Gaming hack in different typ
Shadow sponsored this video and the concept behind their service is pretty straight forward. You install their app on your device, whether it's a Mac book, Windows book, full-size computer, phone, tablet, or even an Android or Apple TV and poof! You are magically dropped, into a powerful Windowsmachine over the internet. But what actually powersthat gaming experience.
The cloud gets so oftenused as a hand wavy, don't worry about how it works buzzword. What does a gaming serveractually look like? To find out, we convincedthem to send one over to us, to poke and prod at. And this thing is actuallyway cooler than I expected. (upbeat music) Using low-latency hardware and coding. A Shadow cloud gaming server, can run it up to 4K60fps over the internet. And it'll forward inputs from controllers, keyboards, mice, and evenother USB peripherals. Making it useful for gaming,design, video editing, or just about anythingelse you can imagine. But of course the abilityto run those applications is only meaningful, if you've got enoughhorses to really use them.
That is why every logged in Shadow user, gets their own dedicated hardware. Albeit not necessarily inthe conventional sense. What I expected to find in here was this, this databoard is what allows the system to be powered by a single 12 volt input. And this is part of theopen compute platform spec that reduces the costof individual servers, by taking the power and cooling and making them part ofthe complete cabinet. Rather than somethingthat has to be integrated, into every single server. So you can see here, we've got these gigantic chunky, positive and negative wires here. And then everything is split-off, to the individual components. So these three right here, are able to handle a PCI Express power for up to three graphics cards. The fans are handled right here. This is a supplementary 6-pin, PCI Express connector for the motherboard. This right here is an8-pin CPU power connector and this right here is a standard ATX 24-pin power connector.
That is what I was not, expecting to find inside this chassis. I was actually expecting this motherboard to use some kind of just12 volt only power input or something along those lines. But because this is just a standard gigabyte ATX motherboard, we can take off this cooler, put something else on it. And here we go, plugin our own power supply and game on this thingright here and right now. Now when I said that every subscriber, gets their own dedicated hardware, I didn't necessarily mean thatall of it would be dedicated.
So here you pop off this shroud, you can actually see, that while everyone obviouslygets their own graphics card there's only one CPU in the system. So depending on what tier it is, you're going to have eitherfour CPU cores or six CPU cores that are kind of carvedout using virtualization, from this CPU and thenassigned a graphics card, kind of like what we've done in the past, with things like ourseven-gamers, one CPU project. As for memory, because this CPU has a six-channel memory controller, each one of a hypothetical three people, who have had this CPU carved up for them would get effectively, dual-channel memory worth of bandwidth. So these are eight gig sticks, which means we've got atotal of 64 gigs of Ram, in this particular systemthat can be sliced up. That means that as long as Shadow, as chosen their hardware wisely, other than the overhead that comes along with virtualization, which as we've shown in thepast, can be pretty minimal. You are basically getting a gaming PC, even though it looksabsolutely nothing like one.
I mean, where's the RGB, am I right? So let's go ahead and hookthis puppy up, shall we? We have a small bench top, Variable voltage powersupply in the workshop, but it is not even closeto what we would need, to run this entire machine, off of this. I didn't point this out before, but you can actually seewhere the 12 volt to five volt and 3.3 volt conversion is happening on this databoard over here. Because if it's not happeningin the power supply, then you're gonna need it to happen here, for that 24-pin connector. Everything else, CPU, fans, PCI Express, that's all native 12 volts. So you don't have to do it, just for the 24-pin connector here. Make sure you're subscribed, because I've got a videocoming up pretty soon where we're gonna be one of the first to be hands on with a new motherboard and power supply standard, that's Intel is actually co-creating. That would eliminate five volt and 3.3 volt from powersupplies in general. So it would just be 12 volt power, going onto the motherboard. Come on, come out of the thing. The cable management is it's too tight. It's too cable managed. Aaaah ow! Poor Shadow tech watching is going aah! What is he doing? They knew who they sent it to. You knew what this was.
This totally feels like cheating, hooking up to the gaming server directly. There's gotta be a 10 gig card over here, with SFP Plus connectors, but we don't those just likerandomly throughout our office. Usually they're more for fibers. So we're gonna go ahead and plug into this puppy right here. Wow that is, is really tight! We like bend this like this. Maybe we'll get that in there. Yeah, there it is, oh yeah! Oh yeah there you go, no problem. Piece of cake. This motherboard totallyforgoes traditional. Just say to connectors in favorof these puppies right here, which are breakout connectors, into four separate set of connectors. Fortunately, I've got an M.2 drive, that should have a Windowsoperating system on it, as well as some games and stuff. And I'm just gonna goahead and pop that in. You might have noticed, that the server has no storage in it whatsoever. That's because alongwith cooling and power storage is one of the other things, that is removed fromthe individual servers and just placed elsewherein the data center.
So that is what that high speednetwork connection is for. That way no one's gonnahave a storage bottleneck when they're trying to loadup their games or whatever. Let's see if it just firesup when we give it power. Oh power supply did nothing else. It doesn't make any noise, because all the fans arepowered by the databoard, which is not powered. So I lied, we're gonna needa blowing Metron after all. Here we go, boys. Whoa! It's trying to take off there. Is that supposed to happen? I'm gonna go get a different one, that could yeah not kill,but definitely maim. - Ooh disgusting! Oooh! - This is less fun, butit's definitely safer. Yeah I think I pluggedinto the secondary card, which is not what I wanted to do. Okay hopefully that's all right. No output to our monitor, but by pulling out bothof the graphics cards, I was able to get into theBIOS on the onboard video. So I have changed activevideo to PCIe device. And the other thing that I wanna change, as you can see it'sset up to network boot. That would normally make sense because the storage should beelsewhere in the data center. I'm gonna set it to my Sabrent M.2 drive and hopefully save and exit. Show me the image, lttstore.com. I
t's water, it'll replace all the sweat. Hello, hah there you are! Yes good job! Fun fact, apparently Shadowadded 240 hertz support. They haven't completely rolled it out, but if you manually selectit should work at 10 ADP. Of course, this is just running locally over display port cable. So there's no special magic right now. There we go over ahundred frames per second, "Shadow of the TombRaider" with a server CPU and a workstation graphics card. Not too shabby. As you can see, no amountof expensive gaming tech, is gonna make me good at "Rocket League" but the good news, is that I'm getting a locked250 frames per second. How about them Apples? Oh yeah! Gaming server for gamers. Of course, this is ridiculous. Nobody's gonna use this like this. So I actually grabbedmyself an Android TV box and a TV over there and we're gonna give it ashot, like the real way. Some people use their Shadows, as their primary computer, 'cause why not? It's got a fast internet connection, 'cause it's right in a data center. You can remote into it fromanywhere, which is super cool.
So obviously two factor,very important feature. Just a little inconvenientfor me right now. 4K 60fps, let's fire up a game. This is their launcher or you can also justdrop onto the desktop. It's actually my first timeplaying around with it, on the Android TV app. Even with all the voodoo magic, there's no getting around Windows updates. Now everything's working properly, 24 milliseconds ping, not terrible. So that's a little lessthan two frames of latency, which considering thatwe're connected to a server in our neighbors to theSouth, actually not bad, cool. So apparently they've worked on this, so that you can bring up the overlay even when you are in game,which is pretty sweet. Believe it or not "Overcooked! 2," is a game that I'm prettysensitive to latency in. I've played a fair bit of this game.
Before the game launches,it's actually a good time to have a look at what thingslike text will look like on a maxed out 70 megabitper second connection. In fact, it actually endsup looking quite sharp. So this is a 4K display running it 4K, and if you go have a close look at it. If you were to just be workingon documents in your Shadow, for whatever reason, I would say that would be ahighly acceptable experience. Oh, you know what? That's interesting! The cursor looks a little weird, but the actual text here, is really good. I can detect it obviously. Like I know what I'm looking for, but this is among thebest that I have seen when it comes to remotegaming image quality. Where I would really expectto see a lot of blockiness, is in sort of big gradientslike this, like this overcast, cloudy business that's going on under our hot air balloon, but it's really not bad at all. This is actually my firsttime formally trying Shadow because last time I had togo to their office for it, because they weren't able, to get us hooked upwith anything in Canada. No wonder people swear by this thing, "Overcooked! 2" definitely benefits from it's more cartoony art style though.
When you're playing something that's intended to look alittle bit more cinematic or true to life, the visual anomalies aredefinitely more noticeable, but are also definitelyacceptable in this case. It's more the latency that I would notice, playing something like a twitch shooter, or like "DOOM Eternal." This is on ultra-violence mode. Oh see, see the chainsaw, there we go, all right and we good? Oh come on stop! Man this game is fun. Yeah I'm basically justplaying video games now. That's always a good signwhen I'm trying something out and I kind of forget that I'm evaluating and I just started playing video games. Yeah, you can kinda see it, in like the textures on thefloor and stuff like that. So when I move they'll get kinda blurry, and then they kind of sharpen up. It's really not bad actually. Things that are farther away, I tend to find it more noticeable.
And like when somethingrocks the building, you can see it go kind of blurry. There and then it sharpens backup. So it's definitely noticeableto the trained eye. You'd be able to feel the latency in a game like this for sure. If you're playing something like, you know more of like a"Tomb Raider" type game where it's more about puzzlesolving and exploration, then I wouldn't consider it, to be nearly as much of an issue.
Bottom line then, Shadow's value propositionis pretty unique even at their highesttier, which is $40 a month. For the hardware that they'regonna bake into that tier, it would take anywherefrom three to five years just to buy that graphics card if you were paying $40 a month. So the value is pretty good, as long as you're willingto deal with remote access. Shadow is available nationwide in the US but the experience is obviously better, the closer you are to oneof their data centers. And you can find themost updated information, about where those are on their website. There's currently four in the US. The most important call to action today, is if this looks interestingto you move fast.
Because the last time wedid a video about Shadow, we caused a months long backlog, on new account activations, and no I'm not even kidding. And if you want an Ultraor Infinite tier account, once those become available, you will need to already havea Standard Boost tier account. They're constantly improving the service. That overlay is absolutely awesome. That USB pass through stuff is crazy. They're even working on a couple of really big things for the future. So one of them is mouse andkeyboard gaming support.
That's gonna be coming with iOS 14, as well as VR support. Although it remains to be seen exactly how well that would workwith the extra latency. Either way, it's worthkeeping an eye on these guys because they are doingsome really cool stuff. Thanks for watching and thanks again to Shadowfor sponsoring this video and sending it over this server. This is actually pretty fun. I've never seen an opencompute project server before. It's nice to get hands on.
No comments:
Post a Comment