Nvidia GRID cloud gaming service to launch next week

It will only be available to owners of the company’s Shield tablet and handheld gaming console.

So who else had been anxiously waiting for Nvidia’s online PC game-streaming service? It had been a year since we all had been waiting for the beta testing period to come to an end and now it finally does with the service launching in a week’s time!

We don’t want to break the bubble too soon but the sad part is that the Nvidia GRID cloud gaming service will only be enjoyed by those who own the company’s own Shield tablet and handheld gaming console. With a free preview, it is first coming out for the US on November 18th and the great news is that this free preview can be enjoyed for a very long time till June 30, 2015. Europe’s turn isn’t so far away and it will get the much awaited service in about a month.

We know exactly what you’re thinking; will this service become a paid one after the free preview ends? Well, this is something that even the company has remained silent about.

The GRID cloud gaming service is not the first of its kind and there is already some tough competition waiting out there for Nvidia. Sony’s PlayStation Now game-streaming service is still in its beta form but will be ready soon and once it does, it will be available for the owners of Sony’s TVs and gaming consoles. Sony’s customer base quite obviously extends that of Nvidia’s but in the efforts to keep up, Nvidia is promising a better service and claims that the Grid would be able to stream out titles at 720p resolution and 60 frames per second. Wow. We really hope they stick to this promise.

Initially, the service is going to offer 20 gaming titles for streaming including some pretty famous ones such as Batman: Arkham City andBorderlands 2 and more titles are expected to come through soon.

The launch of this service is going to be quite beneficial for Nvidia since a lot of attraction is going to be magnified towards the Shield tablet which is currently available at a starting price of $299 for 16 GB storage. To attract more customers, the tablet is soon going to be upgraded to Android 5.0.

Currently the service is only set to work with the company’s own device since it takes advantage of specific hardware and graphics features in Shield devices. However, this could possibly be changed in the future as Andrew Fear, senior product manager for GRID cloud computing at Nvidia says “There’s technically nothing stopping it from working on any device.

source: nvidia, via