Before Christmas and Covid rudely interrupted my 2022 work flow, I was testing a power upgrade to Shadow's streaming PC service (opens in new tab). And I really wanted it to be great. I've been a longtime fan of this French company's approach to streaming, especially the service's more libertarian leanings, and I regularly used the technology to play games on the go when I couldn't carry a high-powered desktop PC.

However, the service was not without its problems, given that the original company went bankrupt (though the service was never interrupted) and it took about three years for the promised upgrade from the original GTX 1080-level graphics core to actually materialize.

But Shadow's basic concept meant that I was desperate for it to look fresh. It's an idea unlike any other streaming service, providing an app-based portal to a remote PC with virtually no latency. It's an app that works with virtually any device and can instantly turn it into a high spec computer. The high-spec computer is yours, you can install any app, run any program.

At least that was the original plan; even when it launched in 2018, the GTX 1080 was already a couple of years old, and its quad-core, eight-thread CPU and the 12GB of memory to support it clearly felt like a previous-generation product. Therefore, the vaunted RTX 2080 upgrade promised for 2019 was supposed to be the next step up for the service.

However, financial and server hardware troubles caused the company to repeatedly postpone the rollout until 2021, when it filed for bankruptcy (open in new tab). Subsequent changes in ownership have kept many of the original key players in place, and the philosophy remains the same today, with upgraded services that are much more expensive than the original, but actually offer rather disappointing specs.

Now, for $45 per month - $15 more than the GTX 1080 base level and $25 more than GeForce Now's Ultimate tier (open in new tab) - you can get the gaming horsepower of an RTX 3070 or unspecified AMD RDNA 2 GPU. But don't be misled by the FAQ (opens in new tab) that states you may be able to connect to an RTX 4000 GPU, as there was no silent Ada update in the package. This simply refers to the RTX A4500 Pro-Class GPU that we use as a performance analog to the RTX 3070 card.

However, the CPU is a quad-core, 8-thread equivalent, and the memory has only been upgraded to 16GB. It also comes with only 256 GB of storage, but can be upgraded to 2 TB if you pay for it.

Back in 2018, I happily forgave its middling specs for its seamless ability to deliver real gaming performance on a low-spec Dell XPS 13 office notebook. At the time, $27 per month was still expensive, but much cheaper than buying a comparable PC on credit.

Nor was there any serious competition; Stadia just wasn't for me, and GeForce Now was still in its infancy. And Shadow was either going to offer higher performance as subscription rates upgraded in the future as the service upgraded (another bonus from buying a fixed PC spec with credits), or if I was content to stick with my current virtual setup I was promised that it would either go down or up.

Of course, neither option materialized.

And now, with GPU performance equivalent to the sixth tier of Nvidia's previous generation graphics cards being touted as "Power Upgrade" and higher than GeForce Now and its RTX 4080-level games, making the case for spending $45 per month on a Shadow PC is difficult.

To be fair, this is calculated as $540 per year, and at this rate it would take sub 3 years to equal the cost of a full RTX 3070 machine right now. But it depends on what you do. If you just want to play games, dropping the $20/month for the top tier of GeForce Now will give you access to a huge number of games on much better hardware.

But whereas both Shadow and GeForce Now require you to own every game you play on their services, Shadow has no restrictions; if you want to play old games emulated in DOSBox, you absolutely can with Shadow! And you can also play Kerbal Space Program or Elden Ring; not all of what you can access on Nvidia's streaming service is available because of publisher and other limitations.

And despite the previous generation hardware, all the good things about Shadow remain, and its streaming technology remains truly impressive. I like the fact that running Shadow PC in full screen on a low-spec laptop is often almost impossible to tell that it is not actually running on the local machine. It also works on touchscreens, which many other streaming platforms have struggled with, as does Steam's in-home streaming.

I've always been surprised at how effective the service is even at low bandwidth levels, although artifacts can occur with fast-moving content on lower performing network connections. If you prefer classic PC strategy games over FPS or action games then you won't have to worry about it. As is my wont, I've played many hours of Football Manager on Shadow on really bad AirBnB and hotel networks, and I have only generally good things to say about the experience.

And it's still just a PC. With a super-fast Internet connection. It's connected to a virtual machine in the datacenter, so when I download on Shadow, it's a direct connection and I get 1Gb speeds at the source. I download Steam games at almost 100MB/s.

Obviously, if I try to upload to the Shadow PC via a USB stick plugged into my laptop, for example, the bottleneck is my connection. At least here in the UK, uploads often lag far behind download speeds, and this has long been a problem I have had when trying to actually work with virtual machines.

So, back to the painfully old specs of "power upgrades": what makes Shadow better than GeForce Now is that it is a complete PC and not just a gaming rig. My first experience with this setup was at Gamescom in 2017, and after watching a series of game demos, someone I was talking with pulled out his phone and showed me how to quickly edit large Photoshop and InDesign files with a simple Android app.

Having a powerful virtual machine that can handle the demands of high-end productivity software as well as gaming means that all the PCs you need are in the cloud and accessible from anywhere. Even if there is a 4G signal.

However, the fact that the one-eighth EPYC 7543P CPU is limited to the same four-core, eight-thread limit as the old spec means that it is likely to actually have a weaker processor than the laptop running Shadow. Unless you are running it on a netbook or an aging Chromebook. So any productivity tasks on the Shadow PC will be slow, and that aspect is almost entirely removed from the positive side of the balance sheet of a stream machine. You won't be able to do anything on a Shadow that you can't do on a basic office notebook.

And this weak 2.8GHz equivalent CPU also hinders gaming performance. Single-core Cinebench R23 numbers are well below even the $130 Ryzen 5 5500, a $130 CPU that can outshine the best CPUs Shadow has to offer.

Also, the raw 3DMark Time Spy Extreme score is 14% slower than the average RTX 3070 GPU score. In other words, the "power upgrade" doesn't even bring the full performance of the RTX 3070 graphics card.

After all, as much as I really wanted to love the experience of this update to Shadow's top tier, it already feels incredibly low-end. The overall utility of having a desktop PC accessible from anywhere is still useful, and if Shadow had kept the original plan (opens in new tab) and kept the original price for updates, but lowered the price of the older tier to about $12/month, I would be a better choice I would have put all my efforts into that as the best option. However, the GTX 1080 version is still $30/month, despite being what can only be described as old hardware by today's standards.

The actual service is still superior in its delivery methods, and Shadow's streaming technology is still supremely impressive. However, the combination of high monthly fees, mid-range GPU options, and thoroughly low-end processor power means that the promise of a high-spec online PC is not being delivered through "power upgrades."

It is with layers of sadness that I must conclude with the words that have been circling in my head the entire time I have been testing "Power Upgrade". I can only say that this service is a shadow of its former self, and I am truly sorry that it has become so, and in the end I couldn't resist the weak pun.