NVIDIA GameStream

» see nvidia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

GameStream did one thing and did it unusually well. A gaming PC with an NVIDIA card sat somewhere in the house and a Shield box sat under the television. The Shield played whatever the PC could render, at up to 4K and 60 frames per second, over your own wifi. There was no monthly fee, because there was nothing to pay for. The games were yours, the PC was yours, the encoder was already soldered onto the graphics card you had bought.

The feature arrived before the name did. When the Shield Portable shipped in July 2013 it carried a beta PC-streaming mode that worked well enough to be the handheld's most interesting property, and on 18 October 2013 NVIDIA gave the thing a brand and a marketing push, folding it into GeForce Experience. For most of the decade that followed it was the reason to buy a Shield rather than any other Android TV box, and NVIDIA said so, in the words the class action would later quote back: a "seamless out-of-the-box experience" for streaming PC games.

The end was posted to a support page in December 2022, under the title GameStream End of Service Notification, and it is a careful document. "Starting in mid-February, a planned update to the NVIDIA Games app will begin rolling out to SHIELD owners," it said. "With this update, the GameStream feature will no longer be available in app." It suggested Steam Link for streaming from your own machine and GeForce NOW for streaming from NVIDIA's, and it never gave a reason for any of it.

Shield hardware never had a retail life in Turkey, so this is one where my only standing is the architecture. That part I do recognize: a local encoder talking to a local decoder over a network you control is the boring and obviously correct way to move a frame across a house, and latency budgets of roughly this shape are what my working week is made of. NVIDIA retired the local path and kept the one that bills monthly.

~ the dossier ~

~ five weeks past the promised date ~

Mid-February came and went. The update that actually took GameStream off the device rolled out on 29 March 2023, and it arrived alongside a rename: the NVIDIA Games app became GeForce NOW Cloud Gaming for SHIELD TV. The company said the new name "better supports" what the app now did. True enough: it no longer did the other thing.

On 18 April 2023, three weeks after the rollout, Davenport and others filed a class action in US federal court under case number 5:23-cv-01877. The complaint is narrow and reads as the obvious one: NVIDIA sold a premium box on a feature, then removed the feature from boxes that had already been bought. The substitutes on offer were worse or metered. Steam Link needs Steam and gives up quality. GeForce NOW is a subscription to someone else's hardware running someone else's copy of the game.

~ what the community put back ~

GameStream's protocol had been reverse-engineered years before it died. Moonlight started as an open source client that spoke to NVIDIA's host software from devices NVIDIA had never blessed, and it long outlived the thing it was cloned from. When the host side went away, Sunshine filled in: a self-hosted server that any GPU can run, including the AMD and Intel ones GameStream would never talk to.

The pair now do more than the original did. They run on hardware NVIDIA does not sell, and nobody can push an update that deletes them. That is a decent outcome, and it is also a reminder that the only reason it was available was that a protocol got documented by people who were not asked to document it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »