What the heck is a GAMING SERVER??

– Shadow sponsored this video and the concept behind their service is pretty straight forward. You install their app on your device, whether it’s a Mac book, Windows book, full-size computer, phone, tablet, or even an Android or Apple TV and poof! You are magically dropped, into a powerful Windows machine over the internet.

But what actually powers that gaming experience. The cloud gets so often used as a hand wavy, don’t worry about how it works buzzword. What does a gaming server actually look like? To find out, we convinced them to send one over to us, to poke and prod at.

And this thing is actually way cooler than I expected. Using low-latency hardware and coding. A Shadow cloud gaming server, can run it up to 4K 60fps over the internet. And it’ll forward inputs from controllers, keyboards, mice, and even other USB peripherals. Making it useful for gaming, design, video editing, or just about anything else you can imagine.

But of course the ability to run those applications is only meaningful, if you’ve got enough horses to really use them. That is why every logged in Shadow user, gets their own dedicated hardware. Albeit not necessarily in the conventional sense. What I expected to find in here was this,

This databoard is what allows the system to be powered by a single 12 volt input. And this is part of the open compute platform spec that reduces the cost of individual servers, by taking the power and cooling and making them part of the complete cabinet. Rather than something that has to be integrated,

Into every single server. So you can see here, we’ve got these gigantic chunky, positive and negative wires here. And then everything is split-off, to the individual components. So these three right here, are able to handle a PCI Express power for up to three graphics cards. The fans are handled right here.

This is a supplementary 6-pin, PCI Express connector for the motherboard. This right here is an 8-pin CPU power connector and this right here is a standard ATX 24-pin power connector. That is what I was not, expecting to find inside this chassis. I was actually expecting this motherboard

To use some kind of just 12 volt only power input or something along those lines. But because this is just a standard gigabyte ATX motherboard, we can take off this cooler, put something else on it. And here we go, plug in our own power supply

And game on this thing right here and right now. Now when I said that every subscriber, gets their own dedicated hardware, I didn’t necessarily mean that all of it would be dedicated. So here you pop off this shroud, you can actually see, that while everyone obviously gets their own graphics card

There’s only one CPU in the system. So depending on what tier it is, you’re going to have either four CPU cores or six CPU cores that are kind of carved out using virtualization, from this CPU and then assigned a graphics card, kind of like what we’ve done in the past,

With things like our seven-gamers, one CPU project. As for memory, because this CPU has a six-channel memory controller, each one of a hypothetical three people, who have had this CPU carved up for them would get effectively, dual-channel memory worth of bandwidth. So these are eight gig sticks,

Which means we’ve got a total of 64 gigs of Ram, in this particular system that can be sliced up. That means that as long as Shadow, as chosen their hardware wisely, other than the overhead that comes along with virtualization, which as we’ve shown in the past, can be pretty minimal.

You are basically getting a gaming PC, even though it looks absolutely nothing like one. I mean, where’s the RGB, am I right? So let’s go ahead and hook this puppy up, shall we? We have a small bench top, Variable voltage power supply in the workshop,

But it is not even close to what we would need, to run this entire machine, off of this. I didn’t point this out before, but you can actually see where the 12 volt to five volt and 3.3 volt conversion is happening on this databoard over here.

Because if it’s not happening in the power supply, then you’re gonna need it to happen here, for that 24-pin connector. Everything else, CPU, fans, PCI Express, that’s all native 12 volts. So you don’t have to do it, just for the 24-pin connector here. Make sure you’re subscribed,

Because I’ve got a video coming up pretty soon where we’re gonna be one of the first to be hands on with a new motherboard and power supply standard, that’s Intel is actually co-creating. That would eliminate five volt and 3.3 volt from power supplies in general. So it would just be 12 volt power,

Going onto the motherboard. Come on, come out of the thing. The cable management is it’s too tight. It’s too cable managed. Aaaah ow! Poor Shadow tech watching is going aah! What is he doing? They knew who they sent it to. You knew what this was. This totally feels like cheating,

Hooking up to the gaming server directly. There’s gotta be a 10 gig card over here, with SFP Plus connectors, but we don’t those just like randomly throughout our office. Usually they’re more for fibers. So we’re gonna go ahead and plug into this puppy right here. Wow that is, is really tight!

We like bend this like this. Maybe we’ll get that in there. Yeah, there it is, oh yeah! Oh yeah there you go, no problem. Piece of cake. This motherboard totally forgoes traditional. Just say to connectors in favor of these puppies right here, which are breakout connectors, into four separate set of connectors.

Fortunately, I’ve got an M.2 drive, that should have a Windows operating system on it, as well as some games and stuff. And I’m just gonna go ahead and pop that in. You might have noticed, that the server has no storage in it whatsoever. That’s because along with cooling and power

Storage is one of the other things, that is removed from the individual servers and just placed elsewhere in the data center. So that is what that high speed network connection is for. That way no one’s gonna have a storage bottleneck when they’re trying to load up their games or whatever.

Let’s see if it just fires up when we give it power. Oh power supply did nothing else. It doesn’t make any noise, because all the fans are powered by the databoard, which is not powered. So I lied, we’re gonna need a blowing Metron after all. Here we go, boys. Whoa!

It’s trying to take off there. Is that supposed to happen? I’m gonna go get a different one, that could yeah not kill, but definitely maim. – Ooh disgusting! Oooh! – This is less fun, but it’s definitely safer. Yeah I think I plugged into the secondary card,

Which is not what I wanted to do. Okay hopefully that’s all right. No output to our monitor, but by pulling out both of the graphics cards, I was able to get into the BIOS on the onboard video. So I have changed active video to PCIe device.

And the other thing that I wanna change, as you can see it’s set up to network boot. That would normally make sense because the storage should be elsewhere in the data center. I’m gonna set it to my Sabrent M.2 drive and hopefully save and exit. Show me the image, lttstore.com.

It’s water, it’ll replace all the sweat. Hello, hah there you are! Yes good job! Fun fact, apparently Shadow added 240 hertz support. They haven’t completely rolled it out, but if you manually select it should work at 10 ADP. Of course, this is just running locally over display port cable.

So there’s no special magic right now. There we go over a hundred frames per second, “Shadow of the Tomb Raider” with a server CPU and a workstation graphics card. Not too shabby. As you can see, no amount of expensive gaming tech, is gonna make me good at “Rocket League” but the good news,

Is that I’m getting a locked 250 frames per second. How about them Apples? Oh yeah! Gaming server for gamers. Of course, this is ridiculous. Nobody’s gonna use this like this. So I actually grabbed myself an Android TV box and a TV over there

And we’re gonna give it a shot, like the real way. Some people use their Shadows, as their primary computer, ’cause why not? It’s got a fast internet connection, ’cause it’s right in a data center. You can remote into it from anywhere, which is super cool. So obviously two factor, very important feature.

Just a little inconvenient for me right now. 4K 60fps, let’s fire up a game. This is their launcher or you can also just drop onto the desktop. It’s actually my first time playing around with it, on the Android TV app. Even with all the voodoo magic, there’s no getting around Windows updates.

Now everything’s working properly, 24 milliseconds ping, not terrible. So that’s a little less than two frames of latency, which considering that we’re connected to a server in our neighbors to the South, actually not bad, cool. So apparently they’ve worked on this, so that you can bring up the overlay

Even when you are in game, which is pretty sweet. Believe it or not “Overcooked! 2,” is a game that I’m pretty sensitive to latency in. I’ve played a fair bit of this game. Before the game launches, it’s actually a good time to have a look at what things like text will look like

On a maxed out 70 megabit per second connection. In fact, it actually ends up looking quite sharp. So this is a 4K display running it 4K, and if you go have a close look at it. If you were to just be working on documents in your Shadow, for whatever reason,

I would say that would be a highly acceptable experience. Oh, you know what? That’s interesting! The cursor looks a little weird, but the actual text here, is really good. I can detect it obviously. Like I know what I’m looking for, but this is among the best that I have seen

When it comes to remote gaming image quality. Where I would really expect to see a lot of blockiness, is in sort of big gradients like this, like this overcast, cloudy business that’s going on under our hot air balloon, but it’s really not bad at all.

This is actually my first time formally trying Shadow because last time I had to go to their office for it, because they weren’t able, to get us hooked up with anything in Canada. No wonder people swear by this thing, “Overcooked! 2” definitely benefits from it’s more cartoony art style though.

When you’re playing something that’s intended to look a little bit more cinematic or true to life, the visual anomalies are definitely more noticeable, but are also definitely acceptable in this case. It’s more the latency that I would notice, playing something like a twitch shooter, or like “DOOM Eternal.” This is on ultra-violence mode.

Oh see, see the chainsaw, there we go, all right and we good? Oh come on stop! Man this game is fun. Yeah I’m basically just playing video games now. That’s always a good sign when I’m trying something out and I kind of forget that I’m evaluating and I just started playing video games.

Yeah, you can kinda see it, in like the textures on the floor and stuff like that. So when I move they’ll get kinda blurry, and then they kind of sharpen up. It’s really not bad actually. Things that are farther away, I tend to find it more noticeable.

And like when something rocks the building, you can see it go kind of blurry. There and then it sharpens backup. So it’s definitely noticeable to the trained eye. You’d be able to feel the latency in a game like this for sure. If you’re playing something like,

You know more of like a “Tomb Raider” type game where it’s more about puzzle solving and exploration, then I wouldn’t consider it, to be nearly as much of an issue. Bottom line then, Shadow’s value proposition is pretty unique even at their highest tier, which is $40 a month.

For the hardware that they’re gonna bake into that tier, it would take anywhere from three to five years just to buy that graphics card if you were paying $40 a month. So the value is pretty good, as long as you’re willing to deal with remote access. Shadow is available nationwide in the US

But the experience is obviously better, the closer you are to one of their data centers. And you can find the most updated information, about where those are on their website. There’s currently four in the US. The most important call to action today, is if this looks interesting to you move fast.

Because the last time we did a video about Shadow, we caused a months long backlog, on new account activations, and no I’m not even kidding. And if you want an Ultra or Infinite tier account, once those become available, you will need to already have a Standard Boost tier account.

They’re constantly improving the service. That overlay is absolutely awesome. That USB pass through stuff is crazy. They’re even working on a couple of really big things for the future. So one of them is mouse and keyboard gaming support. That’s gonna be coming with iOS 14, as well as VR support.

Although it remains to be seen exactly how well that would work with the extra latency. Either way, it’s worth keeping an eye on these guys because they are doing some really cool stuff. Thanks for watching and thanks again to Shadow for sponsoring this video and sending it over this server.

This is actually pretty fun. I’ve never seen an open compute project server before. It’s nice to get hands on.