Nvidia GRID Reaches 40th Title With 'Saints Row IV,' 'Alan Wake,' 'Metro: Last Light Redux'

News
By Michael Justin Allen Sexton
published

Nvidia's GRID will soon offer 40 titles, and it will continue to grow with more titles added each week.

GRID is a cloud service that streams games to users of Nvidia's SHIELD products. The games are run completely on cloud servers, which gives users the gaming experience of a powerful system, without needing powerful hardware in the device itself.

The service launched on November 18 with a total of 20 games. Since then, Nvidia has added a new game each week, and as of today it has 38 titles available. Nvidia decided to add games by genre, based off what its customers most wanted to see.

The latest title is Saints Row IV, a 2013 game that was a highly rated success. The game is an open world action adventure, much like the rest of the series. The prequel to Saints Row IV, Saints Row: The Third, was one of the original 20 titles. The popularity of the series led Nvidia to add the title to its list of games.

The next two games coming to the service, Nvidia will add its 39th title, Alan Wake, to the service on February 24. Alan Wake is a psychological survival horror game first released in 2010. In the game, users play as Alan Wake as he attempts to discover what happened to his wife.

For the 40th game title, which will arrive March 3, Nvidia plans to add Metro: Last Light Redux, a post-apocalyptic first-person shooter in which you play as Artyom, fighting mutants and humans alike as you try to survive in a harsh world.

With the ever-growing list of top-rated games, Nvidia hopes to attract new customers to its SHIELD gaming devices. Currently, there are two SHIELD devices available: the SHIELD Tablet, which comes with a detached controller, and the SHIELD Portable, which combines the tablet and controller into a single device.

Currently, the service is free to all users who own a SHIELD device. However, the free service ends June 30 of this year; at that point, Nvidia plans to start charging for GRID, but a final price has not yet been set.

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Michael Justin Allen Sexton
Michael Justin Allen Sexton is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He covers hardware component news, specializing in CPUs and motherboards.
5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • cats_Paw
    It might fly in the mainstream media, but for people like me, cloud gaming is not usefull at all.
    lag, constant internet connection, small gaming screen, limited to pad only, games cant be moded...
    Reply
  • anubis44
    I don't know why on earth they even bother with this junk. The input lag must be horrendous. I can feel it if my computer is even running some other task in the background when I'm playing a game, never mind the ludicrous lag created by wireless ethernet. And that's in a game like COH2, where the game performs many of the tasks on the local computer. This is a hopelessly ill-conceived idea. You can play chess or tic-tac-toe or checkers on a wireless connection, but not an action-oriented game.
    Reply
  • BrutalAttis
    Will be a cold day in hell before I use something like this.
    Reply
  • somebodyspecial
    15319631 said:
    I don't know why on earth they even bother with this junk. The input lag must be horrendous. I can feel it if my computer is even running some other task in the background when I'm playing a game, never mind the ludicrous lag created by wireless ethernet. And that's in a game like COH2, where the game performs many of the tasks on the local computer. This is a hopelessly ill-conceived idea. You can play chess or tic-tac-toe or checkers on a wireless connection, but not an action-oriented game.

    Toms already tested this streaming to shield (even without grid which should be better than streaming from at home PC to some other state or country), and it was pretty darn good for certain types of titles. Sure I wouldn't play a mutliplayer shooter yet (maybe ever), but strategy/rpg etc would be good fits. Skyrim etc worked well.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-shield-remote-gamestream-review,26476.html
    I'm not saying good for everything, but a great fit for some stuff for sure. It's getting better, and streaming from their own servers (no lag from your home) while running around etc is surely better. They remove a lot of variability when they own all the hardware you're streaming from. We are already far beyond chess/checkers and that was before grid...LOL. By the way, it feeds other stuff too, with 1000+ companies now testing it. The learning made on gaming will be used for virtual gpus/apps (with vmware etc) in enterprise once we work it all out for them. So excellent idea, not stupid. Think bigger.

    From the article above as an example:
    "In our "same city" scenario, which we imagine to be the most popular one for gamers on the go, the host desktop was on a Rogers Cable connection in downtown Toronto, as was the Shield. Geographically, the two were separated by only 4 kilometers. The host computer was on a mid-tier internet plan that demonstrated a 3.26 Mb/s on Speedtest.net. Mind you, this is below Nvidia's recommended 5 Mb/s upstream. A ping test between the Shield's internet connection and the host PC yielded an average of 31 milliseconds."

    Titan totally playable and UNDER Nvidia's requirements...See the point?
    Reply
  • somebodyspecial
    Now imagine far better internet say 5-10yrs from now included in that whole scenario. If FCC stuff goes through shortly, municipalities will force more companies like Verizon (already selling stuff to pay to upgrade their network) to upgrade or face huge local competition FINALLY. Not saying this won't end up bad, just that it at least forces upgrades they should have been doing for years now. The mere mention of google coming to austin with Gigabit connections caused a response from AT&T in ONE WEEK! The municipalities threat will be like google saying "tomorrow we're announcing service everywhere", and Cox, Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner etc will all be forced to act like Verizon just did, and AT&T in Austin or die.

    The bad part happens if ISP's don't respond properly and municipalities own everything in the end and run wild on us with pricing just like we have now. It's a slippery slope but we kind of have no choice as they are blocking the crap out of google etc (from using poles etc) as much as they can.
    Reply