A week ago Alienware announced and demod its new Concept Nyx gaming server solution. It’s a box that’s designed to let multiple PC games be streamed to other devices and played at the same time.
Currently, we’ve only seen a few reactions to hands-on demos, and there’s almost no information about what’s actually in the box. Reaching out to Dell, we had some of our questions about Concept Nyx answered by David Zavelson from the company’s Experience Innovation Group. Alienware is keeping pretty tight lipped about what’s under the hood of Concept Nyx, but we managed to get some clarification about some aspects of the game streaming solution.
Sadly, as before stated we still don’t know what the actual specs for Concept Nyx are but that’s largely because Dell is still experimenting with those aspects. Zavelson explained there are many facets that are coming together, both in hardware and software.
“The iteration we have showcased builds on core Dell and Alienware gaming platform expertise but has been designed in tandem with the Concept Nyx software stack for a different class of game streaming experiences than anything that exists today.”
Best gaming PC: the top pre-built machines from the pros
Best gaming laptop: perfect notebooks for mobile gaming
Given there are current demos a ballpark or even approximate price point would be nice but with all the current changes and challenges of the market it makes sense Dell is keeping this under wraps.
Zavelson also clarified the intent behind Concept Nyx. We took it as one PC to replace four, which it is in a way but for those wanting the absolute top tier gaming PC experience, a dedicated PC is the way to go over something like Concept Nyx. This isn’t designed to give you the most ray traced FPS tier excellence, instead it’s about doing a good job at streaming multiple games to several screens of all kinds at once.
“We are able to support simultaneous gameplay across multiple users through the full concept solution that we've created which is a combination of hardware and software - the central piece of which is a high-performance edge server.” explained Zavelson. “We aren't sharing any details yet on the internal components, but we are leveraging our breadth of skills & expertise across Dell technologies.”
So again, we aren’t likely to see many details about the hardware of Concept Nyx anytime soon, but we did manage to find out a bit more about the software. From the demos we couldn’t tell which stores were supported or the software used to stream. Dell has confirmed that it is proprietary streaming software, that will run from multiple stores like Steam and Epic, which actually sounds pretty interesting even without this server box.
“We've designed the Concept Nyx user interface to be an aggregated view across all of your PC game titles regardless of where they were purchased. So no matter what device you are playing on, you could see a common view and could be able to quickly launch and play any of your games. Concept Nyx could allow you to play games from virtually any store and more importantly, have multiple games being run simultaneously from different devices.”
An Aggregate store for a PC isn’t a new concept, you can add other games to Steam and stream them with remote play, and GoG Galaxy has been around for yonks as a way to see all your games in one space. But that’s a bit niche and requires some setup work and know-how from the user. Something that does this natively, and presents all your games as streaming options when connected to does sound like a promising development. It’d be especially good if this software can be used in other builds. Even single streaming PCs could potentially benefit from software like this for when you want to take a break and game on the couch.
Again, how viable Concept Nyx is likely to be will come down to the price. A household that’s looking to game together will hopefully be able to pick up one of these for cheaper than it would be to do a comparable setup each, and of course if not then what’s the point? Many households have a screen per person of some kind but not necessarily a PC to use it, and this could be a great solution for share houses and families. Again, hardcore PC gamers wanting the ultimate experience will need to look elsewhere, but with the current chip shortage one PC has to be easier to get than four.
