Newcomer Shadow offers GTX 1080 gaming power via the cloud
Is this the answer to the current graphics card shortage and the sky-high cost of RAM? Or perhaps a genuine alternative to the way we own and upgrade our gaming PC hardware? Today, after a successful rollout in its home territory, French company Blade revealed that its Shadow cloud gaming system is coming to the UK, offering what it says is the equivalent of a £1,500 PC at prices starting at £27 per month for unlimited usage.
If you're a long-term Digital Foundry reader, perhaps you caught the phrase 'cloud gaming system' and conjured up images of laggy gaming and poor image quality. After all, historically, we didn't care much for concept trailblazer OnLive, rubbished the claims made by its founders, but still appreciated the ambition and recognised scenarios where it did have something to offer. Subsequent systems based on the same concept - like Nvidia's GeForce Now - were received a little more warmly as performance improved, but based on the demo we saw, Shadow could potentially move things on to the next level.
First up, this isn't a new gaming platform being sold to you - you're essentially hiring a PC in the cloud. Log in to Shadow and you get the standard Windows 10 PC desktop to do with as you will. From our perspective, that means installing Steam, Origin, uPlay and GOG in turn and downloading our games, but the truth is you can install any app you want on Shadow and interact with the system just as you would with a standard PC. And the specs of this cloud hardware? You get eight threads from a Xeon server equivalent to performance from a Core i7 processor, 12GB of memory, 256GB of solid-state storage and GPU power on par with GTX 1080 (indeed, the demo we saw IDed GTX 1080 in the device manager).
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