Promised in May 2022, Shadow’s Power offer is approaching. From October, the company’s customers will be able to benefit from this cloud computing notably offering graphic power “RTX 3070 class”.
It was the main attraction of the Spotlight event organized last May by Shadow, the French specialist in cloud computing : the announcement of a new Power subscription formula giving access to a PC in the cloud, much more powerful than the aging configuration available in the company’s “standard” offer. A few months later, the realization seems imminent: it is from October 26, 2022 that the Power offer will be accessible.
For €15 per month more than the standard formula, i.e. a total of €44.99/month, the Power offer will give access to a dematerialized Windows PC equipped with a graphics card, whose power is intended to be equivalent to that of an Nvidia RTX 3070. In concrete terms, the company promises in-game graphics performance almost doubled compared to the standard configuration (presented as equivalent to a GTX 1080). This power will be provided by a server type GPU on Nvidia Ampere architecture at launch. Later, solutions on AMD RDNA2 architecture will also be deployed. The user will be informed when ordering his offer of the type of GPU that will be allocated to him; obviously important information since it will have consequences on the exact performance profile that can be expected from the graphics circuit, as well as on the access to certain specific functionalities, such as upscaling via exclusive DLSS at Nvidia.
The company also promises big progress on the CPU side, with performance announced between an Intel Core i5 and an 11th generation Intel Core i7. There is a response formulated to one of the main criticisms that could have been addressed to the standard Shadow configuration, namely a CPU part that is too light, clearly unbalanced in relation to the GPU power available. “We did a lot of purely gaming benchmarkssays Yannis Weinbach, director of consumer activity and marketing at Shadow, during an interview carried out as part of Gamescom 2022. To have the most representative panel of games possible, we used games on different engines like Unreal Engine, Unity, etc., but also very old titles like StarCraft 2 which is purely CPU and doesn’t pull on the GPU at all. This allows us to clearly see if we have a bottleneck in the configuration. In addition, it gives us a good idea of the performance of League of Legends, which is still today one of the most played games in the world.”
Early access availability for the most loyal customers
Shadow also insists on the fact that each user has access for his session to a fixed shared CPU part (an invariant slice of a latest generation AMD Epyc processor is reserved for him), as well as to a GPU of his own. . The operator thus ensures that each user benefits from perfectly constant computing power, regardless of the level of server load. This is one of the points by which the company justifies the high price of the offer – in addition to the fact, of course, that it is truly a complete PC in the cloud, with individual storage on flash memory, all of which can be used for absolutely any purpose, not just the cloud gaming.
The Power offer will be available for pre-order from September 20 as an option for existing standard subscribers. An early access period will be reserved for current customers who have had the longest wait times (the service has for a very long time had great difficulty in increasing the capacity of its servers to accommodate all the demand, and therefore some customers have had to wait very long months between their registration and the actual provision of their PC in the cloud). The latter will also be offered an initial discount of €5/month, and the offer will therefore be offered to them at €39.99/month.
New also on the pro side
The Power offer is aimed not only at the general public, but also at the professional market. “We think we can interest people who do architecture, 3D, design”, Weinbach tells us. To do this, Shadow plans to launch transactional offers in the next six months, that is to say, available directly over the counter on the Internet. These offers will be accompanied by an internal Shadow fleet management tool, which is intended to be particularly suited to the needs of small and medium-sized businesses.
Finally, Shadow’s presence at Gamescom was also intended to promote its service offers for game publishers. This follows a very successful partnership with Bandai Namco, in early 2022, for the preview phases of the game event Elden Ringwhich were made in cloud gaming from the Shadow servers. A type of operation that the French company is happy to renew in the future.