NVIDIA’s GRID Service Reaches 50 Titles, Introduces 60 FPS 1080p Streaming

NVIDIA’s GRID service has just reached a big milestone: it now features 50 titles. 2009’s Bionic Commando became the 50th, and as we covered last month, Dirt 3: Complete Edition, LEGO Movie the Videogame and Strider helped lead up to that.

To celebrate the occasion, NVIDIA has just rolled out a much-requested feature: 1080p60 streaming. Yes, that’s 60 frames-per-second. To take advantage of such smooth performance and the higher resolution, a high-speed Internet connection will be required. NVIDIA says that 50Mbps is ideal, while 30Mbps is the minimum. Also extremely important is that your latency to the server is no higher than 50ms.

I gave the 1080p60 streaming a quick test, and while my connection wasn’t terribly impressive (I can’t wait for a Canadian server!), the experience and quality was very good. Here are some ingame screenshots from Dirt 3 and Strider:

If you’re interested in testing out the 1080p60 streaming, there are a couple of things to bear in mind. First and foremost, you’ll need to download the beta version of SHIELD Hub, which requires you to first join the SHIELD Hub Beta community at Google+, and then go to Google Play to sign up as a beta tester. Full details can be found here. Further, 15 of the 50 games currently do not support 1080p streaming; you can see which ones do right here.

As covered before, GRID will remain free for SHIELD owners right up until June 30, and I’d expect that pricing information will trickle out a week or two before then. It’s also worth noting that up to this point, NVIDIA has rolled out six data centers for its GRID service, including USA NW, SW, and E, as well as Northern Europe, Southern Europe, and Asia Pacific.