Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of Pax 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel and SteelSeries we're here at the Nvidia booth PAX Prime 2013 as you guys may or may not be able to you know Devine based on your ultimate powers of whatever you have Nvidia shield is a huge huge focus for them here at the show as well as of course a whole whack load of upcoming and current titles that feature NVIDIA GeForce technologies so we're here in the Nvidia booth they've got a wack ton of cool stuff that they're showing off this year but as you guys probably know if you watch the win show on a fairly regular basis one of the things I'm really excited about for the future is invidious grid technology maybe not necessarily from the cloud gaming perspective because I'm in Canada where internet connections are still basically Stone Age but from a what this technology enables perspective so I've got Andrew fear with me here from Nvidia to talk to us about this device which is being shown off here in the public and I'm just gonna oh yes ok so tell me about it what is this so this is grid and so for grid for us is we built custom-made cloud graphics cards so instead of putting one chip on a board we put four and then we put up to three of those cards in a server so any one of these servers can have 12 GPUs all running at once if you imagine a full rack of this it's about 360 GPUs it can stream about 720 concurrent users from a single server Rajko grid and the whole idea is that we render a game like normal just rendering a game and then in real time very very fast we encoded as a video stream and then you can send it out to any device you want you can set it to a tablet a phone a laptop a TV a shield device so it may enables you to get gaming pretty much wherever you want so that's what you guys are showing off here right all of these shields are actually legitimately being powered off of the grid behind me is that correct that's correct so what we're doing is we're running a couple servers in the back here we didn't bring a full rack we only needed a couple servers but we're actually streaming the games in real time so you can walk up to our shield device we have some of our software running on there to demonstrate the technology but you can instantly start playing one of these games just click a button and in the back the servers sit up starts playing the game rendering and sent it directly to you and so in terms of frame rates we're not even going to be talking necessarily about about paying for a particular graphics card from a cloud gaming perspective we're gonna be talking about you almost walk into well I want it I want sixty I want a 60 FPS experience period and then the provider will be able to add more grids and scale their operation according to the demand from their users we kind of think of it as like renting a Geforce right so some people out there want to go buy achieve course they want to go buy in a computer they want to go buy it in a laptop wherever they want to do it other people don't have a Geforce maybe they're not a PC user maybe they just have a tablet Grigg let get some the ability to almost by a chief Brenda chief horse in the cloud if you say I want to I want to play dishonored or I want to play you know I wanna play Assassin's Creed 4 or I wanna play whatever it is you can now go rent to GeForce with the cloud get access all those games played on devices you would never be playing it before now let's talk prehistoric Internet again for a second now something that I personally get really excited about is more like a local installation of grid now I'm not a general consumer I have a 16 terabyte storage server in my house that has a two thousand dollar rate card in it so to put that in perspective if I was the kind of person who was crazy enough to buy something like a second or a third or a fourth generation grid and deploy that or if a land center were to technically were to deploy that it's technologically possible correct yeah I mean there's nothing stopping us right now for going like a game Saturday I could easily imagine a game center buying a couple of servers putting in their server room and then they don't need to have you know sixteen computers lying around they gonna have just sixteen monitors is very very simple you know $50 device that was decoding the video playing cloud gaming obviously it's possible you know we're talking to me all about it I think the initial deployment without gaming receipt probably more than the national level for more service providers but it's certainly I think a couple years down the road you can see it showing up the game centers speaking of showing up I mean is this really that different from the technology you guys have been able with the GeForce PC streaming to shield that we're already I mean it's already at the consumer then right well in some ways it is I mean we have you know we virtualized graphics across solver different business units so we have a grid team that focuses on streaming out high-end professional applications so if you're a light wave used your adobe use or whatever you are we can now stream that we can stream an entire desktop as a Windows high quality graphics you know in the home we have our PC to shield streaming which gives you basically a virtualized game streaming your shield device we're trying to take similar technology we developed for all those for cloud gaming and be able to give that an enterprise level to a service provider so they can deliver cloud gaming to again any device you want now my understanding is NVIDIA has for years had had a device that is capable of emulating any OS any geforce card in any game in order to help you guys optimize the GeForce experience and in order to help you guys diagnose drivers is this sort of an evolutionary step that came from well if we can build this for ourselves maybe we can build it for everyone or was this the goal in the first place well you know a lot of it is as you said is we have a lot of technology that's custom build in-house to be able to emulate ships before they go into production I mean in fact the engineers can tell you that there they don't make themselves as a hardware engineer their software engineers right III create a software program that emulates my GPU I load it into a giant datacenter and I run doom it may only run it one frame per second but at least I can know that it works so we developed technology from that learning how to remote into debug drivers because we you know what is the same needs to say the Sun never sets on the British Empire I mean if you look at the Nvidia software team the Sun never sets we've got engineers in the US we got them in India China Russia Europe wherever you name it and so the problem is you have we have these clusters of data centers where an engineer may need to say I need to debug this problem over here right and so some of the technology that we use to look out how do we do that we decided you know what we get real if we can deliver a pretty good experience for us maybe we could deliver for consumers and then some of it was kind of born out about in-house development and tools we were using just to build our products phenomenally cool I'm personally very very excited about it thank you so much for chatting with us about this and it's good to see you again good to see you again too