GeForce Now: A Review
whatever.scalzi.com
whatever.scalzi.com
This is going to be way worse than movie streaming, and unlike movies, when one of these companies pulls a game you once loved and it's not available, there will be no pirates to save you, because the software is trapped in the cloud. The future may well be streaming-only.
Mods will be greatly impacted eventually, with only sanctioned mods allowed to run in the cloud. There'll be no deep tweaking, no introspection or learning opportunities. Cloud mod API only.
And it'll go the way of all cloud services: fragmented. You'll have to subscribe to a different one for each game you want to play.
And you won't stop paying. To play a game over the course of 10 years, as many of you have with Diablo or Quake or Minecraft, you'll have to pay your $15/mo to each streaming service, so instead of Diablo being $50, it'll be $1500.
That's before we even start talking about the F2P/IAP/DLC casinos. You used to choose on the character select screen or find items in the game, now new characters are $10 and items are $10 up to $100+, we all know it should be part of the game.
Think, they don't really make arcade games anymore. I guess traditional videogames will die off too. More than one company has quit normal games to run a casino for children.
I guess I'll go pen a dirge for the dying art I have loved.
P.S., thank god for indie developers who make games without input from accountants and psychiatrists who specialize in addiction, they may save us all yet. There's also a glimmer of hope at gog.com where they still sell real games without DRM. I'll keep hoping.
You can't own games. You can only get a license to play one.
He puts it in the game console, it starts up, and he plays it, and still hasn't agreed to any license or contract.
I'm not declaring that you're wrong, but I suspect these "publisher's wishlist" licenses and terms may not hold up in court in the event of someone violating those terms.
Just because someone writes something down doesn't make it true, and that describes a great many EULAs, too.
I think of a long, rambling contract with made-up terms and obligations you never agreed to at purchase time, EULA style.
So yes, you get a license-to-use-and-lend-and-resell with your purchase as you do with books, music, and movies, but the EULA and TOS type stuff are probably fiction, I think. I'm no expert, but afaik it's not well-tested legally, and first-sale doctrine counts for a lot.
I just need to improve the graphics a bit as it's mostly place-holder stuff for now.
It's not a great game(yet), but god's damnit it's mine!
.... Wait, it's made in unity, I don't really own that game either, do I?
I'd like to play it though. Maybe "Project Birdperson"? Nobody would name a character "Birdperson".
In some limited sense it is kind possible to own some games, the ones that exist on physical media and play on devices that do not require online connectivity. But even in the case of GOG, which sells DRM free games you can download, you aren't really the "owner" of anything tangible - you have a license to use the software. The fact that you may have a copy of the files is not the same as owning anything.
In the modern era though, with DRM and phoning home etc, it's much more obvious that you "own" nothing.
The pricing isn’t great either. I tried the 3080 tier for $25 CAD per month. It was really cool, but not realistic for my gaming budget. To me the pricing looks bad even with the hyper inflated, unrealistic prices of GPUs right now. I can buy a 3080 for about 3 years worth of GeForce Now (3080) and after 3 years I still have a half decent card to hand down to someone else.
Personally I’ve always been a mid-range gamer at best, so the priority tier is closer to reality for me. That’s $13 CAD per month. I’m sure they used to advertise it as a 3060. If they hadn’t managed to hyper inflate GPU prices that would be a joke. Even now I paid $290 CAD for an RX6600XT (refurb, but seems brand new) which is less than 2 years of the priority subscription.
My GPU before that was an RX480 for $200 CAD (new). That was a decent entry-mid range card 5 years ago, so the $150-$300 per year as pricing while buying market share makes me think the goal is a massive increase in the cost of gaming. Nvidia is out of touch IMO.
Also factor in that Nvidia probably only needs 1 card per X subscribers and it’s obvious there’s already huge margin. With AMD as the only GPU competitor we’re destined for some serious price gouging. I’m rooting for Intel ARC.
Yeah but you need to have a desktop PC to start with. And also don’t forget to add the energy prices.
If you game 10 hours a week the difference in power usage is probably about $30 a year kind of a rounding error.
The second point, indie games will absolutely exist, even if AAA will go in this rent extracting direction. The next Stardew Valley will come along, just as it did in the age where AAA is $60. SV is $12 in my region on Steam.
I don't want games to be ephemeral either. They are a form of art as valid as any of those others. Often, games combine all those forms into one magnificent modern whole.
I want to be able to examine and study games as a form of art, the same way film & lit students study those things; I can't do that if they get pulled from the streaming service to get a tax cut, ala HBO. The only option is offline.
For the "should" part, I think it'd be great if software would somehow expire, and then become free software, as in, code and assets too. I'm not a lawyer or anything but as artwork goes public domain after a while, so should software and its assets. It would be great "for the people" so that the experience wouldn't go away as abandonware and I'm sure projects would spring up that would make them playable again on current architecture - similar to how GOG started out originally.
For the "will happen" part, streaming services will go the Netflix way, work great for a short while (we're at this part I think), then the games would be pulled from third party services only to be played exlusively at specific services, while the first streaming only gaming sensation would spring up... so rent seeking basically, for gaming.
The problem with public domain is that there's no legal requirement for the publisher to give it away once the copyright expires (if they are the sole possessor). If something is legally public domain but no one has a copy, then it doesn't matter.
If we had a library of deposit (publishers legally have to provide a copy to e.g. the library of congress) for commercial software like we do for books, that would fix that.
Another thing that could happen is that consumers could just reject game streaming like they did in the 80s (GameLine) 90s (Sega Channel) and 00s (OnLive)... I think those were technical, not consumer rejection problems though, but I'd be glad to be wrong. Nevertheless, I'll do my part by never paying for a cloud game. If consumers reject it, it'll die off and games will continue as before. I also hope the PS5 digital fails; already I can't use a bunch of PS3 game features (gran turismo track editor, dlc, etc) since the servers are shut down.
One more thought: mods and custom servers can do special things that people love, and that will always be viable, and worth a lot of money. If Arma II were a cloud only game, DayZ wouldn't have been made, which means neither would PUBG or Fortnite have arisen. Maybe the concept of mods will always keep the local game alive?
I don't think you're wrong with regards to past consumer rejection. I think people were now primed with the spread of internet and the SAAS / cloud culture that followed in the 2000s, then in the meantime smartphones happened, lootboxes / gacha became normal on phones then later in the wider gaming culture, music streaming gained steam and Netflix finally made a successful media streaming service... normalizing consumer behaviors which were previously alien to many consumers. But now the market is ripe for cloud gaming to become popular. Sometime in the 2010s maybe game passes on console also become a thing - the type of payment when as long as you hold the subscription, you have access to the downloaded game. I think that considering these changes in gaming and consumer behavior explain why cloud gaming is now acceptable enough to be profitable, or to be a thing at least.
Regarding Arma II and DayZ, and so on, I don't particularly like this type of thought experiment. I think if we allow the liberty, the opposite conclusion can also be drawn: think how much productive these people could have been if they haven't wasted their energy in these mods. Or what else could they have made - contributing to free software instead, or any other social good. And the ideas are also not original, I mean in general; the light bulb, the radio and the telephone all got invented independently in different parts of the world, so, Arma II being a cloud only game, we wouldn't have DayZ and so on, but we'd have something other that made battle royale a popular gaming phenomenon.
I think you're onto something with modders. I think local / non-cloud gaming will be alive as long as there are devices that run third party software without much issue. The games might not be very advanced or flashy, the AAA titles will surely go extract as much rent as possible, but I'm sure that the next Minecraft, Stardew Valley, or Teeworlds will get made, as these all began (or still are) passion projects of a single person, and sometimes, people just want to give. So I think passion projects will keep the local game alive - be it modding, an indie game or free software.
Yes, I think indies (and AA studios before they inevitably get bought out) will always keep the art alive. Of course that means missing out on some types of games that are simply not feasible for smaller groups or without significant up front funding.
> There's also a glimmer of hope at gog.com where they still sell real games without DRM.
That is no longer true for all games on GOG unfortunately [0]. Similarly Steam does require games to have DRM once downloaded and there are many that you can just copy and run wherever you want (without a technical restriction anyways). I wouln't count on any distributor to have a significant effect on the keeping games clean.
Those games that come out to $1500 over a decade? Don’t forget that a decade is probably 2x $2000 for building gaming PCs.
$1500 per subscription service, think, netflix apple disney yadda yadda, it might cost $5000 or more to play the half-dozen major games you like.
Don't be fooled by the temporal marketing, the long term strategy is in place, and it ends with them screwing you out of something you once loved.
Some of your gaming library, for example no Blizzard games are playable. Though this is not Nvidia's fault. I think a few publishers realized where this is going and pulled their games by threatening to sue so they could work towards a streaming service of their own.
With the trend that the comment above you is describing, there wont be any option to build your own gaming PC because the market has shifted to streaming services by renting out both hardware and software through the cloud because that is more profitable.
Disregarding this is comparing the cost of leasing or buying a Porsche while ignoring the fact that the Carolla exists.
This is going to be what ends up hamstringing the service in the long run. When GeForce Now first came out, you could play a much larger catalog of titles; publishers then caught wind of this and started pulling their games off of it, in case they wanted to launch their own streaming service in the future.
For this reason, I think Microsoft has the pole position with their XBox Cloud Gaming service. They have been running it as an extension of their Game Pass Ultimate service, and are rumored to allow you to play games you bought and own through the service sometime later this year. There's a future where a Microsoft game you own can be played on PC, XBox consoles, or streamed to an iPad or Chromebook, syncing progress between them.
A third party would need to sue them or the government would have to introduce legislation to stop this bullshit. I'm not hopefully that either will happen in the near future, which is sad. Compared to e.g. Stadia Geforce Now has the far more customer friendly business model.
The actual issue is vastly more trivial copyright makes it easy to forbid such and even if present license didn't forbid it then fighting in court would be as expensive as it is pointless because license v2 would certainly do the job. The only path forward is via willing cooperation.
Nvidia has that market share because Nvidia has a very big team doing nothing but working either directly with game developers or on pre-release versions of games (provided by the publishers) to make sure that the games work perfect on their cards from day one. No one needs to release a game that doesn't work on Nvidia cards, just not providing that access would be incredible damaging for Nvidia and Nvidia knows that.
If Call of Duty N doesn't have terms in its license that forbid NVIDIA's use case the best case scenario for NVIDIA would be fighting a protracted and expensive legal battle to establish this meanwhile Call of Duty N+1 includes slightly different wording that clearly establishes this limitation.
There is no need for coercion its clear as day that the only reasonable path forward for NVIDIA is willing collaboration with manufacturers.
Basically stop spinning stories to explain what is already trivially explicable.
That's where you're wrong: You never "bought" the game, you only bought a license to use the game in so-and-so location under so-and-so conditions as dictated by whoever published and "sold" you the game.
We can have an entire discussion on the merits of buying a product vs. buying a license granting you rights to use a product, but point of the matter is you never bought the game. Not even back during the CD-ROM In A Physical Box days.
Don't mistake this as me endorsing this regime. I'm just explaining the reality of the situation.
Feel free to supply evidence to the contrary though. I would be happy to be wrong.
Since I don’t see any additional agreements when I buy/play the game on steam it seems unlikely there is one.
It seems the steam license agreement only allows you to make non-commercial use of paid games. I can imagine that Nvidia just didn’t want to go into the battle of whether pre-installing steam content that (other) users have already paid for constitutes a violation of that provision.
Easy to use and the games are already there. I am not a gamer anymore, I occasionally play here and there, perhaps couple hours once or twice a week. Sometimes nothing for days, then a Saturday playing 6 hours.
One thing that Xbox Cloud did for me is to eliminate buyers remorse or thinking I have to try a game a little bit more because I paid money for it. If I don't like something, I just move to the next - in fact, sometimes I think that's actually _too_ easy and I wonder if I stick for a while the gameplay won't actually get better.
Anyway, for $15 a month you have an Xbox ready in 10 seconds and dozens (hundreds?) of games at your fingertips... the value is ridiculously high. I can't see myself actually buying a console and paying $10-$60 for just one single game.
edit: Think about it: you have $60 and a game you want to play is on Xbox Cloud. You can either buy the game (supposing you already have the console) or have access to ALL of cloud games for 4 months. It's a no-brainer!
Also when I have bouts of extended hours at work or when I travelled to Brazil to stay there for a few weeks with my family, I just cancelled the membership and re-started it later. It's so convenient.
You do notice artefacts when you move fast in FPS type games but you even forget about it most of the time (fully wired internet) as it mostly occurs on the orbits of the screen, where you don't necessarily focus. For most games it's hard to notice unless you look for it.
I made a quick search and GFN seemed to have all of the recent major new games and most of the old classics (4/5 old indie games I searched for); is it really that bad?
Any game more than 5 years old runs fine on my existing rig, if this service lets me avoid buying a new GPU while still owning the games in my Steam library then it's pretty amazing in my book.
I can see the other use-case is "play any game on a laptop" in which case the holes in the back-catalog could be more problematic, but I think they will go far just enabling people to play AAA and new indie games without a dedicated rig.
It does have the massive advantages of name recognition, lots of games and more importantly, first party exclusives and subsidised prices, so it will probably be the main cloud gaming platform in the future.
https://blog.paperspace.com/setting-up-your-cloud-gaming-rig...
I haven't checked recently, but the blog post claims it works with all games.
I’m still bitter at 2K about this. If they offered an alternative cloud gaming subscription then I would purchase it to play Civ on a cloud machine. But they just decided to interfere in my choice of which hardware I use to run their software, while offering no alternative.
Super disappointing. I do still pay for GeForce Now though, because it’s a low price and because I have anxiety about what would happen to my save files if I stopped paying.
Besides, I’m mad at 2K, not Nvidia. And I already bought the license for Civ, so it’s not like I can withhold money from 2K (I’d even pay for another license if it was an option to run it on the cloud - just let me do it).
GeForce Now itself is outstanding, and the technical quality of its product is exceptional. I suppose I could be mad at them for respecting questionably legal opt-out requests from publishers, but I understand their strategic reasons for cooperating with those.
And I suppose I’m only assuming 2K is the party at fault. I wish 2K would share its side of the story - maybe Nvidia tried a shakedown and asked 2K to pay for inclusion in its catalog? I doubt it though – the nature of GeForce Now means it supports any game by default, and requires effort to prohibit one. Given the obscure titles available in the GeForce Now library, I assume inclusion is opt-out by default, and 2K made their choice for whatever misinformed reason.
I have my gaming PC in another room and stream it to my laptop using Nvidia's GameStream and Moonlight. I run it at 1440p with 120fps. With everything connected via ethernet, I get an end-to-end latency of 7ms. This means my stream is only just 1 frame behind the PC.
I use this setup for fast-paced games as well as regular PC usage. 99% of the time, I can't tell that it's a remote stream.
The advantages of the setup are:
1. Don't have to deal with the heat and noise of my gaming PC being in my room.
2. Switching between my laptop and gaming PC is faster than using a hardware KVM switch.
3. I can easily stream games or use my PC remotely with tablets and phones.
Disadvantages are:
1. Gamestream and Moonlight don't support streaming dual screens at once.
2. Gsync doesn't work over streaming. So lower frame rates (< 60fps) aren't as smooth as native.
It's still probably well within your acceptable tolerances, but worth keeping in mind.
- 5ms network latency
- 2ms display latency (includes decoding + vsync latency)
I'm assuming that the mouse/keyboard can begin processing as soon as the network call is done. If true that's about 5ms.
Keep in mind that different mice vary in their latency. Even wired mice can vary from 1.5ms to more than 25ms in click latency [1]. So if you use a low latency mouse over the network, it could be faster than some mice that are plugged in directly.
It's good but not worth 160 USD. I'd recommend the Razer Deathadder or V2 Mini. Just my 2 cents.
Also means I'm ready to upgrade for M(whatever) when I get round to it.
I also once was at my parents many KMs away from my PC and Moonlight apparently works over the internet? Not sure how much latency there was but it wasn’t noticeable. Note that my PC is wired to gigabit internet and I was on a gigabit AC Wifi network on my phone. Still, it blew me away.
I have also found it consistently less glitchy over last year to stream a game from cloud to my media computers via geforce now, than from my next room gaming rig via steam link... Which speaks more bad things of steam link itself, but also I think at least some good things of geforce now.
Note that I have Ethernet for my laptop and desktop. I can not speak to latency via wireless - my assumption would be "frustrating" so I didn't even test.
There are people who need (and people who believe they need) 165HZ or heck 240HZ screen, 8000Hz Mouse, and notice every millisecond of lag. And there are people like me and apparently Scalzi :-).
My experience with GeforceNow was perfect. I'm sure somebody with better reflexes and more into competitive multiplayer would find it complete unacceptable.
People are talking about turn based games but my experience is that it's flawless and indistinguishable from native in twitch games like fortnite and counterstrike. But then again I live on the East Coast pretty close to a datacenter and I'm on fiber, so obviously this won't be the case for people in rural areas. But for people who are in situations like mine, it's great.
To the point where I can't stand using my work-supplied laptop because of slight mouse lag (I think the mouse travels maybe 30-40ms behind my hand) and 60hz screens. This is somewhat annoying coming from 165Hz, gaming peripherals. Then I have to connect to a VM to do development. Absolute hell.
> mouse travels maybe 30-40ms behind my hand
That sounds awful. But it reminds me that the chart I posted is tested using a very exacting tool and even the 3090 has a 30ms latency on 120hz and that's about as good as it gets. So you shouldn't take these numbers in a vacuum but more comparatively. GFN on 120hz is better than a 3060 on native in 60hz. I know it's not compelling for anyone who hates 60hz heh but for people who are okay with 60hz then GFN latency won't feel any different to you.
unless there's some trick I'm missing it's going to be at least the same (plus the network latency)
The "trick" here is that native devices already have some amount of latency, just they are in an acceptable range for most people. However nvidia can optimize PC hardware to reduce the device's latency such that even with the network latency added it's still faster than the average person's native device. Hope that makes sense.
Something is a little weird with the numbers as shown. 120hz to 60hz only gains 18ms on PC, but it gains 45ms on xbox. Presumably with the same peripherals, tv, network connection, etc. Not really sure what's going on there.
Watch the video yourself.
they should be comparing the same input/output hardware with the xbox
then only switching out the xbox for a PC connected to the same inputs/output
what would be terrible: comparing xbox plugged into TV+controller with geforce now running on a PC with keyboard+mouse+PC monitor
the numbers don't make sense otherwise
> GFN on 120hz is better than a 3060 on native in 60hz
False. 60Hz input lag is subtle and if someone can't notice an extra 40ms, they won't notice this.
It would be interesting to see a pipeline diagram of some sort, breaking down the total time for each stage of the test, to see where the console is falling behind.
Here are the results from a different game:
https://youtu.be/jOcFSlniGrw?t=831
I think a pipeline diagram would be cool too, though I don't think it's possible to get that information from a third party at least.
The tool tests time from button click to muzzle flash. It's not a 80ms delay on every motion, this is the total latency including the time the game takes to react to an input and fires a gun. It's hard to know how much base latency there is, the game could decide to wait a few ms before doing anything who knows, so I wouldn't read into that. Things like spinning around in a circle feels flawless. This chart should really be used comparatively.
This is just your opinion and it's wrong for at least 50% of humans. Nobody with a mouse will find fortnite or cs playable with 40ms added lag. 40ms lag is higher than the mere 16.66ms you get from going from 60 FPS to 60 Hz vsync (that is, running the monitor at 60Hz and enabling vsync. it will be the same framerate but much laggier). In the 60 FPS days, EVERYONE complained about this mere 16.66ms added difference. This included people who just started playing their very first video game one day ago. On Twitch, still everyone notices vsync and turns it off once they figure out that it is the cause of the shitty sluggy mouse feel.
Your next idea
> The "trick" here is that native devices already have some amount of latency, just they are in an acceptable range for most people. However nvidia can optimize PC hardware to reduce the device's latency such that even with the network latency added it's still faster than the average person's native device. Hope that makes sense.
Is also utterly wrong. You don't need "le graphics pipeline" to make input lag noticeable. Just plug in a monitor with 16ms input lag to your computer and you will notice that the mouse is annoyingly difficult to position over anything in the Windows or Linux desktop.
OR another explanation: Make a program to move a small shape around the screen using the mouse position. It waits until the monitor is about to start scanning out a frame from the framebuffer and only then draws the shapes new position in the framebuffer where the mouse is at that time (since it's just a blank image with a small shape it's near instant to do this in the CPU, a few microseconds). If you use a monitor without lag (like a CRT) and it's running at 60Hz, that means there is now a total input lag of up to 16.66ms (accounting for the time between frames), and perhaps 1ms if you run the mouse at 1000Hz like you should be doing, then maybe some small delay from the OS. Now if you make this program render the slow vsync way, i.e, rendering the frame to temporary memory and doing nothing for the next 16.66ms then swapping it to the framebuffer once the monitor is about to scan out the next frame, this adds another 16.66ms of input lag. And it will feel terrible.
Ergo, getting far greater than 16.66ms lag caused by some network streaming service will NOT magically feel less laggy than native hardware. Also the idea that optimizing small isolated components randomly will fix input lag is laughable, it's all about timing. Almost no lag is caused by CPU (or GPU core) bottlenecks, aside from the straight up most basic problem of low framerate.
The chart really only says it's more smooth than native hardware. Like think about it, if you're comparing 16.6ms to 100+ then the game would be running at like 1fps and is completely useless. Come on that's obviously not what it is.
> Like think about it, if you're comparing 16.6ms to 100+ then the game would be running at like 1fps and is completely useless.
Not how it works, you could have 2000ms of lag and still have a completely smooth game running at 500fps. But why are we talking about smoothness all of a sudden?
That youtube review is clickbait and bikesheds on some stupid detail like tree rendering distance on some certain scene. I don't think it even talked about input lag. He did state that cloud gaming being bad is a misconception because he feels like it's good, though. Also Genshin Impact is a laggy game. I have played it on a PC, and it's framelocked way down to 60FPS, and so it only uses a small fraction of CPU/GPU, and it's still so laggy you can't even aim right with the mouse with an aiming weapon like the longbow. Just moving around is tedious, which indeeds gives me that post 2000s console feel. The game with vsync off plays far worse than a misconfigured system. Even any FPS like UT or Quake with vsync on feel more responsive than Genshin Impact.
My experience with Stadia has been pretty great. Since November 2020 I've been playing Destiny 2, an MMO FPS, so perhaps the worst-case latency-requiring kind of game, and it's been pretty great, at least for PvE activities. (PvP has been less great, but perhaps that's more the fault of my aging reflexes than near-imperceptible network latency)
When traveling, I've been playing Destiny on Stadia on an iPad (!) with an Xbox controller paired, using the host Wifi.
That, alone, was enough to sell me on the value of Stadia. I'm gladly paying the $10/mo (half that of GeForce Now) for the Pro tier, which gives me 4k HDR, and a bunch of games free each month.
People like to harp on Stadia, and it's true that their player numbers are low. In fact, a couple of days ago Destiny announced availability on the Epic Games Store, and apparently on Day 1 the number of players via the Epic Games Store outnumbered the number of Stadia players by 10x. There was a promotion on Epic which helped, but still, 10x!
Google has certainly tarnished their brand by killing well-loved products, but I also feel like they're under-promoting what they have. For example, if I try to go to stadia.com right now from this mac/safari, I'll just get a page that says "Stadia requires Chrome", with no promotional content to entice the user.
Destiny 2 on stadia is 1080p upscaled medium not 4k. GFN actually plays it on 4k at high settings.
> I play on a tablet
> Xbox controller
None of these instill any confidence in me that Stadia has tolerable input latency. Geforce Now certainly doesn't. A mouse has a much lower tolerable input latency than a controller. Then again gimped experiences like aiming on a controller are just as bad so you do you.
> 4K HDR
HDR could mean a lot of things. Geforce Now substantially cuts the color depth even when using only a small fraction of the available bandwidth. It's night and day. I'm sure Stadia does the same (otherwise adds more lag).
Not exactly encouraging that Googles cares about the service. Google IOT seemed like it had a lot more revenue promise (probably cheaper to host as well), and even that could not survive the graveyard.
I'm surprised he even bothered trying the service let alone he found it playable. A rural area with 25-40mbps with someone using the internet at the same time ( let alone netflix!) is basically worst case scenario. If you are playing near a datacenter with reasonable internet your experience will be significantly better. Geforce now is technically very good when configured properly; it is similar to parsec (which is probably state of the art).
Worth pointing out: the Geforce now library is not great and and I wouldn't hold my breath on it improving too much. Most interested publishers have already signed up and the rest are either commited to other platforms or aren't willing to choose nvidia over other monetization options.
NVIDIA has spent a lot of time and money tuning the service to do clever dynamic upscaling locally on your machine to minimise the sort of block compression artifacts and frame skipping that you would normally see from say YouTube or Netflix.
It's not even particularly latency bound, since round trip times less than 40ms are for most people (unless you're a very competitive player), completely unnoticeable. I've played with latencies at around 60ms and I still find it tolerable (although occasionally a bit annoying).
Instead it's very sensitive to network jitter. Even 1 or 2 ms of random jitter can dramatically reduce the quality of the service. And given the distance between your local machine, and the number of hops required between your device and the server, there's a lot of room for random jitter. Part of the problem can be mitigated, by carefully ensuring that everything in your home network is dimensioned properly. But the rest of the pipe is owned by your ISP, and they could apply all sorts of dodgy QoS parameters that increase your likelihood of experiencing jitter.
I have "on paper" great internet in the SF Bay Area (Monkeybrains), and while I can get 600mpbs symmetrical throughput, the jitter and 0.5% average packet loss (it's a microwave mesh network), game streaming is completely unplayable.
[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/08/22/not-getting-a-new-com... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553017 (58pts, 2d ago, 90comments)
If I wanted to spend a lot of time playing games, especially multi-player ones, I don't think it would be a good substitute for using my own machine, but for being able to occasionally dip a toe into a game when I get the itch, its a pretty good deal.
The greed of companies will be their own downfall.
My favourite though is the independent novella God Engines.
One game that really pissed me off was Elite: Frontiers because they decided they were no longer going to support macOS, but I was able to continue playing just by using GFN. So the argument of “once you’ve bought it once, you can play it forever” doesn’t really hold true for games you download and run locally in all cases either.
The author discusses his internet connection, but for me even with a 500mbit connection and ~10ms ping to NYC area data centers I felt the video compression artifacts and periodic stutters were too noticeable. I also had some input glitches that were basically impossible to diagnose and made certain games hard to play.
I still run windows in a VFIO setup but Linux is really good for gaming these days. Was even playing Cyberpunk on the release day!
yes! I'm surprised how many people are ok with these. This is also the biggest problem with streaming, in addition to input latency.
I couldn't figure out how to reduce the video stream bandwidth with any of the settings. It worked really well technically, but without some improvements in this regard, I don't know how I can use it. I guess folks with unlimited bandwidth can make it work, but that's about it.
I paid for the full service and then promptly had to cancel all of our accounts, since it wasn't going to be viable for us.
Jesus Christ, how can it be that bad? Their servers are running Windows, right? I don't see how Nvidia's coverage can be that bad unless they're encumbered by licensing quirks. Even Valve's Proton manages to cover ~75-77% of the Steam store's titles...
It's notable that legally Firaxis (and the other sleazy scumbags) largely have no legal basis, but nvidia decided not to make enemies and let them do this.
As a result, I have bought no additional Civ expansions, and will never buy another Firaxis game.
Presumably that is covered by this part of the EULA:
>You agree not to, and not to provide guidance or instruction to any other individual or entity on how to:
>except as otherwise specifically provided by the Software or this Agreement, use or install the Software (or permit others to do same) on a network, for on-line use, or on more than one computer or gaming unit at the same time;
I’m constantly surprised by how few ISPs have implemented CoDel or CAKE. While it does not fix actual packet loss, it solves basically everything else: inconsistent speeds due to some packets getting priority, bufferbloat, laggy streaming.
If I could hand people a router that just had an in port and out port and CoDel installed it would solve 90% of the problems. Unfortunately (for us) ISPs have done away with modems and instead gone for modem/router/wifi combo boxes which makes traffic shaping much much more complicated.
[0] https://jlforrest.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/the-forrest-curve...
It's no small difference, $1740 given by the article for a 3090 and $290 for a 2060. I've found that when decisions are somewhat arbitrary one chooses numbers that best make the argument for us. Best practice is not to pick your examples in a fashion that amounts to fudging the numbers and stick to more practical details like the fact that you can only play a fraction of the games and they can be taken away at any time or become more expensive. Altogether a nearly worthless service. A novelty without substantial value.
Which made the process of entering login credentials for my uPlay account (wanted to try some Assassins Creed game) kind of creepy.
The final experience was predictably a bit latency heavy and lots of artifacting/unclean picture quality from the video compression.
Tho the Microsoft version of it on the Windows 10 Xbox app, sees a bit more use from me due to GamePass; Way more streamlined, easy and quick way to test a game before I decide actually download several GB worth of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzL3vcqvU7o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk_BDC-juQU
Lol! Actually I was really impressed with GeForce Now. It came in super handy during a long move where my PC was on a boat for 2.5 months and a friend and I were in the middle of playing some games. Connected it to my Steam account and picked up right where I left off (kudos to steam too for syncing stuff)
But Genshin is only available on the Windows and Mac desktop apps (and the Chromebook app, not the browser on Chromebook which isn't clear), I can only assume for politico-business rules (I can't think of a possible technical reason for this). They hide it from the UI and support has no idea about this.
So I haven't yet been able to try GFN.
I, urgently, must play the latest AAA extravaganza, again...
...I've only $30 to my name, again. I'm collecting my family's supply of $2 coins, again.
I'd be all over it.
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Tons of software works REALLY well on Geforce now. Asynchronous, turn based games. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is one.
Server side rendering latency w/ monitor is a fascinating problem. I found the idea incredibly technically interesting.
NOT so much for me, an engineer who one click buys electronics.
I'm not the audience.
I haven't plugged my local gaming PC into the wall in months. The future of Mac gaming for me is Shadow.
Stadia does not exist and Shadow PC had an eternal waiting list.
I stream Elden Ring from my place in LA to my family's place in ATL using Steam and I manage to do well. Just beat a tough boss tonight.
Not Bitcoin, but Ethereum. Several years ago people have stopped using graphic cards to mine Bitcoin, and instead use dedicated ASICs.
Wi-Fi is an arms race between you and your neighbours about who has the most powerful Wi-Fi transmitter, while Ethernet works wonderfully and collision free, in terms of network packets.
We all have at least three Wi-Fi devices, including the smartphone, using some frequency bandwidth.
Yes, people dislike cables, but if you ever play and transmit the game via OBS to Twitch, for example, Wi-Fi is simply not going to cut it any more.
It's probably quite compelling for games where latency is not as important.
With how many technologies get caked unto the rendering pipeline and CRTs being replaced by slower response time LCDs (unless you pay a premium), you might even argue it got worse compared to the olden days.
Glad I'm done with that platform.
I tried Geforce Now on two occasions. Both times, it was completely unplayable for literally anything. Remember how bad vsync feels if you use it at 60Hz? This is like that but multiple times worse. And to top it off you can easily feel the latency increasing and decreasing as you play, so you couldn't even lead your shots consistently. The first time I started it, it shows me a VNC type window where I can login to Steam, a portent of future disappointment.
The second time, I ran two games at 1024x768 and I measured and saw it only uses a small fraction of my bandwidth: 7mbps for mostly still scenes, and 20mbps for spinning the mouse around. And the latency was still unbearable. This was on a machine with very low latency to begin with (so it should be even harder for a game to bring the latency within human perception, than with an average machine): CRT, and mouse and keyboard at 1000Hz.
Further debugging:
Ran the built in network test in the Geforce Now menu, latency 14ms.
Opened the status window in the games (ctrl+alt+f6), it shows ~50ms RTD (is that round trip duration?) at all times. That would explain the lag. I don't know enough networking yet, but I'd say once you're receiving multiple megabits (as opposed to maybe a few kilobits with most games), you no longer get good latencies.
For one more test, in the Geforce Now settings, I lowered max bitrate to 5mbps, kept framerate at 60fps (highest you can get for free), and turned vsync off. This time it showed RTD 30ms. It was less bad this time (could be a coincidence), but still much worse than 60Hz vsync would feel. The graphics were ultra crap at 5mpbs too.
In all of the above tests, it was never smooth either. This is to be expected as I don't think you can just go from 7mbps to 20mbps each time something interesting on screen happens and have a constant amount of latency in those instances. I did notice that whenever I flicked 90 degrees it stuttered.
On all these tests, the games were on lowest graphics settings.
I also noticed the color depth vastly improved after switching back to the realm game on real hardware (on a 90% dead CRT).
To confirm that this is a pure streaming service (no advance stuff like 3D acceleration offloading over the net), I also tested downloading something at max speed while playing the game to confirm the graphics do degrade to sub crap jpg quality and the sound starts skipping.
But what about casual games, you say? Like an RPG? The lag is still so bad that you will likely strain your wrist or arm due to constantly having to readjust your mouse to do basic tasks.
I want games that don't have constant stutters due to their team not caring about a baseline resource usage. Most games will still stutter on a 3080 RTX. Streaming doesn't fix this.
Streaming gaming sucks and will likely to continue to suck for the next decades. I want at least 240Hz if I'm using an LCD for smoothness but mainly because 120Hz is still too blurry, and with 1080p at the very least so it can be on a 24" monitor without too much moire, and with zero input lag on top of what the game itself already has. I feel like if streaming gaming takes off, the chance of games ever running good will never happen. It's already hard to get a baseline 240FPS at a reasonable percentile, and networks are bloated with garbage and streaming gaming will absolutely worsen this problem. Games should engineer to reduce jitter. The reason you see enemy players teleport is because their latency changes (or their network straight up cuts off for a while).
And last but not least, streaming gaming is the next level after Steam where you don't own your games. Steam (and competitors) already sucks ass because it's terrible half-assed software, but it also prevents you from being able to revert whatever version of the game you want.
As a side bonus, the fewer people will have powerful GPUs at their disposal, the fewer of them will be able to secretly generate deep fakes and do other nasty things.
'we must control the proliferation of assault-grade GPUs.'
if you're selling the zero-ownership lifestyle then you'd be better served not reminding people that it'll be used as a leash inevitably.
i'll stick to owning things. It's hard to catch an uber out of a forest fire during an emergency, and I think that analogy might apply to more things than people realize.
And as a side deficit, fewer artists will be able to run ML models to template their next works and do other creative things.