NVIDIA GRID now supports 1080p 60fps streaming

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NVIDIA GRID now supports 1080p 60fps streaming

Ultra Street Fighter 4 is one of the games that will offer 1080p60 streaming on NVIDIA GRID. (Image Source: NVIDIA)

Say goodbye to grainy 1280 x 720 resolutions. Owners of NVIDIA’s Shield handheld, tablet and set-top box devices will now be able to stream their games in all the fluid detail that 1080p60 streaming offers.

Movie and television streaming services like Netflix and Hulu already offer 1080p streaming, so that in itself is nothing new. But streaming video games at full HD resolutions presents unique challenges because of the interactive element of games and the need for low latencies.

It’s okay to wait a little while for your movie to buffer, but gamers don’t have the luxury of waiting for their gameplay to load. All the action takes place in real-time and game streaming requires every button press to have an almost instantaneous response on screen.

But with the public release of a new Shield Hub beta, NVIDIA Grid now becomes the first game-streaming service to stream games at 1080p60. To experience the new public beta, owners of NVIDIA Shield devices will need to join the Shield Hub Beta community using the Google account currently associated with their Shield device. They will then have to become a tester on Google Play by navigating to the NVIDIA Shield Hub page in the Play store and hitting the update button to install the latest beta build.

Owners of the NVIDIA Shield Portable handheld device will now be able to stream select games from NVIDIA's GRID library in 1080p60. (Image Source: NVIDIA)

Users will also need to pair their Shield device and PC via NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software and log in to Shield Hub on their Shield device. For more detailed instructions, please refer to NVIDIA’s website.

But if you’re not the type to experiment with beta builds, NVIDIA says the official release is due sometime near the end of May so you won’t have long to wait. More than 35 games in the Grid game library now support 1080p60 streaming, including Batman: Arkham Origins, Devil May Cry 4 and Dirt 3 Complete Edition. But to take advantage of the support for higher resolutions, users will also need a 30-50Mbps broadband connection, less than 60ms ping time to one of NVIDIA's six datacenters, and a NVIDIA Shield-ready 5GHz Wi-Fi router.

NVIDIA is also bringing two new data centers online in the southwestern US and Central Europe, which should help to cope better with the higher demands of 1080p60 streaming. GRID is currently free for owners of Shield devices until 30 June 2015, so users who have not yet experienced GRID should probably seize the opportunity to do so now.

Source: NVIDIA