Your friendly neighborhood postal worker hates to see it happen, and your unnamed cloud computer service provider doesn't like talking about it: packet loss. Losing your Zurg collectible in transit can be as frustrating as losing that one frame that would have helped you score the equalizing goal. I mean, you had it. It was almost there. We saw it too!
Cable companies hate this trick. Because the freshly released trick that we call a feature will help you enjoy your favorite cloud gaming service even more.
Everyone knows that a good, ergo fast and stable internet connection is key when it comes to working and gaming in the cloud. While Shadow recommends 15Mbit/s of bandwidth to get started, the fun turns sour as soon as you start to lose more and more data packets.
As the image quality suffers fragments of package loss, your sound will be off with every drop too. It’s like an artist on stage that is rocking a microphone with a loose connection and no crowd singing the missing words.
Instead of witnessing a subpar experience like this, we want you and all Shadow users to experience what matters most, the joys of gaming. So got to our work and developed a feature to solve this issue once and for all.
The new feature goes by the name of “Dynamic Bitrate” and will make sure that your Shadow will lose fewer packets in all of your sessions. It does this by monitoring your connection with Shadow and whenever needed, it adjusts the acquired bandwidth on the fly.
Sounds pretty nifty, doesn’t it?
This means that next time your smart fridge suddenly starts another 13 GB update, or your significant other binge watches another 4K cat telenovela, your Shadow will automatically adjust to the changed bandwidth environment and continue to work smoothly. Please note, you will occasionally notice a very small drop in quality.
Thanks to Dynamic Bitrate, screen fragments, laggy gameplay or missing sound(bits) will be greatly reduced since fewer packets will be lost.
💡 If you are suffering from above-mentioned issues, lowering your bandwidth allocation for Shadow can help a lot. The higher the selected Mbit/s, the more packets are sent per time interval and in this case, the more packets are also lost per time interval.
The freedom to choose how to play games always remains yours with Shadow. This new feature is turned on by default on the next Shadow Launcher update (3.6), but remains entirely optional.
The Dynamic Bitrate sits alongside most of the other options behind the cog-symbol in your launcher. Here you can comfortably switch it on and off as much, and often as you like. If you feel very daring, you can even change this setting using the Quick Menu.
One more thing before you leave:
💡 Please don’t confuse Dynamic Bitrate with “automatic bandwidth”, which is the bandwidth recommendation based on the result of your Shadow in-launcher speed test. The automated bandwidth does not automatically change your bandwidth while using your Shadow, and only does so each time you do a speedtest within your launcher.
And now, have fun and game on!