Shadow.tech streaming PC vs. real Desktop

[Radegast74]

Ok, since I couldn't get any of you magnificent bastards to do this, I signed myself up to test out this Shadow.tech streaming PC thing, since I'm being told it is "the future."

In case you don't know, https://shadow.tech runs a service where for about $35/month (*without discounts) you can get stream a 6-Core Xeon / plain 1080 / 12GB RAM equivalent PC from their servers onto any of your computers...I have streamed Star Citizen on my MacBook Air and a couple of even older turd computers... To compare Shadow to a real PC, I streamed Shadow to my desktop, and then just played it the old-fashioned way / non-streamy way on my desktop. Both play sessions were recorded in 720p in OBS, see the videos for more details...

Below are the unedited videos...to aid in making comparisons, I ran my Nvidia FPS counter in the bottom right as well as the SC FPS counter in the upper right...at the end I show the Task Manager Performance Tab, showing what each rig looked like in terms of CPU, Memory, and GPU.

*If you use a referral code, you get it for $25 for one month. Hint --> use mine if you are interested, but I'll be posting more vid's soon...

Shadow.tech Streaming PC:

View: https://youtu.be/1HdxkWs0ZTQ



My regular desktop PC (i7-8700k, 1080Ti, 16GB RAM, Samsung 960 EVO SSD):

View: https://youtu.be/l1E7twosV1s


Yay, I finally got my dual joysticks to work!
Shadow.tech Streaming PC: Skimmer Mission at Kareah:

View: https://youtu.be/R7ciP-f8zWg

 

[August]

That's actually better than I had expected; surprised it's a quatro GPU though?

 

[Radegast74]

That's actually better than I had expected; surprised it's a quatro GPU though?

The Task Manager says it's a "Quadro P5000." When I go to the RSI Telemetry page, it tells me I'm running a Nvidia 1080, and has my performance pegged as that. I'll post that tomorrow, along with another update--> I finally figured out how to enable my joysticks and other USB peripherals! (lol, I enabled my Logitech webcam...and then it crashed...I guess FOIP is going to be too much for this!).

EDIT: Ok, here is the screenshot of the RSI Telemetry page for this...NOTE--> This is somewhat artifcial, as it really describes the interactions between the RSI Servers and the Shadow.tech servers...what gets passed on to *me* as a result of the streaming can be somewhat different, as my internet connection can vary, my ISP may throttle me, etc. This just shows that Shadow.tech is giving me what they say they are, i.e., the RSI servers see it as this and track the FPS this configuration gets.

 

[BUTUZ]

Interesting! I think performance is being hampered by only having 12GB ram available. Can you adjust the specs up and down and pay a bit more or is it you get what you get?

 

[Printimus]

Hmmm interesting.

 

[Radegast74]

Interesting! I think performance is being hampered by only having 12GB ram available. Can you adjust the specs up and down and pay a bit more or is it you get what you get?

I absolutely agree! I watched RedLir stream on Twitch over the last week...he upgraded his PC first to a Samsung 970 EVO SSD, then a couple days later from 16GB RAM to 32GB. His rig was already pretty beefy, but you could still notice the performance went up a little bit, as it had more memory to load in the objects/contents in a given area, and then could swap things in and out of memory faster.

Right now, you can't upgrade the memory...you can only upgrade your hard drive. I'm expecting later you might be able to upgrade the memory. FYI, it is a "real" virtual PC you are streaming to...I had to go through the Windows PC setup the first run. The vPC I'm streaming is one where I've turned off all the extra gunk running in the background and stealing RAM (see BoredGamer's Windows Performance tweaks if you haven't already).

FYI, I was going to email the company with a bunch of questions after another week of play testing, I'll add that question.

 

[Lorddarthvik]

I find this really interesting. There have been quiet a few tries at this very thing over the years but they all died pretty fast due to lack of interest and upkeep costs.
The horrible 720p+youtube (oe Twitch) compression doesn't do the comparison any justice imho, would like to see some uncompressed screenshots in 1080 at least.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not against the idea at all! I play games through steam in-home stream on a WiFi - router - WiFi connection every day and find it perfectly acceptable.
I also find this xeon + quadro thing very very interesting, sounds also like they are using an old render farm for this. If I could run my 3d modeling and rendering software through this, it could greatly increase productivity for little cost. (For example iterating on shading and lighting with test renders through a proper quadro equipped machine with more cores than my home-work PC would cost way less this way than doing the same iterative process with the help of a render farm)

 

[Vavrik]

My inner computer system architect is spilling out.

The Quadro P5000 actually has performance numbers more like the 1070, but that doesn't limit Star Citizen. That is mostly a question of bandwidth, and memory. It's also possible, and common for a virtual PC to outperform the equipment it's emulating. The virtual PC is software, running on massive computers (they're the size of a shipping container). That said, you do not need 60 FPS to play SC. Your brain can only process a maximum of 30 FPS of video anyway. It probably averages more like 16... of video ... and that's on a good day. Anything else is gravy. NOTE: I said gravy, not useless.

Also, adding virtual memory to the virtual PC won't give you the same kind of performance boost it does in a real PC. It will make some improvement though. Don't forget, the disk in a virtual PC is RAM, so you already have most of the speed increase. You can get some from increasing RAM but the same performance limit (everything is in RAM) applies.

 

[Xist]

The real question is how much additional lag did you experience?

Especially input lag.

That's what had traditionally made this business model suffer for people who at home have decent internet speeds.

 

[Radegast74]

Great news! On the third attempt, my regular dual joystick setup "just worked"...so I did a skimmer mission! I added a video of doing a Skimmer mission at the top...here is the link again, below, for those of you already following this.

I want to do some uncompressed 1080p video...is their anyway to make sure YouTube doesn't turn around and compress that?

View: https://youtu.be/R7ciP-f8zWg

 

[Xist]

I want to do some uncompressed 1080p video...is their anyway to make sure YouTube doesn't turn around and compress that?

I'm not sure what you mean by "uncompressed" 1080p. It's not feasible to transfer uncompressed video over the Internet. It would be many GB/sec of transfer required. It has to be compressed or nobody can view it.

Do you mean they're scaling it to a smaller size? AFAIK when you upload to YouTube they do eventually transcode all the sizes, but they do the smaller ones first.

 

[Xist]

PS- @SeungRyul FYI see OP

 

[Radegast74]

I'm not sure what you mean by "uncompressed" 1080p. It's not feasible to transfer uncompressed video over the Internet. It would be many GB/sec of transfer required. It has to be compressed or nobody can view it.

Do you mean they're scaling it to a smaller size? AFAIK when you upload to YouTube they do eventually transcode all the sizes, but they do the smaller ones first.

I....I'm not sure what I really meant either. It would be too damn big to upload anything to YouTube, uncompressed. I can just take some screenshots, at 1080p, for comparison.

 

[Xist]

@August the reason they're using Quatro GPUs instead of GTX is because GTX is a single-user GPU. It only has 2 stream processors. Quatro is a similar performance multi-user server GPU.

If they used GTX they would literally need 1 PC per user. They're not selling you that, they are selling you a VIRTUAL PC. They have servers with lots of cores, lots of RAM, and multiple Quatro GPUs, and you just get to use a piece of it. It's much more cost effective for them and you get similar performance. It would be significantly more expensive (for them, AND you) if they used GTX, and the performance gain would only be marginal.

 

[August]

@August the reason they're using Quatro GPUs instead of GTX is because GTX is a single-user GPU. It only has 2 stream processors. Quatro is a similar performance multi-user server GPU.

If they used GTX they would literally need 1 PC per user. They're not selling you that, they are selling you a VIRTUAL PC. They have servers with lots of cores, lots of RAM, and multiple Quatro GPUs, and you just get to use a piece of it. It's much more cost effective for them and you get similar performance. It would be significantly more expensive (for them, AND you) if they used GTX, and the performance gain would only be marginal.

Thank you, that makes sense.

 

[GarikDuvall]

Think I'll be checking this out as well. I had tried liquidsky for SC and it worked fine, though I was unhappy with their billing management and how hard it was to cancel the reoccurring charge (had to get my CC to block them). But besides that it worked very similar to Shadow. Nice thing about liquid is that they have non-reoccurring options, like $9.99 to get 25 hours of playtime. BUT, Shadow is currently the only one that does 4K.

I'm currently running a PC I built some years back with a Intel i7 2600k, samsung 850 evo 500gb ssd, 1tb storage, gtx 1050Ti. It gets the job done but not exactly prime SC material. So if I do, I will also add my thoughts on using shadow as well!

 

[SeungRyul]

Actually toured Shadow's offices in San Francisco and met with their community manager while visiting for Twitchcon. Definitely very interesting technology. Maybe I will follow up with them and get some kind of exclusive deal for TEST members.

 

[GarikDuvall]

I signed up for it to try it out (used your code radegast). That's what I was using during Saturday's CFT. Performance was great. I crashed twice but that was due to MY PC freezing up (haven't resolved that issue yet). But awesome part is that as soon as I got restarted and loaded shadow up again, I was right back in my cockpit as it keeps running even if your PC isnt. This could be cool for guys who do editing where you need hours to render videos, as you can start the process and even shut down your own PC at night and load shadow the next morning to find your task done.

Of course they say that you should shut down the virtual shadow pc when not using it "for health of the machine" or wtvr. And that probably is best bet, but you could keep it running 24/7 if you wanted to.

 

[Michael]

So anyone did the math about the cost?
What is the minimium hardware someone will need to use shadow tech?
How much bandwidth do you need?

 

[GarikDuvall]

So it's $409/year ($25 first month, then 35 thereafter) if you do month-to month. OR its $294 if you pay for year in advance. That's not cheapest, but have to weigh cost vs building/buying your own rig, or having to upgrade it every year or two. Main benefit is that they pay to upgrade their hardware, while your fee stays the same. So in theory your virtual PC should always have fairly top of the line performance. I'd say try it for one month for 25 bucks. If you think it's route you want to take then it's clearly cost beneficial to sign up for a year.

For connection/bandwidth this is what they have to say:

What type of internet connection is required to use Shadow?
There is no issue running Shadow with FTTH or very high-speed networks with a coaxial cable (FTTB). If you are on an ADSL broadband, chances are that Shadow also works; however, we can not guarantee it.

What are the minimum broadband speed requirements?
Broadband speed is one of the main elements needed to enjoy the full Shadow experience. It also requires low ping, a stable connection, and low packet loss. That is why we ask that our users use fiber or cable when using Shadow and the reason why we cannot guarantee our users a proper experience while using ADSL. To answer your question, Shadow uses a minimum bandwidth averaging from 5 to 25 Mbps, depending on the use. However, this does not mean that a speedtest above 25 Mbps guarantees a good use of Shadow (as detailed above).