 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, divine 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 whack ton of cool stuff that they're showing off this year. But as you guys probably know, if you watch the WAN show on a fairly regular basis, one of the things I'm really excited about for the future is Nvidia's 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 going to... Oh, yes. OK. So tell me about it. What is this? Well, 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 rack of 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 encode it as a video stream. And then you can send it out to any device you want. You can send it to a tablet, a phone, a laptop, a TV, a shield device. So it 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 server starts it up, starts playing the game, rendering, and send it directly to you. And so in terms of frame rates, we're not even going to be talking necessarily about paying for a particular graphics card from a cloud gaming perspective. We're going to be talking about you almost lock into, well, 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 a GeForce. They want to go buy it 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. Grid gets an ability to almost rent a GeForce from the cloud. If you say, I want to play Dishonored, or I want to play Assassin's Creed 4, or I want to play whatever it is, you can now go rent a GeForce from the cloud, get access to all those games, play it 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 $2,000 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 LAN center were to technically deploy that, it's technologically possible, correct? Yeah, I mean, there's nothing stopping us right now from going to a game center. And I could easily imagine a game center buying a couple of servers, putting it in their server room, and then they don't need to have 16 computers lying around. They can have just 16 monitors with very, very simple $50 device that was decoding the video and playing cloud gaming. Absolutely it's possible. We're talking to people about it. I think the initial deployment of cloud gaming you're going to see probably more in the national level for more service providers. But certainly, I think a couple of years down the road, you could see it showing up in game centers. Speaking of showing up, I mean, is this really that different from the technology you guys have enabled 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 virtualize graphics across all of our different business units. So we have a grid team that focuses on streaming out high-end professional applications. So if you're a LightWave user, you're an Adobe user, 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 streamed to your Shield device. We're trying to take similar technology we've developed for all those for cloud gaming and be able to give that in 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 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 at this custom building house to be able to emulate chips before they go into production. I mean, in fact, the engineers can tell you that they don't have anything themselves as a hardware engineer. They're software engineers, right? I create a software program that emulates my GPU. I load it into a giant data center and I run Doom. It may only run at 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, you know, what is this saying? They used to say the sun never sets in 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 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 at how do we do that, we decided, you know what, if we can deliver a pretty good experience for us, maybe we could deliver it for consumers. And then some of it was kind of born out of that 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.