Nvidia Geforce Now launches at $5 a month
nvidia.com
nvidia.com
5 minutes of setup and I'm playing on amazing-looking (to me) settings and it seemed damn fast FPS (to me): looks so good and played great! The input lag was not noticeable (again, to me - not a gamer... I died in Pleasant Park trying to figure out how to build a cone).
I think I might be their core audience for this, and am extremely tempted to sign up for $5 a month. My GPU sucks, hard drive is always "nearly full" so keeping games around isn't an option. For a casual like me this seems... futuristic!
Would have signed up even for $10. Considering the quality of those titles. Compare to other $5 Gaming Subscription like Apple Arcade, Nvidia 's offering is much more attractive.
1) Games that aren't available on my Macbook. Simple things like Legends of Runeterra and Magic Arena and Magic Online. Not super graphically intensive Geforce Now has worked better than Wine/VM solutions
2) Games that my Macbook just can't play like F1 2019. Good enough for both single and multiplayer.
Gonna miss it being free but easily worth $5.
People don't have upfront money. People don't see the value in owning their things - as is intended. Our society is all credit based. As is intended.
> GeForce NOW instantly transforms nearly any laptop, desktop, Mac, SHIELD TV or Android mobile device into the PC gaming rig you’ve always dreamed of. Instantly play the most demanding PC games and seamlessly play across your devices.
Sure, it still might not work out, but I still think they have a better chance than the previous SaaS entrants.
Just look in this thread, the people who are impressed are casual gamers who have no interest in building a gaming PC, and I kinda doubt that group is a reliable customer base.
And when the gaming press reviews these services, they crank up their magnifiers to figure out at exactly what quality level the games are actually being rendered at, and since that is always lower than what hardcore gamers can do themselves on their own hardware, the consensus is always "why bother?".
Good enough quality simply isn't good enough for your prospective customers. And this is why these service are doomed to fail.
I mean, either you're paying nvidia $5 per month, or odds are you're paying them many hundreds of dollars for a GPU every two years. I don't think they're really seeing the downside. Nor does your economic case actually make sense (nvidia is filling their own data center full of their own cards -- they can provide a much higher performance per dollar than they can feeding the same through retail channels).
It's also worth noting that the quality offered by this service easily matches or beats a PS4 or Xbox One X. Not sure why you felt the need to squeeze console gamers in when defining "hardcore" gamers. Quite the contrary for people with a console but who have a desktop or laptop that wouldn't normally be able to give a good experience, this service is wonderful to bridge their experience.
"Just look in this thread, the people who are impressed are casual gamers who have no interest in building a gaming PC"
This is nonsensical gatekeeping. I love the service. I normally game on a pretty beefy "gaming PC" and had fed many thousands of dollars to nvidia over the years. Do I not count because you disagree?
But that's irrelevant. People who talk about their "gaming PC" or try to gate-keep who counts as real gamers are a minority. In no universe is that the make or break market.
Sure, there's an upside for nVidia in this case, since they supply the cards, but since you need to place your rendering farms as close to the customers as possible for latency reasons, you can't have a global pool of cards to handle peaks around the globe, so your utilization rate of the cards is going to be pretty crap.
Better than the utilization rate of the card that sits in my PC, sure, but not that much better.
> It's also worth noting that the quality offered by this service easily matches or beats a PS4 or Xbox One X.
...if you have the bandwidth for it. 4K video eats through data caps pretty damn quick, and if you compress it too hard, you're removing details that you spent GPU time on creating, so you have to balance the render quality with a target compression rate, which means that for an acceptable video bitrate, you're not going to run at full detail, which means a local gaming PC, or a local gaming console, will provide better quality, simply because the bandwidth of an HDMI or DisplayPort cable is unlimited and consistent.
Bandwidth caps are the norm at least in the US market, and you have to take those into account.
> I love the service. I normally game on a pretty beefy "gaming PC" and had fed many thousands of dollars to nvidia over the years. Do I not count because you disagree?
The question is if you are an outlier or the norm. There's been plenty of companies doing exactly this, and they have all pretty much failed. The one good difference I see in this case is that nVidia allows you to grab games from external libraries, games you already "own", that solves a trust issue that plagued all the predecessors. But I'm still pessimistic about this, I don't see what makes the underlying fundamentals different this time, that would magically make this thing work, when all the others have failed.
Feedback from the other 10+ gaming SaaSes suggests everything, but this. This is pretty much a game breaker.
Every time there is a new gaming SaaS, they come challenge that. Even Google with its own backbone network can't provide 50-70ms in the best case demo room scenario, and jitter is simply impossible to mitigate on anything, but the top tier switches that are too expensive for residential ISPs.
Eh? My ping time to google.com from my home internet connection is less than 6ms.
Or were you talking about total frame time?
It's consistently sub-50ms latency (on my home network). Sure, the latency will never be acceptable for fast-paced games like Fortnite or Rocket League, but for slower games like Assassin's Creed or Destiny, it's not even noticeable.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/valve-appears-to-be-w...
Word of caution - if you have a bandwidth limit it burns through it pretty quickly.
Then there are comments here talking about 4K, but Nvidia only seems to mention 720p and 1080p. Sure, most users' network connection probably isn't good enough, but why not tell us? It could certainly be a selling point for connecting this to a 4K television.
(Disclaimer: I'm an NVIDIA employee who works on unrelated projects, but I really enjoyed using the beta of GeForce Now.)
That doesn’t seem like a wise choice.
Ordinarily no product needs to target 1% platforms, but this product specifically seems like its early adopters would naturally be non-Windows desktop users. Cutting off half of that crucial adoption seems ... stupid.
Both numbers are significantly higher than Linux.
"Selected user account does not exist in tenant 'NVIDIA Corporation' and cannot access the application 'https://preview.nvidia.com' in that tenant. The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant first. Please use a different account."
Something about it feels creepy to me, but I can't place what.
It's also a nice way to force yourself to play for only an hour and then go do something else, or at least consciously make the choice to play for longer than you intended.
Oh even better... Logging out doesn't log you out, I had to clear cookies to actually log out. Edit: Uhhh, even that didn't work, wth is going on here?
The performance, in my experience, has been fantastic. Suddenly on my MBP I can play games that were only previously on my Windows box with a beefy GPU. Better still the fans stay at a minimal level -- on this machine it's barely more than streaming a video. I have a dislike for hearing the GPU fan grinding and this is a relief.
On the flip side if you aren't really close to one of their data centers, it isn't a great experience for twitch FPS games. I tried pubg and it...worked, but I fell from competitive to pretty mediocre given that everyone else had a couple of frames head start.
Still, it's an instant sign up for me. Even for games that I can play locally on my laptops, like Civ 6, doing so with minimal local power suckage, heat and fan grind makes it worth it. I'm outsourcing those to an nvidia datacenter, of course, but better than than in my lap. My experience with this has been much better than even Steam in-house streaming (where I used that big beefy Windows box with a high-end GPU in another room to play from my MBP).
And for those who questioned how the process works, for a steam game it kicks you into a virtualized version of steam that you log into. On first play you "install" the game but they seem to have images for everything so it's instant. Then you play in a virtualized session. It's very well done.
The link to Steam is extremely interesting to me, I did not own gaming hardware (except for a Switch) for long time.
There are some quirks with it especially around getting the resolution right. Sometimes the output is a bit blurry because it doesn't quite match the resolution/aspect ratio of your screen.
I would say that it is worth giving this a try. The free limited version is idea for as a trial.
But yes, latency does affect and may be a deal breaker for.some games.
The best part is that your Steam saves sync and the laptop stays cool.
I'm pretty sure I could get that most days even though I live out in the boonies, but it looks like Linux isn't a supported platform and GOG isn't a supported storefront. That's kind of a bummer.
Stadia does use Linux, however Stadia has made an enormous number of missteps and seems very close to DOA so I'm not sure they're a good example of much.
For the reference, RTX shouldn't depend on the OS, since it's supported as a Vulkan extension.
Not that I like Stadia to begin with. They help Linux gaming only tangentially. But what they do actually helps in some way, rather than harms like Nvidia.
How would you expect all those Windows Games to be Streamed and played?