NVIDIA Ignites 1080p 60 FPS Streaming For GRID Cloud Gaming Service

It’s Happening! NVIDIA is bulking up its GRID cloud gaming service with the introduction of 1080p 60 FPS streaming. This is big news for gamers as 1080p60 is the same performance target that developers aim for with the latest and greatest games running on Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One.

NVIDIA is actually the first company to offer 1080p60 streaming over the Internet, however, plenty of services offer the capability with local playback. To take advantage of this new capability, you will need to sign up for the SHIELD Hub beta and of course have possession of a SHIELD gaming device. But that’s not all; in order to ensure a lag-free gaming experience, you will need an Internet connection of at least 30Mbps.

NVIDIA’s Brian Burke is quick to point out that while 1080p streaming for movies is widespread these days, enabling this functionality for games is a much tougher endeavor. “Most people don’t mind when you press 'play' to watch a movie and it takes a little time to buffer and start,” Burke explained. “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.”

Coming out of the gate, 35 games will support GRID 1080p60 playback including Batman: Arkham Origins, Devil May Cry 4 and Dirt 3 Complete Edition. And to help shoulder the burden of increasing demands of game streaming, NVIDIA is opening up one new data center in the southwestern U.S. along with another in Central Europe. This brings the total number of global GRID data centers to six.

For those that don’t want to go through the hassle of signing up for the SHIELD Hub beta to access 1080p60 streaming, you can simply wait a few more weeks when the SHEILD Hub app makes it way to the Google Play Store.