Thanks to the advent of cloud gaming, gamers don’t necessarily need the latest and greatest hardware to access the latest and greatest games. But with ease of access comes a myriad of issues—namely unstable Wi-Fi connections that produce a litany of performance and latency issues. Alienware hopes to change that, while simultaneously solving one of the biggest challenges in PC gaming: how to allow players to easily access and play their full game library on any device.
Enter “Concept NYX”, one of many prototypes and concepts from Alienware parent Dell shown off at CES 2022. In the run-up to the Las Vegas conference, PCMag had the opportunity to go hands-on with Concept NYX, Alienware’s bold attempt to harness the power of edge computing for high-performance game processing on the fly.
A Stream for Every Screen
In our short demo of Concept NYX, we started by loading up Cyberpunk 2077 on one computer screen, and Rocket League on another screen across the room. Both games were being streamed locally, directly from the nearby streaming system (that closely resembled a larger computer tower, complete with RGB lighting.)
The games worked as well as they would on any other streaming platform, but the concept really started to make sense when we took a seat on the couch. Through a phone app, the Alienware reps merged both games onto the big TV in front of us, moving the games off their separate devices across the room and onto the same screen. This allowed two of us to play both games independently of one another, side by side, on one TV.
If Concept NYX ever made it to market as a full product, the screen switching would ideally take place in each device’s menus or through a controller button. As a prototype, the representatives had to manually swap which game was being pushed to which screen with the phone app, which wasn’t without its glitches. That’s understandable for a concept.
The core idea of Concept NYX is to make accessing your game catalog as easy as accessing music or movies, drawing from a central library of all your games regardless of where you purchased them. The rudimentary user interface of the concept is a bit like GOG Galaxy 2.0—an app loaded onto each client device will allow you to stream your library of games to that device.
All that’s to say, Concept NYX is not just a computer or an app—but a whole ecosystem. It’s the PC ‘server’ tower and UI, the controllers, and the device screens around your home working in tandem to deliver your games anywhere in your home.
Push Me to the Edge
This is all possible thanks to edge computing. Concept NYX wants to shorten the distance between servers, placing the information in your living room rather than having to communicate with distant servers, which is how cloud streaming works. Because processing happens locally (via the large, ominous PC tower Alienware was using for this demo), it would eliminate latency, offer greater bandwidth, and be an overall more responsive experience.
Alienware hopes that Concept NYX’s unique appeal will bring in not only hardcore gamers, but casual ones too, especially those with large families. In our demo, we were only able to stream Rocket League and Cyberpunk 2077 simultaneously, but Alienware is experimenting with powering up to four game streams at once.
In theory, you can get together with friends around the couch and play a split-screen game, use your corner of the screen to play something totally different, or just watch someone else’s stream, as you would on Twitch. If you’re not interested in playing on the same display, the idea is also that you’d still only need one PC so everyone can play games in separate locations throughout the house.
You might imagine that streaming that many games at once would require a lot of horsepower, and you’re right. Dell didn’t say exactly which specs this closed system has, but it’s clear that serious computing power is key to making the NYX concept possible. Suffice to say, we think it had to have been packing some serious high-end hardware, possibly including multiple GPUs. We can’t imagine it’ll be cheap, though.
Whether Concept NYX is economically feasible (or if it will even work as intended performance-wise) remains to be seen. But with the interest around cloud streaming on the rise thanks to the likes of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Google Stadia, and Amazon Luna, Dell’s effort to offer a localized version of the ability to stream your favorite titles is promising.
