CES2022: Alien Nyx Game Streaming Server

What if you could start playing Halo Infinity on TV, continue hacking and slashing Gollum while you go to the bathroom, and complete your session in a notebook when you should be working? That's the basic philosophy of Alienware's Concept Nyx, a powerful server that's powerful enough to run all your games across your home network. Think about it, it's like Plex for games, but instead of opening up your video library, it's about bringing your game to all your devices.

Given Google Stadia and Xbox's push for game streaming, Alienware may have found an interesting solution for multiplayer families. As you can imagine, you can run two games on TV at the same time, as we saw in a demo in New York City recently. Or you can play Cyberpunk while others perfect their Rocket League skills on another device. Since all rendering and network processing happens in your home, Nyx will also have a lower latency experience than traditional cloud games, which rely on servers hundreds of miles away.

However, concept is the key word here. Alienware representatives won't tell us what the power of the mysterious Nyx server is, it looks like a giant gaming desktop. While Engadget's Cherrynn Low and I were able to play Cyberpunk 2077 and Rocket League at the same time on a single TV, the games ran in tiny windows. That's a far cry from the slick half-screen experience dell shows in the promotional image.

Like Alienware's Concept UFO, a Switch-like portable gaming pc first demonstrated two years ago, Nyx may never appear in reality. But we can see elements of it in future products, like the way UFO controllers are used to demonstrate Nyx. The concept of a game server can ultimately simplify streaming from your device. That's something we can already do with Steam's remote playback feature, but maybe Dell can make it easier for you to play all your games at home. The company says it's also exploring ways to run four games at once, as well as ways to collect all of them, no matter where you install them.

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