Today, French cloud platform SHADOW announced ‘Neo‘, a new tier of its cloud gaming offering. Neo replaces the previous ‘Boost’ tier with much-improved specifications, delivering greatly accelerated performance in gaming (up to 150%) and software (up to 200%). All current subscribers at the Boost tier have been upgraded to Neo, which is still priced at $37.99 monthly, taxes excluded. These are the updated specs:
- CPU: AMD EPYC – 8 vCores @ 3.25-3.8GHz
- GPU: Equivalent to NVIDIA RTX 4060 16GB (Server-grade NVIDIA RTX 2000 ADA 16GB)
- RAM: 16GB DDR5
- Network: 1Gb/s fiber connection
- OS: Windows 10/11
Olivier Abecassis, CEO at Shadow, said in a statement:
Neo is our newest and most versatile cloud PC yet. Whether you’re gaming in 2K with RTX and DLSS, editing complex 3D models, or working on the go, Shadow Neo gives you the power of a high-end PC — instantly and from anywhere.
The new configuration supports DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, RTX, DLSS, FSR, and Frame Generation. This, however, raises the question of whether the Power tier makes any sense anymore. Currently, Power provides access to a similar CPU and an older GPU, the RTX 3070 Ti. When factoring in the fact that the RTX 4060 has access to DLSS Frame Generation while the RTX 3070 Ti does not, paying $50 for the Power tier does not make much sense, as the performance is nearly the same in some games. SHADOW will have to upgrade this tier too shortly to make it viable again.
Overall, you might be baffled to hear about such high prices compared to, for example, NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW platform, which lets you rent an RTX 4080-class GPU for $20 monthly. The big difference is that SHADOW gives you access to a whole PC, so you can use it however you see fit. That means installing any kind of software, or, staying within the gaming subject, being able to install mods for your PC games, which isn’t really possible on GeForce NOW (or similar competitors like Boosteroid).
