It happened the first time I watched Monday Night Football on HDTV. A whole new world opened for me. After that, it was almost impossible to watch a game at standard definition.
I just had a similar experience with the latest version of our NVIDIA GRID game-streaming service. It let me play Ultra Street Fighter 4 streamed at full high-definition at 60 frames per second, or 1080p60. It was tough to go back to 720p60. The difference was huge.
Now, you can experience the difference for yourself. With today’s public release of a new SHIELD Hub beta, GRID becomes the first game-streaming service that can instantly stream games at 1080p60. And GRID is available only on SHIELD.
Movie services are already streaming at 1080p. But streaming a video game is harder because of the interactivity required for games.
Most people don’t mind when you press “play” to watch a movie and it takes a little time to buffer and start. But you can’t buffer gameplay. Streaming games requires the response time from button press to screen action to be in milliseconds. We’ve spent years perfecting cloud gaming. As a result, we’re now the first company to stream games at 1080p60.
You can access the new SHIELD Hub beta by following these instructions. Or just wait a little bit for the official release, which we expect to roll out near the end of May, on the SHIELD Hub app available from Google Play.
More than 35 games in the GRID game library now support 1080p60. They includeBatman: Arkham Origins, Devil May Cry 4 and Dirt 3 Complete Edition, which was just released on GRID.
And, we’re bringing two new data centers online. One, covering the southwestern United States, is live now. The second will start providing service in Central Europe later this month. More data centers translate into lower latency and a better streaming experience in these regions.
NVIDIA now has six data centers offering GRID to SHIELD customers in 20 countries.
We invite you to try game streaming at 1080p60 for yourself. But I have to warn you. It will be hard to go back.
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