Concept Nyx is Alienware’s home gaming server variant

Often several players live under the same roof. But what happens when all these players want to play at the same time? Wi-Fi mayhem, disputes over who gets the best equipment, and often separations as family members retire to their play caves. Alienware is trying to solve this problem with one powerful mysterious computer.

Concept Nyx is an R&D project announced today. Basically, it’s a home server with enough processing power to allow multiple people to stream PC games from it at the same time. I personally tested the prototype and saw that it runs two gaming sessions at the same time, one user on a non-gaming laptop and the other on a large screen suitable for a living room.

Alienware showed me two players playing at the same time, but its lab is currently testing the Concept Nyx with four players playing at the same time. The rep told me that there is “basically no performance hit”when adding a person, but the demo wasn’t long enough (less than 10 minutes) to confirm that for me.

The concept of Nyx is similar to cloud gaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now and Google Stadia, but instead of streaming games from a server in some remote data center, you’re streaming directly from your home. As everything happens more locally, Alienware expects “lower latency, more throughput and more responsiveness,”Glen Robson, CTO of the Dell Technologies Client Solutions Group, said in a blog post today.

Like cloud gaming services, Concept Nyx will allow you to play on regular non-gaming devices. For example, you can theoretically play on a Dell XPS without a discrete graphics card.

Obviously, all this requires a lot of computing power. I could tell the Concept Nyx was heavy based on its size, but Alienware hasn’t confirmed which or how many processors, graphics cards, or other components were inside. It’s also unclear what cooling methods will be used to keep it cool for extended periods of time.

One thing I appreciated about Concept Nyx is that while it encourages family members to play frequently, it also encourages physical intimacy, which you don’t usually associate with PC gaming. The split-screen feature Alienware is experimenting with will allow two players to play on the same screen at the same time. This means you can play Halo Infinite while your child plays Cyberpunk 2077 and both enjoy the best screen in the house while sitting side by side and, dare I say it, talking to each other.

Alienware also showed off the Nyx concept, which tracks where you are in the game so you can move from your bedroom PC to your living room PC and keep playing with ease.

In the same vein, Concept Nyx aims to make gaming easier to access by bringing all PC games together in one app, no matter where you originally got it from. “Gaming on the Concept Nyx should be as easy as accessing your favorite music, TV shows and movies,” Robson said.

In theory, Alienware will never be able to turn it into something you can actually buy. However, Alienware will continue to develop the project, so perhaps one day we will see something like this or even some of its features in a shipping product.