Gaikai and NVIDIA to bring next generation console gaming to Android with GeForce GRID

Cloud gaming on Android is going to get a shot of adrenaline later this year. Today at the GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced that their new Kepler chip was the world’s first GPU for cloud computing and it would be powering Gaikai‘s multi-platform gaming service.

Gaikai’s open cloud gaming platform offers a fully managed system that is optimized to deliver high-end video games and applications within seconds to all leading web browsers, operating systems, and devices. The Gaikai app is already available on Facebook and it will be coming to Android devices in the second half of this year.

Gaikai will work on on types of displays.

We have already seen other cloud gaming platforms like OnLive, but they suffered from lag and didn’t offer a wide variety of brand new games. Gaikai is focused on next-generation titles from the leading game developers and they say they have fixed the lag problem with the help of NVIDIA.

GeForce GRID will offer the same game experience as traditional consoles.

NVIDIA’s Kepler chip allows for virtualized GPUs so a single server can power thousands of low-latency remote displays. Gaikai has designed custom servers and distributed them in data centers across the globe, and they claim to offer the lowest latency, highest quality experiences possible.

To demonstrate the technology in action Gaikai showed off an upcoming game called Hawken that was running on the ASUS Transformer Prime. This first-person shooter mech game looked amazing and it easily topped anything we have ever seen on Android. The developer Adhesive Games says Hawken will be available on December 12th, but we expect Gaikai and other games should hit Android before then.

Right now we don’t have a release date for Gaikai on Android, but I highly suggest you play with their Facebook app for a quick demo. I just wasted a good 30 minutes playing Dead Rising 2, and I can’t wait for this service to come to Android devices. Check out Gaikai’s promo video below to get a feel of some of the other games that are already available to play.

Does this look like a service you would pay to play on Android?