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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related, but GeForce Now is absolutely incredible. It seems like they’ve finally cracked game streaming. If you have a solid wired connection, it is practically unnoticeable for single player games at this point. They also made the (genius) decision to integrate it with multiple existing stores like Steam and GOG rather than building their own. I don’t know if I’ll ever buy a gaming PC again.

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I've been a GeForce Now subscriber since the start. It's a good service that is prevented by publishers from being great.

Two major pain points for me:

1) I can't play my whole library. During the beta I was able to play pretty much my whole steam library but that changed after GFN went live. I accept that some titles may have technical limitations but thats far from universal. Like, why can't I play Red Dead Redemption II on GFN but I can on Stadia? Pure publisher bullshit, that's why

2) I wish Nvidia made it possible to apply mods to games. Steam workshop mods work if supported but the majority of games do not support that. I don't often mod but when I do its usually to correct some 'quality of life' issue.

I ended up buying a Steamdeck to game on instead of GFN.. I hope the arbitrary restrictions holding it back disappear someday

You can use Moonlight (an open source implementation of Nvidia's gamestream protocol) and a cloud PC like Paperspace or Shadow, to stream any game you want. I used Paperspace primarily, you can get a decent graphics card for about $0.50/hr. In Seattle with 100 Mbps internet I wasn't having many issues with latency or lag, and it was hard to tell I wasn't running it on my machine. I put a lot of hours into Elden Ring this way.

...until I got my 3060. At a certain point it just makes more sense to buy your own card.

Shadow is much better (not as cheap as GeforceNow), you basically get a PC with a dedicated GPU, you can do what ever you want with it

https://shadow.tech/

Also if you're interested in a bigger offering, I just ordered their upcoming Business Premium offering (not public yet, you need to contact them). It comes with an RTX6000 w/ 32GB vRAM, 6 cores of an Intel Platinum and 24GB RAM for 206€ per month. Here's their lineup: https://i.imgur.com/lWM3Vco.png. (129€ is the price until December 2022). Just find the business contact address on their site and shoot them a mail.

I've been working with Mathematica and PyTorch on it, and I played Stray, Cyberpunk and Ghost Recon all on max graphics with 120fps. It's insane and definitely moving the goalpost for me in terms of expectations.

Oh wow, are they officially entering the public cloud space?

If everyone thought this they'd put themselves out of the consumer hardware business.

I think they would rather be the group to put themselves out of that business than someone else, like amd + amazon for Luna or amd + google for stadia

Well, they may make it more accessible to get in to gaming, and then having increased the number of gamers they may find more customers looking for a local experience. Maybe college students gaming on the fiber network at school coming home to a poor internet connection, or nerds who start gaming on a laptop but decide to build out a whole gaming rig with the best performance. I think this kind of thing has some complexity to it.

They still have an issue with game compatibility, and I don't think the pricing model is competitive enough

I am moving in two weeks to a place that has gigabit fiber. Maybe I should give this a shot!

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