Nvidia reveals GRID Server for speedy cloud-based gaming

Nvidia announced the GRID cloud computing gaming platform recently at CES. GRID is built to solve the problem of performance issues that gamers face in cloud-based gaming by providing a real time graphics server.

The concept is that the games will be rendered on the cloud-based server which then sends the output of the rendered games to whoever is accessing the server to play that game.

This isn’t the first instance of this. OnLive was the first to build this concept. OnLive’s key problem however was that it needed 1 graphics card per user and therefore it was unfeasible and impractical in the long term to have such an infrastructure even with a small-to-medium member base.

But the key difference is that Nvidia GRID solved this problem. A single GRID box is in a size of a 4U server casing but with 24 GPUs using Nvidia’s Kepler architecture. These cards are designed specifically for GRID and therefore you will not get these cards off-the-shelf.

There’s also a circuitry that supports hardware virtualization for both the CPU and GPU, which Nvidia calls “VGX Hypervisor” software. According to Nvidia, a stack of 20 GRID servers is equivalent to 700 units for Xbox 360 but it consumes one-fifth of power. The servers will be passively cooled.

Nvidia plans to sell these units to those who want to render real time 3D content from cloud computing. The companies that showed interest initially are Agawi, G- Cluster, PlayCast, ubitus and China based CyberCloud and CloudUnion.

2 questions for now come to mind: will gamers look forward to this? and if they do, will companies have less intrusive/ridiculous terms of service?

Via: PCWorld