Nvidia's Cloud Gaming Service Rolling Out Next Week, Limited To 720p

Grid will be available for Nvidia Shield owners in North America starting November 18.

Nvidia has announced that its cloud-powered game streaming service, Grid, will be available starting next week for Nvidia Shield devices. Grid will roll out on November 18 in North America and in December for Europe. The service will be available in Asia sometime in 2015.

Grid will be free for Nvidia Shield Tablet ($300 + $60 for controller) and Nvidia Shield ($200) owners through June 30, 2015. After this, it will be offered through Netflix-like subscriptions or individual purchases or rentals.

Writing on its website, Nvidia explained that it look ten years for the company to create the technology to bring high-fidelity graphics to devices such as Shield.

"The reason: streaming games is hard," the company explained. "You need to build a powerful gaming computer in the cloud. Then you need to get games to users in milliseconds."

Grid will offer "super-low latency," Nvidia said, thanks to the technology's array of data centers around the world. "It's an effort that’s put 20 petaflops of graphics processing compute power into the cloud. That's equal to the fastest supercomputer in the U.S.," Nvidia explained.

In terms of games support, users will be able to stream big-name games such as Batman: Arkham City and Borderlands 2, as well as older titles including Brutal Legend and Psychonauts. A total of 20 games will be available at launch, and more are planned to be released every week.