Hey everyone! My name is Lucas Zuege, and I am the founder of the Cloud Gaming blog, Luro.io. Shadow has allowed me to take over the blog for a day. I will be writing an article to reflect upon the time I spent testing out Shadow's new offer, Shadow Infinite, and other exclusive testers' experiences.
If you are on Shadow's blog, I am assuming you already know what Shadow Infinite and Shadow Ultra are. If you do not, you can check out their recent blog post detailing the announcement of these new offers in the United States.
As part of the Shadow Maker's program, I was one of the first to gain access to one of Shadow's new configurations. I was lucky and received a Shadow Infinite test machine. Here is my overall experience.
My first impressions of Shadow Infinite have been positive so far. Within the first hour of using the new machine, I did take note of the additional storage space. Being able to download multiple games from my favorite game launchers is a significant win in my books.
Then, I started to get into doing some work. When writing articles for my blog, sometimes I find myself opening 20+ tabs in the chromium-based browser, Brave. For those that use a chromium-based browser, you know how resource-hungry they are.
On my home laptop and my Shadow Boost, I have to utilize tab hibernation to save on resources, especially if I am multitasking with video encoding, software building, and any other resource-intensive application.
With Shadow Infinite, I did not notice any slowdowns, no matter how much I threw at it. This is thanks to the 32GB of RAM and the much faster CPU.
So far, before I even started gaming, I loved Shadow Infinite.
What would a review of these new offers be without a section talking about how well it runs games? Well, here is that section!
At 1080p, with the highest possible graphical settings and RTX enabled in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the benchmark showed an average of 86FPS, with it spiking to 120+FPS in less cramped areas.
Coming from Shadow Boost, this is a significant step up, especially with the ability to enable Ray-Tracing.
Games that I have played on Shadow Infinite have managed to stay above 60FPS, with most of them in the 110-144FPS range. These same games on Shadow Boost could barely stay at 60FPS.
One of the best features of Shadow is the fact that the service offers you a Windows 10 PC in the cloud. You can do more with it than just gaming. Although you can play games on other Cloud Gaming platforms for cheaper, you would not be able to replace your computer with one of those services completely.
I decided to do just that. I pulled out my Shadow Ghost and replaced my PC with it. To get into using these new offers, I forced myself to use the Shadow Ghost and utilize my Shadow Infinite for 100% of my daily computing. This includes my blog work, my day job, and gaming.
I am amazed by how well Shadow Infinite has handled all of the tasks I have thrown at it. I have never had a computer nearly as powerful as this that I could access from most of my devices. It is truly remarkable how well Shadow Infinite performs.
Plus, how awesome is it to say that you are running a beast of a rig in such a small form factor?
I honestly love not having a large PC taking up space on or around my desk!
I am only one of many that had the opportunity to test out the new offers. I have reached out to a few of the other testers on Discord and asked them about their experiences. Here is what some of them had to say.
"I feel very spoiled with the quality, I have played with some RTX supported games and it is really good." - @TheGamateers#6918
"I love how fast [Shadow] the Infinite runs. The 32gb of RAM, the amazing CPU, the 1tb of SSD space, and of course we can't forget the RTX graphics card... all of these put together make for a very speedy machine. And the quality of the games that take advantage of the RTX capabilities? The games are gorgeous." - @Saphrym#0713
"I tried playing some games back to back on [Shadow Infinite and Shadow Boost], and the lower frame rate and game graphics on boost became very evident. [Shadow] Boost is great, but [Shadow] Infinite, is well, infinitely better." - @Powell#1412
"As for having anything else to say about the tiers, I hope they push them out to all data centers and regions soon because they're such a massive step up from the [Shadow] Boost tier" - @Hellhaven#0001
From those that I have interviewed and from my personal experience, these new configurations have gotten mostly positive feedback. From an improvement to the CPU that many have requested, to a significant boost in graphical power from more modern Quadro GPUs, you cannot go wrong with choosing Shadow as your Cloud Gaming platform of choice.
I am excited to see what Shadow will bring to the table in the coming years. With tech giants invading the cloud gaming space, it is good to see that a company like Shadow can hold their ground and provide a fantastic product to consumers.
I can say that a few years ago, I never thought I would be using a computer in the cloud for all of my computing needs. But here we are, and I do not think I could ever go back to not using my Shadow.
I want to say thank you to Shadow for allowing me to test out Shadow Infinite and write a guest post for their blog. You guys are awesome!