CES 2014: NVIDIA Updates Us on GRID Cloud Gaming & G-Sync Availability

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang sure had a lot to talk about during his presentation at CES. So far we’ve covered the Tegra K1 SoC in some depth, using Iray to configure vehicles, and learned about the mysterious crop circle that appeared in Salinas, California a couple of weeks ago.

Now, we’ll wrap-up our coverage of Jen-Hsun’s presentation with a couple of mentions that he started off with. First up, GRID cloud gaming.

At the start of the presentation, an NVIDIA employee on stage was playing Batman: Arkham Origins on a 4K television which was being streamed to at 1080p from a SHIELD. Then, the SHIELD was unplugged from the TV, at which point the camera panned over to “wow” the crowd with its wireless capabilities. Of course, if you’ve been following the site in recent months, you’ll probably already know all about these capabilities – they’re something I thoroughly covered a couple of months ago.

But no – what made this particular example interesting is the fact that the game was being streamed from a GRID server 6,000 miles away in Sophia, France. I did see some slight lag on occasions, but overall it was smooth. The upside is that this is an unrealistic scenario – wherever you are in the world, you’d be connecting to a server much closer than this.

At a press event held this past November in Montreal, NVIDIA blew us away with the unveiling of G-Sync, a monitor technology that makes Vsync look obsolete. The major question up to this point is when we’ll be seeing models go on sale; the answer: Q2, as this slide shows.

A lot of popular monitor vendors will be releasing G-Sync models, including ASUS and Acer; 24″ and 27″ models are expected to be released. Both sizes will include a 1080p version, whereas the 27″ models will have a 2560×1440 counterpart as well. Pricing, of course, will have to come later.