 Shadow is a company with an ambitious goal. They're gonna kill off the traditional gaming PC and do it without gamers either caring or in many cases even noticing. How is it that they intend to do something like that without becoming about as popular as this blanket I'm sitting on here in their lobby? Well, that's a terrific question. And they sponsored our trip down to their San Francisco office to answer it for you. This is a shadow ghost. Basically what it is is a super low powered Linux computer that leverages the power of the cloud to enable it to perform like a high performance gaming rig. So right here, I've got one of these and I'm running rise of the tomb Raider at very high settings, 1080P and getting an excess of a hundred frames per second. And this is all on a seven watt fanless arm based system. It's not exactly a new idea though, is it? Thin clients, which are low spec machines that use a remote server to handle heavier workloads have been around for decades. And even in the gaming space, this is old news. On live, the world's first commercial cloud gaming service was announced at GDC nearly 10 years ago. But as we're about to see, not every cloud is created equal. So let's head over to shadow's west coast USA data center to check it out. Now to say that cloud gaming is a bit of a nebulous maybe even buzzword worthy term would be a gross understatement. You could ask a dozen different people, all smart and informed people and get 13 different answers about what exactly it means. Some of them might only see the value in synchronizing save states across devices. Others might see it as a way to augment limited local storage for high quality assets. I mean, I still remember when Nvidia launched the grid which was this server full of special GPUs that could be virtualized or carved up to allow multiple users to run off of a single card for later workloads. And when Microsoft first launched the Xbox one when they were talking up this hybrid approach even to 3D rendering where some of it would be done locally and some in the data center and then the resulting combined image would be displayed on your TV. But a shadow is fundamentally different from what anyone else is doing right now. So rather than using an existing cloud platform like AWS they're actually building out their own co-located data centers like the one we're standing next to right now. So everything inside this cage actually belongs to them. And when you subscribe to their service you're not getting like a chunk of a GPU or a Netflix like interface with a limited selection of games you can stream. Inside of every single one of these custom built boxes is 16 CPU cores, 48 gigs of system memory and four performance grade GPUs. Typically GTX 1080s or Quadro P 5000s which are about equivalent in gaming performance. Shadow is then using their own tuned version of Red Hat KVM hypervisor running on Linux to allocate the CPUs and the RAM using virtualization. And then when it comes to graphics each shadow actually gets its own dedicated GPU passed through to it. This is actually really similar tech to what we used in our seven gamers one CPU project a couple of years ago. And for gamers who subscribe what it means is near bare metal performance with support for 1080P 144 Hertz or even 4K 60 Hertz gaming, at least in theory. Because the truth of the matter is you can have all the hardware in the world but the user experience is still gonna suck unless you can solve the problem with cloud services the latency. And shadow knows this and takes it really seriously. So as part of their ongoing journey to get the delay between a mouse click and an action taking place on screen as close to local gaming as possible they've even developed their own special hardware. This right here is called a Betty. And what it basically does is issue a command to their software that's just a space bar input that inverts the color of the screen. Then it uses this sensor on the back to measure the delay. So to put their claims to the test I actually asked them to give me a copy of their latency testing software and put it on my machine. Then install their shadow client on my machine. So we can do an apples to apples comparison here. A wired connection is ideal but you can get away with five gigahertz wifi assuming that you have a good fairly recent access point but they really don't recommend 2.4 gigahertz. I mean, especially some of the older stuff it could be 20 milliseconds of latency just between your wifi card and your router which is really gonna hurt the gaming experience. Okay, so we're all set up. We've got their latency insight.exe here. So we're running this locally on the machine. We're gonna do our multiple test. And here we go. All right, 91 milliseconds. Now we are going to use a shadow machine. So this is running off of that data center. One of the racks in that data center that we were just at. So we're gonna fire up latency insight here. All right. What did we get about 91? Let's go ahead. And moment of truth. Okay. So the long and short of this is, and remember that these are fairly ideal conditions. They've got a pretty decent connection here and we are not far from the data center. The long and short of it is, it adds only about five milliseconds of total latency if the server's running on the same local network. And that's for all of the image capture, encoding, transferring and decoding. And then plus whatever your internet latency is here. And these are really impressive results. Like I wasn't expecting that. I was expecting at least the five to 10 milliseconds on top of what we got natively. But depending on how tight everything is and whether that latency can be hidden by the refresh rate of the monitor itself, you can end up with the same results remotely. So those results are really impressive. And it's no accident. Shadow believes that it's their tuning of both the hardware and the software at every link in the chain that gives them their key advantage. Everything is tuned to optimize latency. For example, the routers that they use are BGP routers. These allow them to find and hold the most optimal path to the end user, rather than fighting through the traffic at a typical internet exchange. And they have been hard at work building their own software clients for a wide variety of platforms so that you can access your Shadow on any device that you want. They've even managed to work with folks like Logitech to ensure that you can use whatever peripherals you want. So this racing wheel equipped demo right here, force feedback and everything, has project cars too looking pretty slick. And it's running off of that same data center that we were in before. Back in the other demo room, things get even more interesting though. So this is the same Shadow ghost that you guys saw before. But as you might've realized by now, it's actually totally optional. So let's say for example, I'm tired of looking at a small screen and I wanna play this same game on my TV. I grab my controller, press this button and bippity boppity, there it is. Now I'm on their Android client. This is an Android powered TV and I am actually decoding the signal using the processor built right into my TV. I'm using this controller a little something like that. Crazy, right? Okay, now I've been gaming for a while or whatever. I'm hungry, I wanna run over to the kitchen. I don't wanna put down my game. Easy solution, thank you. Got an Android tablet here, got my controller paired to it. Now I'm playing on this. That's how quickly it switches. Now let's say, okay, I don't know, my battery ran out or something. Now I'm gonna switch to my phone. Here we are. This is the iOS app. Now running that same game that we left off on from before. Completely seamless switching. Then, oh, I don't know, I dropped my iPhone. Who knows what, I gotta keep coming up with more and more contrived reasons for me to keep switching devices here. And as a last resort, I go, okay, I guess I'll game on the Macbook here. Go ahead and plug in my mouse and oh, look, they already pressed the button for me. Thank you for that. And there we are. Now we're running on the Mac. And actually, the implementation here is particularly interesting to me because not only have they actually found a purpose for the touch bar, so you can change some of your options, you can adjust your bit rate, some kind of cool stuff like that. But I'm gonna go ahead and quit the desktop here because this is crazy. With a simple three finger swipe, I can go from a full fat Mac OS experience, high performance, natively running obviously, to a full fat Windows 10 experience. Now this one isn't running natively, but imagine the things that you could do with this kind of functionality. I mean, this is not just for gaming anymore. You could install and run anything. Like if you were, let's say you were editing a video in Adobe Premiere, you could do your heavy lifting on the shadow and then you could even save your battery life since your laptop CPU is hardly doing anything. It's just running over the network. So sounds pretty cool then, right? Without the upfront investment that comes with a typical gaming tower, for 35 bucks a month, you're getting a gaming PC with a gigabit internet connection that rips through modern games. And not only that, that shadow promises will continue to receive upgraded hardware over time. So you're always gaming at high settings. What's the downside? Okay, I mean, nothing in life is perfect. So one is image compression. While your shadow can fine tune its encoding settings for your connection, on the other side, not all decoders can deliver the same experience. And you guys might've noticed this, especially with the TV. From my experience, H.265 at their maximum supported bit rate of 50 to 70 megabit per second delivered the best experience with minimal compression artifacts and blocking even on challenging color gradients like the sky. But not every internet connection or device will be able to handle this. So you're gonna have to try it out for yourself. And naturally, of course, we have a link below for that, including a $10 off offer code for the first month. And in much the same way that even in a future where ride sharing services have mostly overtaken individual car ownership, there are still going to be people who wanna own a Lamborghini and rock around in it on the weekend. As cloud gaming continues to gain traction among mainstream users, there will still be people, probably some of which are watching this video, whose bleeding edge desires outstrip what's possible through the cloud. And notable limitations today include HDR, multi-monitor support, and VR gaming, the last of which is particularly sensitive to latency. Which isn't to say though, that they won't be working on those things. And that there might not be new gaming experiences that are worth trading them for. I mean, here's a hypothetical for you. What if data center technology continued to advance in such a way that entirely new gaming experiences could be created, like massive or photorealistic environments that simply couldn't be rendered by one or two GPUs and SLI in a box next to you. If all of that cost you was 10 to 30 milliseconds, much of which could be made up with faster display technologies in the coming years, things would start to get really interesting, wouldn't they? In the meantime though, if you wanna try it out, check out the link to shadow.tech down below. A Shadow is just 35 bucks a month with no usage fees outside your regular data rates. And they've got seven data centers worldwide with two more coming. I would love to hear your guys' thoughts in the comments below. So thanks again to Shadow for sponsoring our trip down here and thanks to you guys for watching. If you disliked this video, you guys all know where that button is. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff that'll be featured at the link below. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should definitely join.