Topic: NVIDIA GeForce Now - Stadia Killer?

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This is gonna be a long post, so I apologize in advance. I had never really heard about GeForce Now before, despite it actually being around in beta for a while. It's been in the news a lot the past couple of days because it just left beta and officially launched to the public, so that's how I found out about it.

If you don't know what GeForce Now is, it's a similar concept to Stadia, but with a few key differences. With Stadia, you need to subscribe to the service, then individually buy games that are tied to the Stadia service. If Stadia dies, you lose all the games you bought. With GeForce Now, you still need to subscribe to their service, and you still need to own the games you want to play, but it is compatible with your Steam library (and to a lesser extent with other storefronts such as Epic Games). This means you can immediately play games you already own on one of NVIDIA's supercomputers using the cloud, or if you buy a game to play and GeForce Now dies, you still own that game on Steam and can continue playing it if you've got a device capable of doing so. This seems a lot better than Stadia's model. Not to mention GeForce Now has a few hundred supported games already, and most of the popular free-to-play games work, so its library dwarfs Stadia's.

GeForce Now has two subscription options: Free and Founders. The Founders tier costs $4.99 a month (half of Stadia) and has a 90-day free trial. The pricing is for a limited time only. I'm assuming it will eventually go up to $9.99. With the Founders tier, you jump to the front of the line if there's a wait to connect, you get a play session of six hours, and you can use fancy RTX stuff like ray tracing if the game supports it. The free tier may require you to wait to connect if there's congestion, you get a play session of one hour (though there are unlimited sessions, so you can just connect back after your hour is up and you're booted off), and you can't use the fancy RTX stuff. One downside compared to Stadia is that there is no 4K at all. You get 1080p/60fps max, but this is available even in the free tier.

I tried out GeForce Now using an old MacBook Pro that is not really gaming capable (and even if it was, it's a Mac, so there are like no compatible games for it anyway). I also briefly tried it on my new Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1, but I got a notice that I will need to use a gamepad for most games, and the Switch Pro Controller is not compatible, so I hit a brick wall (the title screen of Fortnite looked really nice though, haha). I have a few issues to report overall, though one of them is due to my location and probably wouldn't affect most people.

First of all, signing up for the free tier and downloading the app was easy. The UI is not great, but it's a little bit better on Android than on Mac. On Mac, you get a search bar to search for games, a section for your library (you can even add games you don't own to your library, but you can't play them as it will have you sign in to Steam to verify), and one row of recommended games. On Android there were many more categories of recommendations, so browsing was a bit more convenient.

My first complaint is game support. There are hundreds of games that are supported, but there are a ton that are not. One possible way around this is that if you search for "Steam," you can just open the general Steam launcher instead of a specific game. When I did this, I could see my entire (meager) Steam library, and it seemingly allowed me to install unsupported games onto NVIDIA's computer in order to play them. I did get a notice that the game I tried (Headsnatchers, free from Humble Bundle a while back) was not supported, and it said I would have to install it every time I wanted to play, and unless there was some kind of support for cloud saving, I would lose my progress every time my session ends. But at least it seems possible that there is/could be a workaround for the lack of game support, even if it might be inconvenient, so that gives some hope. I'm sure more games will get official support as time goes on as well.

My next complaint is that it is too Steam-centric. If any game is available on more than one storefront, GeForce Now will automatically try to launch it in Steam, with no option to pick a different launcher. I got a handful of free games from the Epic Game Store as I've been snagging them since the beginning of the new year. Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, as an example, is supported in GeForce Now, and I own it on Epic Games, but if I try to play it, it asks me to sign in to Steam, which is not where I have the game. Thus, I can't play it, even though I own it and it is supported. This seems like something too obvious not to fix, but as of now it's a big problem that many online are grumbling about. And there is no way to just open the general Epic Games Launcher as I mentioned you could do with Steam above, so there are no workarounds as of yet. Fortnite works fine because it is only on Epic, and if you play Blizzard's games you'll be fine, since they exist in their own little Battle.net world.

Finally, how does it play? I decided to test with Fortnite since I felt like it would be a good benchmark, and I've played it a bunch on Switch so I can compare them. First, I had zero wait time, despite being on the free tier. Maybe a benefit of living in Korea, as I won't usually be playing during peak times in NA or Europe. Upon trying to connect, I got a warning that they don't recommend me to stream with my current setup. My WiFi router only uses 2.4 GHz, but they recommend 5 GHz. It also said I was too far away from their server. Here's where Korea comes back to bite me. The only freely available servers are located in the US and Europe. Even the closest one to me (US Southwest, located in LA) is still too far to get an acceptable latency level. The thing that sucks is that there actually are servers in Russia, Japan, and Korea, but they are run by affiliates, so you need to sign up with them in order to use them. In my case, I need to be an LG U+ customer (they are the worst of the big 3 telecom companies in Korea). It would be like if they said US residents could only use the service if they were Sprint or T-Mobile customers. Very lame.

Regardless, I ignored the warning and tried to play anyway. The game actually looked good, even in motion. Much better than on Switch. I only had one brief instance of stuttering, followed by the usual streaming artifacts, but it resolved itself very quickly and had no effect on my gameplay. And this was with all the warnings they gave me. The input lag was bad though. Like unplayable levels of bad. I tried one more time, hooking up my laptop directly to my modem with an ethernet cable. This got rid of the 2.4 GHz warning, and improved my latency number, but not enough to avoid the "too far away from server" warning again. However, my second playtest was not that bad. There was still noticeable lag, but it was more manageable than before. I imagine I could get used to it if I played a lot, though it is still far from ideal.

Overall, I think this service seems pretty promising. It's not as restrictive as Stadia, and you can likely use it with games you already own. It's a little disappointing it can't do 4K, and I'm sure NVIDIA's infrastructure is not as advanced as Google's, but it works well enough for what it is at present (especially at the free tier), and it will only get better with time. I don't think I'm going to be using this service much until they add servers closer to me and better integrate storefronts and launchers other than Steam, but if you live in the US or Europe, I definitely think it's worth a shot to see what you think.