Nvidia launches Grid on-demand streaming gaming service

There’s another streaming games service on the way, this time from Nvidia.

It’s called Grid and it will be offered free to owners of Nvidia’s Shield handheld and tablet from November 18th through to June 30th 2015.

The company claims to have built a grid – get it? – of thousands of Nvidia GPUs embedded in data centres round the world, amounting to 20 petaflops of compute power. This is a feat it claims equals the fastest supercomputer in the US.

20 games will be available at launch:

• Astebreed
• Alan Wake American Nightmare
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Batman: Arkham City
• Borderlands
• Borderlands 2
• Brutal Legend
• Darksiders
• Darksiders 2
• Dead Island
• Dirt 2
• Nail’d
• Psychonauts
• Race Driver Grid
• Saints Row: The Third
• Street Fighter X Tekken
• Strike Suit Zero
• Trine 2
• The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
• Ultra Street Fighter 4

Nvidia has also confirmed that it will be updating its Nvidia Shield tablet to support Google’s latest Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system. That will launch alongside a new 32GB tablet bundle containing Shield-optimsied versions of Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Portal.