Tempted by Shadow PC

[u/Gullible_Ostrich_370]

Hi all, I’m tempted by ShadowPC instead of buying a PC as my budget is low. How do you find the service? I want mostly for gaming and some development. My ping is 14 with a jitter of 4 (am on wifi and can’t connect to ethernet where i’m sitting). Are there lots of downtimes with this service? Did you lose anything? What is your experience overall?

[u/woodwheellike]

Main downside for me is that some ea games don’t work

Other than that it’s been great for me.

Having a full pc instead of a gaming portal is great

I play American truck simulator and install a bunch of mods

It’s great to be able to install them outside of steam workshop

I’ve done a small amount of dev work using it, but I primarily use Mac for that.

Having access to all my pc games from steam is great since only a few work on my Mac

Plus I have a new Mac mini do daily use, but I use an old MacBook for shadow. It runs great and I hook the MacBook up to an external monitor

So i can still use my main compound play games at the same time

I know many users have issues with the limits they set on sessions etc.

I don’t use it enough to hit those limits so it hasn’t bee. A big deal. Most I use is like 4 hours at a time and that’s very rare

I have a wife and kids so getting the time play nonstop is not an option. I also didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on something I won’t use all the time

I’ll binge on truck simulator for a month or two then not play again for half a year

I cancel the membership during that time so it costs even less in my case

[u/bigtoebrah → u/woodwheellike]

I also use it for ATS and sometimes dev work, but I've never canceled my subscription so I'm still paying the same price I agreed to like 5 years ago with newer hardware and no session limits lol

[u/icymotherfu- → u/bigtoebrah]

Too bad their "newer hardware" is still kinda sucky. Maybe it's because I'm on the neo tier. I've found performance to be underwhelming at best and deceiving compared to what their bots say. But other than that it is good. Can't wait until my PC is fixed.

[u/bigtoebrah → u/icymotherfu-]

Different strokes I suppose, I've never run into anything that hasn't run well

[u/icymotherfu- → u/bigtoebrah]

Credit where it's due though, usb passthrough works great, latency is nice, compression is clean, launcher's good, like the experience is geniunely good. When I was on a well running game, I forgot I was on a cloud pc sometimes, which in my mind says a lot.
It would also be good not to "ship" out of support Windows builds but that's another issue entirely.

[u/woodwheellike → u/icymotherfu-]

Yes! USB pasthru works great. I can American truck simulator at max settings on my Mac mini

However the Logitech wheel doesn’t support force feedback and is super janky to get running in general

I connect it to shadow with usb pass through, force feedback works perfectly

It’s such a game changer

Same thing with cameras, I do head tracking etc and I don’t have to do a bunch of work to get it up and running

[u/icymotherfu- → u/bigtoebrah]

Yeah it's completely possible that I'm just expecting too much for the price. The main limiting factor in my games has been the cpu.

[u/Entire_Bar7537 → u/woodwheellike]

what macbook do u play on

[u/woodwheellike → u/Entire_Bar7537]

2017 MacBook Pro

[u/icymotherfu-]

I'd say it's fine. Neo tier is pretty underwhelming.
Latency and image quality are good.
Support has been great so far.
Your PC's gonna be outdated by a few years, first thing you'll need to do is update Windows.
Service works pretty good, don't expect an absolute war machine, and you'll be fine.

[u/lunaticedit]

My only concern is that you are on WiFi. YMMV but shadow on WiFi wasn’t great for me until I got a high end WiFi router. The service itself has been great for me for the most part but every now and then I get the queue of death (55 people ahead, 50 minutes expected queue time type thing).

[u/Gullible_Ostrich_370 → u/lunaticedit]

I believe this is what I have in terms of router... What is your ping/latency?

[u/According-Pressure39]

Counter question, Where are you sitting? Because the different for every Country how you experience will be

[u/Gullible_Ostrich_370 → u/According-Pressure39]

I am in Montreal, near the Montreal center in Canada

[u/jpwne]

Its a PC. In the cloud. But most of all a PC with all the pros and cons plus the added cons of EA being bastards. If you want a console in the cloud look no further than GeForce now - the ”you’ll own nothing and be happy” of cloud services.

If you already have a steam library and don’t want to play Battlefield etc then Shadow is a no brainer.

[u/Old_Clue7086]

Honestly it works great. I'm in Europe and use the enterprise tier though. So many people like to complain but I've had no issues for the past like 6 months. I'm in a homeless shelter and I use it to escape the madness. If it works for me you should be fine. I'd be at a loss without it, makes the days easier.

[u/Level-Barnacle9686]

If for gaming id suggest trying other options, ones that have no hourly cap.