What does Cloud Gaming really mean?
Our experience with Shadow and its new Power Upgrade began with this question in mind, between logging in and setting up Windows. The point is this: is the real meaning of playing streaming really what we have been proposed so far or is there something more that is slipping away in plain sight? Shadow had the merit of offering us interesting considerations regarding this segment of the gaming market, made up of liquid gaming with platforms with different – but not too much – nuances in substance. The closest thing to Shadow, among the most famous services, is probably GeForce NOW with its client management, even with all the differences of the case, but the Cloud Computing offered by this service differs in versatility and transversality, even if it alongside some criticism.
Prerequisites and supported devices
To use Shadow you don’t need big recommendations: just download the client and make sure that the platform where we use it meets the requirements, which range from supported hardware to connection quality.
The positive note is that compatibility is very wide and ranges from Windows to macOS, via Android. On PCs, where there is a wide variety of configurations, the margins are just as wide: to meet the recommended requirements, any seventh generation Intel processor or even an AMD CPU from 2012 onwards is sufficient. The memory must be at least 4 GB of RAM. At least Windows 8.1 is required, but Windows 10 or higher is preferred.
Shadow is present on the main mobile platforms and on Android set-top-boxes to play directly on the TV. The icing on the cake is compatibility with 64-bit Raspberry and with Meta viewers, i.e. Quest and Quest 2, via a dedicated app that can be installed via SideQuest.
As for connectivity-side requests, the universal recommendation is to have at least a 15 Mbps network available with a 30 ms ping.
The higher you go with the bandwidth, the higher the quality will be, up to a maximum that can be allocated for Shadow alone of 70 Mbps if you decide to opt for a fixed and personalized approach, otherwise you can apply the automatic formula that dynamically adapts the bandwidth available based on network conditions.
All of this information, along with audio, video, and peripheral management, can be found directly in Shadow’s popup menu once you’ve logged in to your remote machine.
Network features and experience
With the new Shadow Power Upgrade you can unlock a machine with respectable performance, equipped with an AMD EPYC 7543P processor with 4 Cores and 8 Threads available to the user.
The graphics, on the other hand, are the responsibility of an NVIDIA RTX A4500, a professional card with 20 GB of video memory whose in-game performance is commonly compared to that of an RTX 3070, while the system RAM will be equal to 16 GB. The company has already announced the upcoming arrival of RDNA2 video cards including the Radeon Pro V620 to be included in the same offer, but details about the management of the possible distribution of one or the other option are not yet known graphics.
The specifications are high-end for a machine that we must imagine in our complete possession, as if it were under our desk: on the monitor, smartphone or TV, we will see the Windows 10 desktop projected from a PC located in the French data centers of Shadow. We have to imagine that the internet is a gigantic connection that transfers the images produced by a PC thousands of kilometers away directly to our monitor, like a very long video cable.
There are no limits to the use that can be made with this equipment, having the entirety of Windows available. You will be able to download all the game clients on which we have purchased our games, but also professional suites such as Topaz AI and Creative Cloud with professional editing, editing and rendering tools to make use of them as transversal as possible.
Its price point is 29.99 euros per month for the basic package, to which must be added 14.99 euros per month for the Power Upgrade. A figure that is certainly important, but which finds its raison d’être by virtue of its absolutely premium potential in the field of Cloud Computing and Cloud Gaming.
However, it is difficult to think of using it exclusively for gaming as much as a main driver even for particularly demanding uses in the event of budget limitations in the possibility of accessing machines with professional equipment of the same level. We have had the opportunity to try Shadow for a long time and wide, taking advantage of both a desktop gaming system and a common ultrabook with second generation Ryzen APU, but we have also tested its potential on smartphones. As a connection, we used an FTTC with 105 Mbps effective, one limited to 25 and 4G cellular. We obtained the best experience in the first case, with excellent responsiveness and high-level visual results. In traditional gaming, much of the experience was satisfying with the best connection available to us. With the second option we found greater video compression: the result was still up to par, albeit with obvious limitations in the more shaded areas.
Also in this case the responsiveness has always been good, with some sporadic interruption of the flow that has not undermined the general enjoyment. Nothing to report, however, regarding the general functioning of the Shadow Client even with less performing devices.
Game performances
Shadow with Power Upgrade has proved to be a fairly powerful creature with generous performance, both in traditional gaming and with Ray Tracing for lights, shadows and reflections: thanks to a professional GPU expertly chosen by the French provider for its cloud workstations, capable of churn out even higher performance than stated.
We were able to play Cyberpunk 2077 comfortably with Ray Tracing Ultra presets and DLSS active (Auto), achieving an average above 30 FPS, while on Forza Horizon 5 we were able to break through the 60 FPS ceiling. With Ray Tracing the workstation is mostly aimed at 1440p, but thanks to DLSS it is possible to obtain very good results even in non-native 4K, always aiming for maximum detail.
The performances will still fluctuate during the experience, especially if you tend to use a multitude of different devices for your game sessions, since as the streaming resolution varies, the rendering resolution will also change dynamically. Therefore, it is not excluded that even higher performances can be obtained on the basis of one’s own hardware. By virtue of this element, we also report the scores of 3DMark TimeSpy, with an overall of 9,702 points made up of 4,208 points in CPU Score and 12,146 in GPU Score.
The platform is promoted with flying colors as input methods: keyboard and mouse work properly, as well as the Xbox Series X, Dualshock 4 and DualSense controllers, although for the latter two it is necessary to use virtual mapping via third-party utilities . The touch controls for smartphones are also very good, even if for many this is not a preferential way of use.
Unlike other services, another aspect to consider with Shadow concerns the immediate availability of games. Dealing with a PC strictly speaking, it will be necessary to download and install every single game on the machine in the cloud.
Fortunately for those who do not have a Gigabit connection, the times will not be marked by our network but by the one supplied to Shadow by the company itself in its datacenters: a 1 Gbps connection is guaranteed for each individual workstation and we actually had to wait a long time little to have access to our favorite titles.
Net of the excellent connection performance, however, there are a couple of considerations to make on the matter. For starters, stripping out all potential, a desktop system like this eliminates the console-like experience of services exquisitely designed for Cloud Gaming like GeForce Now itself. Another consideration deserves the storage space, limited to 256 GB, unless you decide to expand it with a paid plugin.
Even this point does not go entirely in favor of Shadow, with other platforms that do not take space and waiting times into consideration in any way, immediately making their entire catalog available in an unlimited way (also in other cases, provided that you have possession of a digital copy of the titles to which you intend to have access).
These are probably the great limitations of Shadow, an otherwise top-level service as well as one of the few alternatives for virtual reality in the cloud, a field in which it could seriously make a difference by bypassing the need for special hardware and overcoming the physical limits of viewers Meta standalone.
