody and sports app
with voice control with the included controller or optional remote and offers
up all the advantages especially for more casual users or guests who come
over that I just outlined before and it can handle it all at up to 1080p 60 FPS
and the really unique thing is that thanks to its teger X1 processor it also
delivers a surprisingly competent local gaming experience in the growing number
of controller friendly Android games and other natively supported games like Doom
3 Talos principal and War Thunder you can even stream straight to Twitch from
the shield with a quick click of the controller so then lonus how much will
one of these set me back well if you're looking at the shield Android TV you're
looking at 199 bucks for the 16 gig flash-based model and 299 for the 500
gig model and then you can beef up the gaming experience with GeForce now for
only eight bucks a month after a 3mon free trial so it's kind of an exciting
time then to be any type of gamer isn't it I hope if nothing else this episode
of fast as possible has given you some food for thought about where the
technolog is heading and what the limitations are thanks for watching guys
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