Geforce Now game streaming is like magic – and it puts Xbox’s cloud effort to shame
Geforce Now game streaming is like magic – and it puts Xbox’s cloud effort to shame
Maybe the CMA was right about the importance of game streaming, just not with regard to Xbox.
Maybe the CMA was right about the importance of game streaming, just not with regard to Xbox.
It's not magic, it's an Nvidia server you're paying for on a time share. And it's decent, but frankly, as the kind of person that can tell when my 120Hz VRR display is hitting a flat frametime by eye it's nowhere near comparable to local play, even in optimal circumstances.
Streaming is a nice option when you need a hardware-independent, location-independent way to run a heavy game, or as a stopgap when your client hardware can't cut it with a modern release the cloud service covers, but it's not an optimal experience and it's problematic if it becomes a primary way to run games for a host of other reasons. I actually find GFN to be a solid idea, in terms of tapping into libraries you already own, but it's absolutely a secondary, value-added solution to either running games on client or even pushing your own stream from a server you own.
Nvidia absolutely does not care about dedicated gaming GPUs anymore though, this is where their focus currently resides. Do you understand how much money Nvidia makes on their server hardware vs the consumer graphics card market? It's absolutely disgusting how much their server offerings are making them right now. They don't care about anecdotal scenarios like yours where you can tell a 120Hz VRR displaying is hitting a flat frame time. There will be a day when Nvidia just won't offer midrange graphics cards anymore, because it's just going to cost too much with little return on their investment over the server hardware and subscriptions.
As a regular user of this service, it's very good, although not perfect, a few bugs, some ux issues with the different game providers, but nothing unsolvable. The customer support is surprisingly reactive too.
disclaimer: tested on a 10Gb/s simmetric connexion and an urban 5G network
Geforce Now has been good the few times I've tried it (note that I have Cable internet with a direct ethernet connection to my computer and I don't use wi-fi) but there's just barely enough latency that those who are latency sensitive can notice it.
Fine for slower paced games, but potentially an issue for faster paced ones depending on how hard they are.