SHADOW.TECH REVIEW [2020] Is cloud gaming any good?

is the shadow tech service worth it no paid promotion no sponsorship no affiliate links no bullsh I’m in the middle of moving so please excuse this studio here it’s not exactly attractive anyway if you’re new here I’m Daniel and we’re into getting the most out of our computers around here so if that’s something that you’re into go ahead and hit the subscribe button and the little bell down there so you don’t miss anything we also have a discord server that is pretty much dead and we could really use your help getting it going the link is in the description if that’s something that you think you could help with so for those of you that don’t know shadow is marketed as a cloud gaming platform but what it really is is a powerful Windows 10 virtual machine that’s hosted in the cloud it’s not like stadia or g-force now where you have a predefined library of games to choose from it’s a full on Windows desktop so first things first let’s talk about pricing and plans as of right now there’s three plans that are available or at least will become available eventually the first one being boost which is what I’m subscribed to and that’ll get you four Xeon cores 12 gigs of ram and the equivalent of a gtx 1080 for 14 bucks a month and in the summer of 2020 you’ll be able to scale that all the way up to the infinite package which will run you a solid 50 bucks a month that being said if you sign up a right now for Boost you’ll still have to wait until almost the end of July to actually use your machine availability has been an issue since I started using the service almost a year ago and when I signed my son up for it as a Christmas gift there was no mention of a wait like there is now but it wasn’t until the end of January when it was actually activated so we had to wait almost an entire month to use it which was which was a bummer so it is nice to see that there being more up front with the wait times now so after your machine is activated interacting with it is pretty straight forward once you start it up you get presented with your machines desktop and you install and play games the same way you would on a regular PC this means that it literally supports any game that is compatible with Windows 10 furthermore and this is what I primarily use it for it supports any software that runs on Windows 10 I almost exclusively edit my videos on my shadow PC Premiere and after-effects run incredibly smooth and wildly increases my productivity it’s nice to be able to have the media encoder rendering my video which is incredibly CPU intensive and I can just minimize shadow and let it run in the background without it dragging anything else that I want to do on the computer to a screeching halt the games also look great rarely have I seen any sort of artifacts that I would consider detrimental on occasion it has been noticeable but it’s been nothing more than a minor inconvenience that’s cleared up quickly and it’s usually my fault because I’m downloading something in the background and eating a bandwidth or my wife is watching Netflix or my son is downstairs playing on in his shadow machine I tried recording a demo for you guys but YouTube is going to completely ruin it anyway so I’m not even going to show it because the compression from YouTube would make the whole demonstration moot moving on the settings are all pretty straightforward and the defaults will probably work for 99% of people if you’re gonna use any USB peripherals you just have to install the USB driver which was completely painless just simply click the install drivers button and once the drivers are installed you can just tick off the devices you want to forward off to your shadow machine while you’re running it shadow also has built-in controller support which is pretty awesome I haven’t tested it thoroughly I don’t really use a controller when I play games but I did plug in my PlayStation controller and it automatically detected it and it’ll automatically detect any of the controllers that you have plugged in and it’ll pass it through to your shadow PC automatically additionally they have support for spoofing your PlayStation controller which I thought was pretty neat I usually have to use a third-party tool but with shadow I didn’t have to as far as the network connection there’s really nothing I can complain about a solid gigabit connection down and hundred megs up I don’t really know what more you could possibly need you can see here I install this game that’s just under a gig in size in a few seconds so storage was one of my biggest complaints using shadow in the past some games like modern warfare a whopping 180 gig download but they have addressed that and added the option to increase your storage for a fee it took a while for me to get it because availability is limited but I eventually did and it’s a fair price in my opinion at only $2.99 for an additional 250 gigs of space my main worry was always gonna be input lag and it has been an issue at times this is directly correlated to your latency to the shadow data center however and there’s a lot of things that influence it I have a hundred megabit per second connection in my house I’m relatively close to the Chicago datacenter and my computer is hardwired but I have noticed that if both me and my son are running shadow at the same time plus others in the house streaming video my latency has a tendency to increase naturally even at its worst though the input lag is minimal it’s probably noticeable for super competitive players or for games that require super fast reaction times but for me chipping away at a video project or something like that it’s never been an issue I honestly had a hard time coming up with cons to add to this video some things I’d like to see in the future maybe would be support for multiple monitors an implementation like TeamViewer where you have multiple windows that you can drag to your monitors would be pretty great but I can see how it wouldn’t be a priority as this mainly as targeted at running a game in full-screen and you wouldn’t need multiple monitors for that the only other big issue I’ve had has been availability and I don’t really think there’s anything anyone can do about that they can only grow as fast as they can grow and at least they’re being upfront and honest before you sign up now which i think is fantastic so overall the games look great they play smoothly there used to be somewhat frequent outages but that’s been resolved and is no longer an issue storage used to be limited but they took care of that I think the company really listens to its users and is providing a useful service for a fair price there’s not really much negative that I can say about them I hope you found this useful if you have any questions I’ll happily answer them in the comments or on discord but until next time peace .