Why?

I came across Shadow Tech some time back when Linus took a tour at Shadow Tech. I was very interested because I didn’t have a gaming PC at home.

All I had was a lousy LG Gram. I mean I could have played some games. And I still do play some Factorio, as well as some other 2D steam games. But even those tend to struggle and I can’t do anything else while playing games.

My Current System

Ofcourse I wanted a gaming rig, but that could never happen. I can’t affort one out of my own allowance. And even with the money, I don’t have the space to put a gaming rig.

So eventually I looked for alternatives.

The alternatives

  1. Streaming games from my work pc

    I could do this.. But HR and IT would be down my neck and I wouldn’t want to lose my job over gaming.

  2. Make a rig on AWS

    I looked into this. NVidia seems to be providing their own AMI. But I heard that pricing is ambiguos. Currently they are pricing at around $0.831 per hour depending on the area. So if I wanted a 24hr running gaming rig to stream Steam games, it would cost me a whopping $700 a month. You know.. you can by a cheap gaming rig with that money. And even a small office with internet and electricity to leave the gaming rig.

  3. GeForce Now, XCloud, Stadia and the others

    1. I tried Microsoft XCloud when it was in beta. I liked it. But the games was stuck with games on Xbox/Microsoft Store
    2. I didn’t try the NVidia one. I was thinking about trying it. But then publishers started pulling their games.
    3. Stadia… well.. You know… it’s cloud console.. Not exactly what I wanted.
    4. The others.. well I can’t remember. But maybe there were others.

  4. Shadow Tech

    Then I heard about shadow tech. This seemed to be exactly what I wanted. Doesn’t cost a fortune and I can play my steam games! The sad thing is.. they didn’t have a server in Korea which would cause a shit ton of latency so I had to just hope for them to make a server in Korea.

Time passes

Some time had past. We ran into Covid19. We started working from home.. WITH MY CRAPPY LAPTOP!! Although we did use remote desktop to our work stations and working wasn’t that different, what did change was my occasional gaming sessions during lunch hours. Bummer.

Then one day.. I came across a few Korean Youtubers talking about shadow and reviewing it. One of them had a link to how he got it. Interestingly, Shadow was doing a BETA in Korea with people owning LG laptops! People had to apply, wait, and just hope to get picked.

I just signed up.. it was in the middle of the signup period, They were giving out BETAs. And a few days later, I received an email with a code to run Shadow PC for 2 weeks. WOOT!

The experience

Pricing

First of all. The price in Korea is a little different. It is beta but we can “extend” the usage if we subscribe. It is 19000 KRW for Shadow boost which is about $18~$19. It seems to be much more expensive then the US pricing which is $11.99 for Shadow boost. Shadow Ultra, which gives you 4K, more storage, and RTX, is $24.99. Funny thing is currently Shadow boost in Korea includes RTX.. because they use a Quadro P series in the US and the Quadro RTX series in Korea! So the pricing seemed OK as long as they don’t change the hardware.

RTX?

I don’t own a lot of games with RTX. But I did try some because I wanted to know if we really did have Raytracing capabilities.

  1. Quake 2 RTX Quake2 This was fun. Old memories but with better lighting!! My reflexes are not what they used to be.. :(

  2. World of warcraft WoW Interestingly WoW has raytracing capabilites. I only checked if the option was available. And it was!! Awesome! Although I did run into some problems which I will talk about later in this post

Although I was tempted to get Cyberpunk2077 and run that, I just didn’t have the time to play it and there still seems to be a lot of noise from it.

Actual gaming

  1. GTA V

    It ran mostly ok. Not super great. But moderate graphics gave nice FPS. Forgot to get a screenie. The only problem was that Shadow only gives 256G, and GTA was about 90G. So I had to uninstall before running other games

  2. World of warcraft

    This was great. I did have problems at first because my mouse jumped so my view in WoW was just horrible. But locking my cursor(Alt+Win+M) into Shadow Client fixed it. Too bad I can’t alt+tab out anymore.

  3. Factorio

    I love factorio. I run it on my LG Gram. It is now super optimized that it would run decently on it. But now I can do proper megabasing.

Problems

Problems exists with Shadow.

Mouse

Some games just had to have cursor locked. This is annoying because I can’t switch out easily.

Mobile Client

The mobile client suuuuuuuuucks. I am not expecting it to be like Steam mobile client, but the overall experience was really horrible. I just can’t use it like other remote desktops.

Automatic shutdowns

I have heard that pre-CoVid19 the idle shutdowns were at 2.5hrs.. which should be long enough for most game sessions. But now they just shut down after 30 minutes of idle. Idle here means no keyboard or mouse interaction in the Shadow client. So I can’t stream with Steam. And I can’t leave it all night to play idle games.

Overall

I am happy with Shadow PC. The pricing could have been better since I don’t play games with ray tracing. I am thinking about subscribing. Just hope their pricing gets better.