Nvidia Geforce Now launches at $5 a month
nvidia.comHoly cow, I've never tried any of these types of services before but I'm blown away! I just signed up for the free version to give Fortnite a go. I've played it a tonne on mobile, but never PC because my 2012 Macbook Pro could only pump out about 5 FPS at the lowest graphics settings.
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!
Yes, there are at least 100M Mac (worldwide) users who could play games now.
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.
you desribe almost my exact usecase and limitations. 2015 MBP, never free disk space. Being able to play these games and not having to think about hardware and installation is great. I've signed up for the $5 tier.
Semi-Related: You've upgraded to at least 8GB and an SSD right?
I am in a similar boat as you -- it feels great to game on my Mac. I do notice some of the latency when I play Doom (granted this is a high "fidelity" game) but for casual gaming this is great.
I've been using NOW for ~6 months now and it's incredible. Are you going to get 144hz 4k gaming performance? No for sure but I've been using it for a couple of reasons:
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.
Mac or laptop seems to be a good reason for this service, but I am not sure about its value for a PC desktop. $5 / month for 2 years is $120. I can get an OK graphic card to play game on my PC with this price.
You didn't include the cost of Games. Which is easily a lot more than $120.
Geforce Now is a 'bring your own license' system. The subscription doesn't include the cost of the game.
What? Interesting. Sorry I am an idiot, how did I miss that. Thanks for pointing it out.
People still pay multiple thousands extra over years to rent cars and homes, this is no different.
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.
You can play games with Ray tracing at 4k HDR. I would buy a graphics cards that can do that for $200
How much data do you use per month on NOW?
Just tried it from 5ghz wifi on a 200mbit connection. It looks like it added me to the correct region (southwest) and set me to 720p@60fps. Tried playing Mordhau, a "hardcore" first person melee game where milliseconds count, and had a hard time due to input lag and occasional stuttering. The lag seemed to bounce around a bit, sometimes it was ok sometimes it was worse. I only played for a few minutes, but it seems like it would work better for more casual and console oriented games. I'm optimistic it will work better on a wired connection. For reference, I usually play it on a decent gaming pc on a wired connection (ryzen 1700, 1660ti)
I had to scroll far into the page to tell what this service even offers.
> 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.
Is this another streamed videogame service? I think these people don't learn. There were 10+ failed gaming SaaS companies on my memory.
NVIDIA, Google, and Microsoft have more of a chance at success. They already have the necessary infrastructure or hardware to scale the business so that latency is acceptable, along with the software expertise to optimize the streaming.
Sure, it still might not work out, but I still think they have a better chance than the previous SaaS entrants.
A problem that all the services face is that they can never, economically, output the same quality that a local gaming PC or console can deliver, which means hardcore gamers, who would want to spend money on gaming, will never be customers.
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.
"which means hardcore gamers, who would want to spend money on gaming, will never be customers"
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.
> 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
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.
Us hardcore gamers make up a minority of the gaming community.
Absolutely, but look at the marketing speak of this thing, it screams hardcore gamer, because that's nVidia's normal audience. Are they unable to fit the message to the actual audience? Or are they hoping to hook hardcore gamers with this? I can't tell.
I agree that there is some dissonance. Seems they only know how to market one way and didn't do proper research.
The vast majority of money spent on gaming comes from casual gamers. Most of this is mobile, but "hardcore" gamers are a much smaller market than casuals.
Yes, but that's because the mobile games industry is churning out freemium, addictive, whale-catching monstrosities that are either glorified slot-machines or pay-to-pwn games. The people who put money into those kinds of games are not the target group for this either.
> latency is acceptable
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.
> Even Google with its own backbone network can't provide 50-70ms in the best case demo room scenario
Eh? My ping time to google.com from my home internet connection is less than 6ms.
Or were you talking about total frame time?
I don't think ICMP is the same as streaming workloads.
Have you tried Stadia?
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.
Investing a trillion dollars in infrastructure won't change c.
Sure, but with more money and more datacenters, you can reduce the distance between your customers and infrastructure to decrease latency. There will always be some minimum, but there's room for improvement over OnLive, et al.
It doesn't change c, but it does change d.
This is so much more interesting to me because you don't buy the games on the service. Instead it lets you stream the games you own on Steam, Origin, etc...
cool this is what I was looking for, which games are supported. Stadia's has a weak library. Being able to stream my existing Steam library is/would be amazing.
Companies seem dedicated to making it work. Sony has their Playstation Now service and I believe Microsoft has a cloud based Xbox game streaming service in the works.
Valve is also potentially working on it. They recently rolled out their "remote play together" that allows friends to play local multiplayer games over the internet by having the game owner stream the rendered images to the other players.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/valve-appears-to-be-w...
this landing page is terrible. I don't know what this service is about. is it a game streaming service, or a new Steam type game store?
Tried founder membership to try Apex Legends - plenty of stutter and delay when attempting to play from Toronto. I'll stick to ye old local play for now.
I tested this out when it was in BETA about a year ago. It worked pretty well with Path of Exile but it ran into issues when I was trying out Monster Hunter World iirc.
Word of caution - if you have a bandwidth limit it burns through it pretty quickly.
Yes, GeForce NOW forced me to get an ISP without a bandwidth cap, as I for the first time found that 1TB/month was insufficient. I was hitting 130GB/day.
This landing page (and the associated support pages) weirdly never mention what they include in "your favorite stores". This seems like crucial information, and was certainly the first thing I wanted to know. Why not mention it? First I thought they might not support Steam and be ashamed of it, but the comments here make clear that they do.
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.
I instantly suspect of any service/product that fails to tell what it is in the first view of the page, I mean, it's not hard, why should I scroll almost to the bottom of the page to read it?
Ars review: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/nvidia-has-shaken-up-...
(Disclaimer: I'm an NVIDIA employee who works on unrelated projects, but I really enjoyed using the beta of GeForce Now.)
Do you know if this runs on public clouds? just trying to gauge how long it (if ever) would be available in Brazil...
I read the page and I don't get what it is -- a store that tries to grandfather in your purchases at existing stores -- with a subscription?
It streams games to your devices. It's like Stadia, except you can also play what you already own, not just what has been released on the Stadia store.
It allows you to stream your games from Nvidia's servers instead of installing it locally. Mostly to play on underpowered devices such as a tablet, laptop, or streaming stick connected to your TV etc...
ah yea, it does say "stream" once in the entire page
Good news. I’ve been playing Quake Champions on it every now and then (haven’t for a few weeks), and the experience on my iMac is pretty good at roughly 30ms ping:
Linux and MacOS are each about 1% of the market, yet this product supports MacOS and excludes Linux.
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.
Most articles I can find put MacOS at 9-15%, about 5-8 times greater than Linux.
And there are way more games available on Linux, plus many more Linux PCs will have a strong graphics card. Probably a smaller market. Add to that the strained relationship between Nvidia and the Linux community and Now not being on Linux is really not surprising. A pity, I was about to test this.
MacOS users stereotypically have more disposable income (not proving a source for that), and Linux users have a lot more hardware flexibility so they don't need a "gaming PC in the cloud" as much.
There are 100M Active users on Mac. Est around 1B PC at Home ( Excluding Business usage )
Both numbers are significantly higher than Linux.
something is going on, I registered for the free service, clicking system requirements or any other link gets me to a microsoftonline login, probably some internal service that shouldn't be exposed, https://login.microsoftonline.com/43083d15-variousnumbers-39...
"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."
The 60 minute session limit on free accounts is interesting. One can imagine the future "Watch an add to get an extra 30 minutes!"
Something about it feels creepy to me, but I can't place what.
... or this is just a good way to have people checking if the service works with their connection? It minimizes the barrier of entry and makes people sign up and install the app, it's a common way to do marketing (e.g. for freemium games).
OTOH, it provides a nice way to try out the service without a commitment and without burning a "free trial".
> The 60 minute session limit
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.
Seems ok to me. I'd love to be able to play ten minutes of a game without any subscription and I'd be happy to watch an advert to do that.
YouTube already works like that.
I like the idea that I can just try it for an hour.
I can't help but wonder if these gaming-as-a-service offerings are just a way to get more data to train ANNs.
Lag, no mods, no hacks, and compressed 4K looks worse than raw 1080p. When will companies learn?
Their game search is a joke, no filter, no sort, nothing..
Sorry, i was talking about searching for a game inside the NVidia portal(currently its in final beta,... yet), post recent update to its beta, they went full on with a minimalist search only box..
Synchronous XMLHttpRequest on the main thread, CORS errors, and more... Great job Nvidia. I really enjoy clicking the button to join and having the whole UI freeze for 30 seconds.
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?
This is a fantastic service. I signed up to the beta just a few weeks ago and love it. The fact that it just uses my Steam account (or my son's Epic account) makes it an easy winner over alternatives.
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.
Thanks for the explanation! I have no idea why your comment is downvoted right now.
The link to Steam is extremely interesting to me, I did not own gaming hardware (except for a Switch) for long time.
Thank you. As to the downvoting -- it takes just one angry guy mad that something doesn't conform with their bias. It's all good.
I have used "GeForce Now" for the past couple of months (during the beta) and it works quite well overall. The latency exists but it is quite low; given that my last few gaming years have been on the PS4 I am more used to this than your typical PC gamer.
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.
I have never used this kind of service before. What is the bandwidth required to stream a game play on a server? And how does the latency affect the experience?
From the system requirements page: "GeForce NOW requires at least 15Mbps for 720p at 60fps and 25 Mbps for 1080p at 60fps."
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.
On Google Stadia, games run on a server on an edge node close to you to minimise the latency impact. Google can afford this, as they have server capacity around the world.
But yes, latency does affect and may be a deal breaker for.some games.
There is some latency but I had no big issues playing strategy games and RPGs on my laptop.
The best part is that your Steam saves sync and the laptop stays cool.
What OS is it using for backend?
Windows of course.
Why of course? Stadia is using Linux. Using Windows is a waste of license fees for such services.
I assume they chose Windows to support the widest array of games, and the most comprehensive and timely support for things like RTX.
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.
I'd say using Windows is a misstep and DOA kind of choice for these things.
For the reference, RTX shouldn't depend on the OS, since it's supported as a Vulkan extension.
It's an abstract backend host for a remote desktop sort of thing -- there is nothing "Windows-esque" about the experience for the end-user -- so I imagine they could easily support alternatives as the need arises. But given that Windows currently supports 100% of the top PC games, where alternatives support a small fraction of that, it's something they certainly needed to support for now.
It's definitely Windows. You do see the Windows 10 chrome on windows (sometimes the steam is there minized) and games in steam install to Program files...
Oh for sure they're using Windows to host most/all games, with a very good justification for doing so, but the way the client app interacts with the server they could just as easily have some games hosted in Linux. The point being that they are in no way tied to Windows, it's just the best option for what they're doing.
I see it as Linux gaming hostile for two reasons. Unlike Stadia, they help Windows gaming with this by using Windows. And unlike Stadia, even their client doesn't work on Linux.
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.
>I'd say using Windows is a misstep ......
How would you expect all those Windows Games to be Streamed and played?
Same way they are played on Linux now.
That would mean that none of the multiplayer games with anti-cheat software would work.
With sometimes janky emulation/WINE, or not at all?
There is nothing janky about it. Also, Wine is not an emulator ;)