APRIL 2 020 T3 59State of the art
4K gaming with graphics set to max, and no need for downloads?
Welcome to the world of game streaming
Game streaming
showdown
Words: Gerald Lynch Photography: Neil Godwinrom cassettes to cartridges, DVDs
to downloads, the way we get our
games is always changing. But the
next evolution may be the most
dramatic yet. What if there were no discs, no
downloads, and you could take your games
and saves with you wherever you went, and
play them on any device that has a screen and
a broadband connection?
That’s the dream of game streaming, with
companies like Google, Nvidia, Sony and
more battling it out to lay claim to this fertile
new gaming ground.The platforms, like Sony’s PlayStation
Now, Google’s Stadia and Nvidia’s GeForce
Now, store games on remote cloud servers,
letting you tap into them instantly over the
internet. Imagine a Netflix stream that you
control with a gamepad, and you’re on the
right track.
Powered by supercomputers, they let
you run even the most hardware-intensive
of PC games on a lowly smartphone or
underpowered laptop, as all you’re really
powering locally is the video stream coming
back from the services’ servers.It’s not all plain sailing though – you’ll
need a steady and fast internet connection,
lag between your button inputs and onscreen
action can be a problem, and the variety,
availability and quality of the games differs
greatly from platform catalogue to catalogue.
But the benefits are undeniable – imagine
getting halfway through a mission in Red
Dead Redemption 2 on your TV, then picking
it up moments later at the very same point on
your smartphone in the cafe down the road?
That’s a future that’s already very much here- and these are the best services offering it.
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