Can you tell it's CES week? In addition to Nvidia's Project SHIELD handheld, the company has shared further details on its cloud gaming initiative. While they aren't releasing a product that consumers will be able to directly use themselves, Nvidia's GRID system promises to improve the experience of playing games streamed over the Internet.

These systems, which pack 240 GPUs and can process up to 200 teraflops -- approximately the processing equivalent of 700 Xbox 360s, according to Nvidia -- will be used by cloud-gaming companies. So far, Nvidia has partnered with companies like Agawi, CloudUnion, Cyber Cloud, G-Cluster, Playcast, and Ubitus, reports Polygon.

The real takeaway here is that, hopefully, we won't have to wait too much longer before all streamed games can truly rival the visual fidelity and latency of playing on local hardware. We'll get there one day. It will be nice when this stuff just "works" and we don't have to hear about it.

Nvidia unveils Nvidia GRID, its new cloud-based gaming hardware [Polygon]