As part of the latest December Nvidia Shield update the handheld console got support for GRID gaming, something that Nvidia has mentioned on several occasions in 2013. It is finally live, at least for people based in Northern California and have 10 Mbit or faster network.

So after the latest Shield software update you will be able to install the GRID application on the Shield. In case you have an Nvidia certified Gamestream router with 5GHz support, an internet connection of at least 10Mbps download speed and home network with 40ms or less ping time to Nvidia GRID server based in San Jose, it should work just well for you.

In case you have a great ping and super-fast internet, it might work for you even outside of northern California, but Nvidia and their partners should bring more of these servers online and we can expect that many major cities in USA might be able to get some local GRID servers for their own amusement.

European users can simply forget about it, as the ping will be quite bad considering that Northern California is more than 5000 miles away from most parts of Europe. For the sake of accuracy, we just tried it and Nvidia didn’t let us in, as "GRID is not available at our location" and the ping was 181ms which is worse than below 60ms for great experience and below 150 ms which is a threshold to get in.

With a New York based server it might just work for us but there should be some servers in Europe at least next year when Shield 2 launches in the old continent.

There are currently seven games available for testing including Witcher 2, Street Fighter X Tekken, Darkside 2 and a few others. This is a three month free beta trail and based on beta tester feedback, Nvidia will decide how to move forward with GRID beta. We checked Nvidia’s support forum where users wrote that after 2 hours of gaming you get automatically disconnected, and we wonder if you are able to save the game.