Published in News

Cloud based 4K years away says Nvidia

by on01 June 2015


Can't get the wood 

Anyone expecting 4K streaming off the cloud any time soon will be plumb out of luck according to Nvidia's CEO.

Jen-Hsun Huang told a media briefing at Computex and that streaming 4K movies from online services like Netflix to PCs, TVs and set-top boxes, streaming games is technically possible, it would need some serious infrastructure changes.

Nvidia can currently stream 1080p games at 60 frames per second from its Grid online gaming service, but the technology needs to be developed for 4K streaming and a lot of fine-tuning is needed at the server level, Huang said.

"It's going to be a while," Huang said.

It would appear that the infrastructure is the major sticking point as many 4K TVs and monitors are already available, and display images at the 3840 x 2160-pixel resolution.

Nvidia uses high-end GPUs on the server side for the Grid service to optimize games for Internet connections. The resolution of the game stream, however, depends on the quality of the connection, and streaming 4K games.

This would take much faster internet connections than many have available.

Huang added that Nvidia's cloud gaming service will improve and was the way forward. It is convenient because you just click and play, and it doesn't involve the inconvenience of buying disks or downloading anything.

Nvidia's gaming service is based on the Android OS, which is mainly a mobile platform, which will evolve into an Internet-based gaming platform over time, Huang said. The company offers a separate Shield tablet, which supports 1080p cloud gaming.

Nvidia also announced the GeForce GTX980 Ti graphics processor, which will bring 4K gaming to desktops at 45 frames per second.

Last modified on 01 June 2015
Rate this item
(5 votes)

Read more about: