When you think about playing the latest graphically intensive games, you imagine a large gaming rig equipped with state-of-the-art drool-inducing specifications to enhance any player’s experience; one fitted with several hard disks containing terabytes of game data and fans buzzing like jet engines to dissipate all the heat generated by the beast of a PC.
While this may sound rather appealing in theory, it has a bunch of downsides in practice. First off, you’ll end up shelling out a lot of money on components that need to be updated every once in a while. Secondly, the aforementioned rig occupies a lot of space and can’t be kept in, say, your living room, where it’s easy for anyone to become entangled in the wires. Lastly, playing your favorite mobile games on PC, while doable through the use of emulators, involves jumping through a lot of hoops as some games require specific emulators to be able to boot up, let alone run at decent frames per second, and you can forget about playing any PC games on Android or iOS.
Lower latency, improved image quality, high-end rendering and ray tracing power: @digitalfoundry reviews GeForce Now's RTX 3080 tier, stacking it up against xCloud and Stadia: https://t.co/CmhsHZHLDL
— Eurogamer (@eurogamer) January 18, 2022
Cloud gaming is the new-age solution to all these problems. In simple terms, cloud gaming is a service that involves playing games by streaming them from a remote server onto a device of your choice. Despite seeming cumbersome, all it takes is a decent Wi-Fi connection for it to work. It has several features that show its usefulness in the world of gaming.
Compatibility with any devices
One of the key features of running your games on a cloud server is that you can do so from any device. An old laptop from 2010 can work as well as the latest Razer Blade. Furthermore, you don’t even need the Windows operating system. Just install any of the latest streaming services on your MacBook Pro, and you are good to go. You can even play the latest graphically demanding, GPU-melting games on your smartphone.
No need to install games or their updates
When streaming games from a cloud service, there is no need to wait an eternity for games or their updates to finish installing. The game versions on the cloud servers are up-to-date with the latest patches. This means that you can dive right in and play your favorite games without any delay.
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Fairly inexpensive as compared to building a PC
One of the most expensive cloud services charges $30 per month for its hardware. Taking $30 per month as the base price, the annual expenditure would be around $360, and the cost of using a cloud gaming service for three years would be $1,080.
Contrasting this with the price of building a PC of comparable specifications, it would cost at least $1,500 without considering the exorbitant pricing of PC components these days due to stock shortages and GPU mining. This makes it clear that cloud gaming is a cheaper alternative to traditional gaming. For what it’s worth, most of the cloud gaming platforms offer users free memberships.
The leading platforms behind this revolution
The key players dominating the field include Microsoft Xbox, Vortex, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, Paperspace, Google Stadia, Playstation Now, and Amazon Luna. Each of these has its own set of games and services tailor-made for all types of gamers. With more platforms joining the cloud gaming bandwagon, this technology will certainly solidify its status in the world of gaming.
Photo credits: The feature image has been taken by Priyam Raj.
Source: Nvidia
