Blade’s technology adjusts the fidelity of the experience on the fly, depending on the device’s power and available bandwidth. The Shadow app only relies on the local device for decoding a streaming video feed of whatever you’re doing on the cloud PC (and uploading your inputs). In our demo, we switched from playing Rise of the Tomb Raider on a computer to running it on a smartphone, with only a brief hiccup to restart the mobile app. And because the Shadow app is cross-platform software, you can start using your PC on one Shadow-enabled screen and transition to a different one. This setup allows Mac users to operate a full Windows PC on their computer without bothering with Boot Camp. The app is currently available on Mac- and Windows-based computers, Android tablets and smartphones, and certain smart TVs it is coming soon to iOS devices. Using the Shadow software, customers will be able to access their virtual PC from a wide variety of screens. ![]() From there, the company will gradually roll out the service across the country as it spins up more data centers, with the aim of offering Shadow nationwide by this summer. Blade is planning to launch Shadow for those customers on Feb. Starting today, Blade is taking sign-ups for Shadow from American customers for the first time - but only from residents of California, since the company currently has just one U.S.-based data center, in Santa Clara. The company let in customers from Belgium and Switzerland in late 2017. “It’s a question of actually putting up the infrastructure.” Blade is so confident in Shadow’s availability, said Kagan, that the company “actually never developed an error message that, ‘The data center is full.’” Coming to Americaīlade launched Shadow in France at the end of 2016, and quickly reached the 5,000-user capacity of its initial data center in Paris. “Our issue is not a demand issue,” said Ness Benamran, chief operating officer for Blade’s U.S. (Cloud-based platforms have to exist somewhere on terra firma, after all.)Ī look inside a Paris-based Shadow data center run by Equinix. Shadow runs on data centers provided by Equinix, and the service’s global expansion is directly tied to that physical hosting setup. “The idea is that the user will never need to care about the hardware anymore,” said Asher Kagan, president and co-founder at Blade, during a demo at Polygon’s offices in New York last month. In fact, Blade upgraded Shadow last November, replacing the platform’s GTX 1070-level GPU with the current GTX 1080 equivalent. Blade handles all upgrades and maintenance on its end: As technology advances, or if components break down, the company will swap out its hardware for newer parts. Shadow’s Nvidia-based graphics solution is approximately equivalent to a GeForce GTX 1080, with 16 GB of video memory - twice as much as the amount in a consumer-grade GTX 1080 - and 8.2 teraflops of processing power. The Shadow platform currently offers a full PC running Windows 10 Home on an Intel Xeon CPU featuring four cores and eight processing threads, with 12 GB of DDR4 RAM and 256 GB of storage. “the user will never need to care about the hardware anymore” The company’s aim is nothing less than upending the model of personal computing altogether - and though its cloud-based platform, Shadow, seems like an impressive technical achievement, Blade may have a lot of convincing to do when it comes to winning over American customers. ![]() But unlike existing companies in the field, Blade isn’t just streaming games to customers. market after a successful showing in Europe. ![]() While major players like Sony and Nvidia are currently running limited cloud gaming services, a 2-year-old French startup called Blade is now entering the U.S. Plus there’s the additional hurdle of fidelity: Although our lives are becoming increasingly dependent on the cloud, it’s hard to convince gamers that any game-streaming platform can deliver an experience that’s as responsive as playing on a local machine. People familiar with the video game industry have been hearing about cloud gaming for so long that they may already be tired of the concept, even though it hasn’t yet hit the mainstream.Ī number of high-profile disappointments, most notably the flameout of OnLive, have left gamers feeling that the idea might be an ahead-of-its-time fad, like virtual reality in the early 1990s.
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