The cloud-based gaming scene is about to get yet another contender with Gaikai backed up by Nvidia entering the fray. Gaikai which is the brainchild of gaming maestro David Perry will allow players to play games from either smartphones, tablets, desktop computers or even televisions as long as they are capable of streaming HD video with just a high-speed internet connection on a service called GeForce Grid. If all the talk about this has triggered your memories about Onlive, you wouldn’t be that far off.
Nevertheless, Gaikai and Nvidia have said that the difference between theirs and previous systems is the all-important latency. In an event yesterday, both the companies took to the stage to demonstrate Nvidia’s GeForce Grid on an ASUS Eee Transformer Prime. With regards to Nvidia’s cloud, the GeForce Grid apparently features 2 Kepler GPUs with what is said to be 3,072 CUDA cores that are capable of “pushing 4.7 teraflops of 3D shader bliss”. To demonstrate the service which is yet to be launched, an upcoming first-person-shooter which is called Hawken was used and it indicated ten milliseconds of latency with Gaikai’s “console” that the Ethernet cable was jokingly referred to as.
With plans in the works to bring the cloud-based gaming services to just about all devices that are capable of it devoid of the console boxes, Gaikai is currently free. But with the addition of this new joint venture, we could be in store for a pricing package that offers “all you can play for X amount of money”. Of course since nothing official has been announced in that aspect, that is just speculation.
That said however, reports indicate that the gaming catalog that can be perused through this service involves prominent publishers such as Epic, Capcom, THQ, EA, Ubisoft and Sega. For now, there is no word on when Gaikai and Nvidia’s GeForce Grid will be launching but if luck is on our side, we might be able to have a closer look at it at E3 next month where it could even be launched; but we just don’t know anything for sure at this moment.