Nvidia wants to make a Netflix of gaming—perfectly smooth, perfectly simple, superbly rendered PC games steamed to your system as if you owned an expensive rig. And so, here's a GPU tower that the company says just that, combining 700 Xbox 360s in one tall box.
Each Grid rack contains 240 Nvidia GPUs that stream titles to your "smart" TV. At Nvidia's CES demo, the company showed its streaming software on an LG LCD TV—Trine 2 looked perfectly smooth running at 1080p (albeit in the same room as the server itself). The same game was then brought up on a Transformer Prime tablet with an Nvidia Grid app, picking up exactly where the game was left off on the television. Think Kindle chapter syncing, only with blowing things up for fun.
Nvidia plans to license the Grid software to a handful of companies in the US and abroad, allowing them to use Nvidia's rack hardware to beam streaming games to their customers. Will it be better than OnLive? We won't know yet until we can try it for ourselves, but Nvidia claims this project has five years of engineering behind it, and with a brand new, custom-built GPU specified for cloud gaming, this could sure be the best of its kind.
As long as you've got a good connection.