[Hardware] GeForce Now review: You bring the games, Nvidia streams the hardware

[Love Pulse]

 

 

GeForce Now is Nvidia’s cloud-based game-streaming service. For those who aren’t familiar with this concept, it means that Nvidia provides the hardware firepower via its own media servers. Instead of you installing a game to your PC and needing an expensive GPU to get the most out of it, you just need a strong, stable internet connection and a subscription to Nvidia’s service, which can range from free to $20 per month. Note: The games themselves are not provided at any subscription level. More on that point when we talk about games below.

The plans
GeForce Now currently offers three tiers: Free, Priority, and RTX 3080. 

Uniquely, GeForce Now is currently the only major cloud gaming service offering a Free access plan. While many services offer a temporary free trial, the GeForce Now Free plan is full access to the service with no long-term limitations. However, there are some short-term ones.

Each tier comes with a limit to how long you can be connected to a gaming session at a time. The Free tier is limited to one hour, Priority subscribers can play for up to six hours per session, and RTX 3080 subscribers get eight hour sessions. There is no set limit to the number of sessions you can start in a day. The free tier also doesn’t feature “RTX On,” Nvidia’s term for ray-tracing and DLSS support.

There’s a priority component to the tiers, too, as Nvidia places limitations on the overall process and user loads on GeForce Now’s regional data centers. Free members have the lowest priority in connecting to the service, which can mean waiting in line to connect to a rig at times. Priority and RTX 3080 have priority access to the queue, with RTX 3080 members getting access to systems that provide RTX 3080 GPUs. There may be times when an RTX 3080 rig is not available for a member, which will send that member to the Priority queue instead.

Beyond those varied limitations, GeForce Now advertises up to 1080p at 60 frames-per-second gameplay for its Priority members, and up to 1440p at 120fps for PC/Mac and 4K HDR on Shield TV for its RTX 3080 members.
Additionally, there are internet bandwidth requirements and data usage conditions to consider. GeForce Now requires a minimum of a 15Mbps connection for 720p at 60fps, 25Mbps connection for 1080p at 60fps, and a 35Mbps connection for 1440p at 120fps for the RTX 3080 plan. Additionally, GeForce Now does require a less than 80ms latency from an Nvidia data center, but recommends a less than 40ms latency.

Game library
At first glance, the GeForce Now game library is impressive—until you realize it’s a list of games that are playable on the platform, not a list of games that are provided to you through the subscription as you find on other cloud gaming services.

You have to own your own digital copies of the games you wish to play on GeForce Now—and specifically have to own them on the correct platform for GeForce Now. This can be a bit messy if you’re an existing PC gamer with a fairly large library on Steam or Epic Games Store, because you might own a game on one platform, but despite the game being available to play within GeForce Now, you might have it on the wrong platform to play within.

We ran into exactly this while testing with Control Ultimate Edition. Currently, only the Steam version of Control Ultimate Edition is available to play in GeForce Now, so if you own it on the Epic Games Store, you’re out of luck. However, the original Control release is compatible with both Steam and Epic Game Store releases. None of that helped us though, as our copy of Control Ultimate Edition is on GOG, which largely isn’t supported by GeForce Now with the exception of Cyberpunk 2077 and a few of the Witcher games.

In addition to your owned game library, you can play many Free to Play games such as Fortnite, League of Legends, Destiny 2, Path of Exile, Rocket League, and more through GeForce Now. You do still need to set up your own account access on their relevant platforms.

If you’re keen on the idea of owning your own game library or want to have some flexibility as to where you can game, without having to lug around a gaming rig, this service is worth checking out.

User experience
Getting started with GeForce Now is fairly straightforward. You just have to register yourself with an account, or if you have an existing Nvidia/GeForce account, you can activate GeForce Now on it.

Once logged in and connected, you can choose to access the games through a Chrome, Safari, or Edge browser to try out some games without installing anything. However, in our experience, it’s preferable to try out the native app instead, as the experience seems to work a bit more smoothly in both the menu navigation and in-game compared to the browser experience. Nvidia agrees, and tries to push you to install its app instead of using the browser.