The NVIDIA Grid, a new cloud-hosted gaming system, may embody the future of eSports. By taking out the possibility of disconnects and lag, in-person tournaments may be simplified to a smooth and flawless experience on both a professional and recreational level.

Currently, at big eSports events, players connect to the servers through wireless or wired Internet. This comes with a few drawbacks having effected the stability of gameplay. For example, at the Season 2 Playoffs for League of Legends, there were major connection problems throughout the event which sacrificed game stability and viewership on the stream. When there are constant disconnects during the game, players can become distracted and ultimately perform worse. More importantly, it halted the event altogether; this forced the teams to finish the tournament a few days later. This sort of occurrence led to a lot of conspiracy and negativity in the community about how these events are run and brought to light the fact that moving forward to new technologies and opportunities may improve this experience for all.

Cloud usage is already spreading through different media, such as Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, Spotify, etc. By hosting all of these services elsewhere than from a hard drive, it allows instant streaming and on-demand use. Bringing this technology to gaming is going to have many different benefits, the most obvious one is stability. It also takes out the complications of hardware and software — no more Ethernet cords or wireless cards to lower functionality of devices.

The NVIDIA Grid can host up to 36 HD devices all ran by their new GPU virtualization technology. These aspects can definitely tie into energy efficiency since it cuts out a large amount of devices from being in use constantly. Their VGX Hypervisor is used to allow multiple clients to use the GPU efficiently. Not only this, but NVIDIA promises a 30 ms reduction while using the Grid.

This graph compares latency across multiple platforms.

Images provided by NVIDIA.