Nvidia Grid Review: Cloud Gaming at its Finest

Introduction

The latest Nvidia Shield update launched recently, bringing the Tegra powered tablet up to version 2.0 and adding Google’s latest Android operating system, Lollipop 5.0. While there were many new features, tweaks and other improvements to the general operation of the tablet with these updates, the most important one for Nvidia was the addition of their GRID gaming service.

GRID has been available in an early Beta format for some time now, but with the servers based in California, lag time for me in the UK rendered the service unplayable. Now that Nvidia has brought their EU Beta servers online, all that has changed and Nvidia have been working hard to give the service an almighty speed boost.

What is GRID? It’s essentially Netflix for gaming. You pick the title you want to play and the Nvidia super computers remotely run the game for you. Nvidia do all the heavy graphics processing for you on their high-end graphics hardware, then stream the video to your device, just like you would stream a movie. When ever you press a button on your controller, they fire that information back to their servers and stream the data back to you. This all happens in milliseconds, assuming of course that your internet is up to par with such a technology. Nvidia recommends 10mbps internet with a ping time of around 30ms to their servers.

All the screenshots below are taken directly from my Nvidia Shield. Here you can see the updated version of Nvidia Shield Hub. This is a portal app that gives you access to all your android games, PC in-home streaming and GRID games.

The GRID page has a range of games to choose, currently there are 20 top titles at your disposal.

All the games listed are big hitters and Nvidia are celebrating their Beta phase by keeping this service free of charge until March 2015.

That means you’ve got a few months ahead of you to help them test the service; just enough time to complete all the games for free?

There’s a good mixture of driving games, 3rd personal action/adventure, first person shooters and even fighting games.

That’s all the games we have available, now it’s time to put some of them to the test.