LAS VEGAS, NV -- BFGDs might have dominated Nvidia’s headlines at CES 2018, but the company also announced that its Geforce Now game streaming service for Mac/PC had entered public beta. Does that sound like deja-vu? It is. Geforce Now started as paid service for Nvidia’s Android TV console, the Shield, and it’s still on there. If you own a Shield, you can pay $8 per month to stream Nvidia’s collection of games to your Shield-attached device.
At CES 2017, however, Nvidia announced that Geforce Now was also coming to Mac/PC, but it would work a bit differently. You would still have to pay, even more actually, but instead of playing Nvidia’s catalog of games, you would play your own by connecting your Steam account to your Geforce Now service. Apparently it took significantly longer than the initially stated March 2017 release to get the service up and running, because it’s only just hitting open beta now. With no mention of the original pricing plans, we can only say that the service is free for the duration of the beta. We suspect that it will remain so, but Nvidia may still be making up its mind on that.
You can sign up now, but there’s still unfortunately a waitlist. There’s also some caveats once you get it. Beyond the fact that you’ll have to already own every game you intend to play on Geforce Now, the service isn’t guaranteed to support every game. For now, games have to be on Steam, Ubisoft Uplay, or Blizzard’s Battle.net and among this list of supported games. According to the FAQ, you’ll also be limited to four hour sessions, so that more people can experience the beta.
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Valantar I got into this a week or so ago, tried it out on my desktop PC with a wired network connection, and it was absolute garbage. Tried playing Rocket League, but it was insanely stuttery (low/uneven FPS), laggy as all hell, and at times only registered about 1/3 of inputs. No thanks. The AMD-powered LiquidSky was in better shape last I tried it out.Reply -
cryoburner Yeah, cloud-based game streaming services like this tend to not work all that well, unless perhaps one of their server farms happens to be right near where you live. Otherwise, the massive input lag makes any fast-paced games rather unpleasant to play. Even if the encoding of the video stream were near-instantaneous, you can't really get around the time it takes to transmit the data hundreds of miles across the Internet. And since they currently only have 7 server farms in the US, and 3 in Europe (one of which is offline for the next couple days) chances are you don't live near one.Reply -
danlw If GPU prices keep their insane levels, this service might actually gain enough traction to warrant more local GPU streaming farms...Reply -
Jeffs0418 Near zero latency Quantum Entanglement communication can't come fast enough! Hopefully in my lifetime before my gaming hands are overcome by arthritis.Reply -
donnihonig Reply20622763 said:I got into this a week or so ago, tried it out on my desktop PC with a wired network connection, and it was absolute garbage. Tried playing Rocket League, but it was insanely stuttery (low/uneven FPS), laggy as all hell, and at times only registered about 1/3 of inputs. No thanks. The AMD-powered LiquidSky was in better shape last I tried it out.
Really excited for this! I've been on the waiting list for so long. Really want access already. @VALANTAR, when did you sign up?
I actually tested liquidsky, its great but quite expensive. Geforce now should be free until they get out of beta ( which will take awhile, the mac version has been in beta for over a year now). -
ramzisablaoui @VALANTAR if you are not using the account can you lend it to me as my pc is not working??Reply -
Ninjawithagun No way will cloud gaming work. Latency alone will absolutely kill any such idea. From what most people are posting here, I have already been proven correct ;-)Reply