And while that is probably the best version of Shadow for someone who already owns some devices and is used to some customizing to his experience, I still believe the idea of a dedicated game streaming box has some merit for a very specific crowd that is more used to consoles https://german-young-holidays.com/microgaming-pulls-out-of-unaccredited-casino/.
And it seems someone at Shadow agrees with part of that statement because they went back to work and revised the old bigger boxy into a very tiny, very modern, very slick looking device that kinda fits very well under a TV or maybe a PC substitute. It is light, has enough usb ports for peripherals like keyboards and gamepads, it allows both ethernet and wifi connections and it supports audio over hdmi and headphone jack. It has no fans and makes no noise, and is so power efficient that Shadow was confident enough to say it could save around $100 in yearly electricity costs if uses instead of the equivalent full PC. But what do you actually get here? After logging in with the Shadow subscription that is required to use the device and got get a very minimalistic settings screen, you can connect to your shadow computer and start using it to play games. It's... very straight forward and under good conditions it works darn well. There are people online using way more sophisticated methods for testing a cloud service like this under load but I was still curious if I would be able to measure a difference, so I ran a simple reaction test. The average reaction time of a healthy human to a visual stimulus is around 250 ms and I seem to fall right on that average on a local PC. Using the same mouse and monitor but on the Shadow cloud PC the streaming adds about 50 ms to reactions. Interestingly enough using Ethernet does not consistently reduce this impact over 5G wifi, although Ethernet does provide better stability and image quality outside of this super ideal conditions since it does not have to deal with interference. Shadow has shared that they have measured better latency on the Ghost than just a regular PC due to some low-level optimization they have implemented, which is likely true in more intense conditions but for me, it can get lost in the normal variation of my reaction time. Again, this is a very unscientific way to measure this, as tons of elements such as vsync and monitor quality can add extra delay to this whole process. It is worth noting that Shadow is very selective of the countries were the provide their service since they want to ensure the smallest latency possible and I am outside this list, so they had to make an exception for my testing with the explicit warning that my results might not be ideal, especially with the nearest data centre being in Paris. So all things considered, good results. One bit that I found fascinating was possible uses for the unexpected high amounts of USB ports on this thing. They seem to work by transmitting USB data over IP, so most of the time when you connect something it will show up in your cloud PC, including all controllers I tested. Stuff as picky as wireless headphones with their own usb adapters seemed to mostly work without any issues. Bluetooth headphones could also work through the Bluetooth adapter of the Ghost itself. The two things that I could not get working consistently were cameras and microphones, both would work for just a bit before crashing. This is understandable given that the flow of raw data from a bigger input device over USB is not precisely optimized for network traffic, but it does sadly dash my dreams of using this as a remote content production station which is likely not the intended use case anyway, I will have to stick to the app for that. Now, let me address something first that I am sure I will see a lot of people furiously arguing in comments, usually before they reach this part of the video which makes it quite easy for me to know who comments before watching the whole thing. For the ultra hardcore hobbyist who is specifically interested in building the most optimal PC ever this is not going to be a substitute to owning a PC, especially since not having access to hardware will drive them insane. Which is in part why I ultimately don't think in the developed world this will come to substitute gaming PC altogether for everyone since the whole idea of building or customizing a PC is for some part of the experience itself. But replying "just build a PC" to this concept ignores the entry barrier that is understanding how to do that in the first place. Not everyone has the desire or time to learn how to build a PC or pick appropriate components. For that sort of person, this sort of model is going to be a growing very clear alternative to consoles as fibre connections become more common. Another use case that I initially thought would not be satisfied by cloud gaming is those who spend on higher end setups not just for high settings but to be able to play in 4k or high refresh rates.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |