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.
This is literally already the case with GeForce Now - you're NOT allowed to play your whole library because the publishers sued nVidia for allowing you to play the GAME YOU OWN on the machines YOU PAY FOR in their cloud.
I think it's interesting - this is the opposite of "games trapped in the cloud", it's games trapped on your computer away from the cloud. I don't mean it as a simple quip, but what should be take from people protesting about this opposite thing too.
A man walks into a store, picks up a game, pays for it, and takes it home; he never agrees to a license or signs a contract.
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.
We may be mixing up our terms, when you say "license", I don't generally think of the same kind of "license" as would be implied for e.g. a paperback. I think it's implied we're talking about software-style licenses.
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 own a game called "Project Rito". It's a VR prototype where your arms are wings and you use them to sail on updrafts, occasionally allowing yourself to drop freely to fire your bow.
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?
You're also using concepts and tradmarks from Zelda and the Youtube channel for "Project Rito" appears to be for somebody else's cosplay, so it sounds like you own a little slice of a game.
I'd like to play it though. Maybe "Project Birdperson"? Nobody would name a character "Birdperson".
Heh, yeah, the name, much like most of the game, is place holder stuff at this point. I hope Nintendo won't sue me until I publish, if I ever even get that far!
I have no idea why you are being downvoted. As much as I wish otherwise, what you say is entirely correct.
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.
Indeed, but on non-connected pieces of physical hardware that use physical media, the experience is similar enough to "owning" something that generally thinking about such things in terms of "ownership" makes sense (even if it's just a convenient fiction).
In the modern era though, with DRM and phoning home etc, it's much more obvious that you "own" nothing.
This is exactly what’ll happen. It’ll start as bring your own library with the odd exclusive, but eventually it’ll evolve into the only way to play AAA games.
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.
Hell, the RX480 is still holding up absolutely fine in 2022 (I guess it helped that the GPU manufacturers keep distracting themselves with "This time we'll find a use-case for path tracing!"?). These subscription prices are crazy.
You need a PC anyway the price differential is nearly exactly the price of the GPU over the useful life of the GPU given that most users keep their hardware for about 6 years its 700 to buy once, 1200-1400 if you intend to buy the next best thing in 4 years and potentially sell the old one, or 2160 to rent something that can play a tiny fraction of the total games if they don't decide to take it away because its not economical at a moments notice.
If you game 10 hours a week the difference in power usage is probably about $30 a year kind of a rounding error.
Attachment to games will change. If you go in with the knowledge that the experience is epheremal (as all experiences are by their very nature!), it will be easier to let one go (not pay the rent anymore) and go into the next. Network effect of course will be horrible, if everyone plays something, surely many will pay the rent just to not feel the fear of missing out.
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 literature, film, or music to be "ephemeral", and I don't want to be unable to show these things to my friends and family.
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.
I think we can discuss two things here, what will happen and what should happen.
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.
I'll add to what should and what will happen a third category: what could happen. But first:
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.
> 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.
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.
This is all true… but GeForce now let’s you bring your own gaming library. If you ever decide you don’t want to stream - you can build a gaming PC like people already do.
Those games that come out to $1500 over a decade? Don’t forget that a decade is probably 2x $2000 for building gaming PCs.
Well, then when those streaming only games come out, I won’t play them. This isn’t a trap at this point, because they are renting a replaceable commodity.
> This is all true… but GeForce now let’s you bring your own gaming library.
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.
This is where Netflix was 7 years ago. It was allowed access to the catalog until the IP owners finished building their own streaming platforms. It’s isn’t that much different in gaming except the very low latency requirement probably means much higher costs of entry.
> ..you can build a gaming PC like people already do.
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.
I've historically got along fine with $600-$800 machined used for 6 years at a stretch. My current machine is a $700 affair with a Geforce 1080 which plays all games at 1080p and some at 4k. I guess the GPU is about half the value so I guess if you divided that by 72 months gaming on my hardware instead of someone else's costs about $4.86 a month. I shouldn't be surprised if more people are gaming on the cheap than building $2000 machines.
Disregarding this is comparing the cost of leasing or buying a Porsche while ignoring the fact that the Carolla exists.
>> While GeForce Now supports a large number of my games on Steam, it doesn’t support them all. It gives me access to 88 out of my over 400 purchased games, with the emphasis being on more recent and/or more popular games.
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.
I don’t really understand this though. I bought the games. What does a publisher have to say about where and or how I play them afterwards? If Nvidea wants to provide me with a cloud computer at a certain price then they should have any say in that.
Agreed. I'm highly disappointed that Nvidia rolled over so easily, with zero resistance. They should have told the publishers to pound sand, as what they're doing is nothing like Stadia or Game Pass. They're just letting me play games I purchased from the comfort of my own couch, as far as I'm concerned.
Nvidia is highly dependent on the game publishers making sure their games work well with Nvidia cards. The whole "best played on Nvidia" thing would fall apart if publishers stopped working with them. Unfortunately, this leads to them being unable to be more of an opponent here.
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.
Nvidia has like 85% of the market share for discrete cards. Releasing a game that doesn't work with Nvidia cards in the PC game space would mean flushing your entire release and all your publishers money. Nobody on earth is withholding support for Nvidia as a bargaining chip in the PC gaming space.
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 like 85% of the market share for discrete cards. Releasing a game that doesn't work with Nvidia cards in the PC game space would mean flushing your entire release and all your publishers money. Nobody on earth is withholding support for Nvidia as a bargaining chip in the PC gaming space.
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.
The problem is that you are fabricating this picture of the world from whole cloth with no corroborating evidence and it doesn't even make sense. Who would threaten to sabotage their own entire operations in the PC space and why would they do that instead of relying on copyright and licensing which trivially provide a means to achieve the same ends.
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.
>I bought the games. What does a publisher have to say about where and or how I play them afterwards?
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.
You didn't buy them though, you bought a license to play them under specific circumstances. If you bought them, then you would have the right to play the same game on a different OS or game system. Can you buy a game on PC and play the Xbox version? Nope. It doesn't surprise me that they want to stay on the good side of the publishers and not risk a legal battle.
Don't mistake this as me endorsing this regime. I'm just explaining the reality of the situation.
Yes, and I bought a license that allows me to play them on any machine that has Steam installed. Whether it’s a machine I bought, or one that I rent from AWS or Google. Why is renting a PC from Nvidea any different?
I find it unlikely that the license agreement and AUP of steam, and in addition of the game you purchased, which might have its own stipulations, is that simple and open.
Feel free to supply evidence to the contrary though. I would be happy to be wrong.
At some point we're going to have to stop letting EULAs and other click-through contracts supersede basic consumer rights. For example, when/why did we lose the right to resell stuff we bough?
> in addition of the game you purchased, which might have its own stipulations
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.
Could be that the service provider doesn't want to delete the game files when you log out, then reinstall the game from steam on a different computer in their network when you sign on next time. In fact, doing so would probably ruin the experience.
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.
I took advantage of one of those deals a year+ ago that amounted to a few bucks a month (3 or 4 I think) and when it comes time to renew, 15 USD is a steal for the value of games. Wholly agree, Game Pass is a game changer. With the studio partnerships and purchases (Bethesda, Activision etc. along with EA Play). It's probably going to have more expensive tiers down the line, but for now I'll gladly pay the tax.
When I started using the xbox cloud gaming, I thought it was wishful thinking, a gimmick. Boy was I wrong. It's absolutely mind blowing.
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.
Xbox cloud seems to have a lot of variance. I tried it on a phone with a 5G connection that was benchmarking at 70mb/s and the picture quality was absolutely awful, like a broken video clip on a twenty year old version of VLC media player.
I first tried it with my iPhone and iPad last year and wasn’t impressed. They supposedly did some big update in the spring as well as lord of optimization work for Edge on the Steam Deck, where it feels great.
If they can get this platform right it seems like this model solves one of the major complaints about Stadia, that you don't own the games.
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.
Xbox Cloud gaming has the worst UX out of GeForce Now, Stadia and itself, unless you use it from an Xbox (when it's only utility is that you don't have to download to play). Start-up times are rather long, at least here in France, and games require a controller (even games that would be a million times better to play with a mouse, like Football Manager or Cities:Skylines). There's no way to explore the games available from an Xbox, you have to find a game and select cloud instead of download/play.
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.
Yeah, I'm surprised that anybody implementing a service like this doesn't have Linux machines available at least as an option for some games. It will never work perfectly for all games, but it works for a high enough fraction that the licensing and resource overhead should make it worthwhile.
It seems strange that some games dont support GeForce Now because in theory it takes a PC game and makes it more like a console, which is to say it makes it harder for people to cheat. This would be huge in certain titles whereby cheating is rampant and hard to control.
GeForce Now is great for simulation games like Factorio or Civilization. Unfortunately 2K Games decided to arbitrarily restrict users of GeForce Now from playing Civilization VI, even with a licensed copy from the Steam store. In the beginning, it worked great. I could play on a giant map with 13 AI civilizations who completed their turns in a few seconds. And my laptop didn’t sound like an airplane.
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.
I agree 100%. However note your save games should be safe on steam cloud. Nothing gets stored on geforce now - your virtual instance gets destroyed once you log off. Should be easy to verify via your laptop even if you don't load up the save.
Will also add that City Skylines has been running pretty well on GeforceNow for what its worth. Of course that's relative to my Windows laptop with integrated graphics!
That’s true, but this is an easy cognitive dissonance for me to resolve, since I can think of it like paying to recover the handful of weeks I would have lost playing Civ over the past two years :)
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.
For my setup, I do a "local" version of Geforce Now.
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.
Don't forget that your input (mouse, keyboard) must travel to the other end before you can start receiving the output that's changed from it. The time from you performing an action to the point where you see that change represented (minus the time to do this locally on the gaming PC) is the actual latency.
It's still probably well within your acceptable tolerances, but worth keeping in mind.
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.
Wow, thank you for the link. Somewhat disappointed that the Razer Viper Ultimate, which advertises lower than wired latiences, is on the low end of overpriced mice, but as a new owner, the lightness of it is night and day with every other mouse I've used.
It's good but not worth 160 USD. I'd recommend the Razer Deathadder or V2 Mini. Just my 2 cents.
I do this too! But with Parsec. Works surprisingly well.
Mostly because it means I can play PC games on my Mac without rebooting to bootcamp and without the noise.
It feels so weird firing up a graphics heavy game, and just hearing silence.
Also means I'm ready to upgrade for M(whatever) when I get round to it.
I do this too but for my phone. I have a Razer Kishi and I sometimes wanna play Rocket League from bed so I throw the gamepad around my phone and enjoy buttery-smooth Rocket League from bed.
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.
On fast paced games that run at 100+ fps, I don't really notice it being missing. But in games that have high graphics, and lower FPS, it's noticeable.
I've used it for about 14 months extensively - I wasn't able to upgrade my rig when cyberpunk 2077 came out. It was brilliant - I played the game at max settings, looked beautiful, not a care in The world. Then I used it too for some turn based / strategy / rpg games as I could play them on laptop, desktop etc, and it was easy to try games without bothering with downloading and local storage. It was sufficiently excellent experience that even once I got an upgraded gaming computer, I still kept the basic foundation paid package due to sheer convenience. It's just great to try and play games with low frequency without installation / configuration / troubleshooting hassle.
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.
How is latency avoided? I've not paid attention to streaming games or looked how it works. If your mouse input needs to go via the internet to control the 3d character on screen, how is there not a noticeable lag compared to a local rendering of the game?
Partially it's modern speedy networks; but partially it's also the player.
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.
Just measured, and I have 10-12ms network latency end to end, from my computer to the Geforce servers. There may be some fuzz factor and complications, but again, for me it's neglible.
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.
I've unfortunately played way too many twitch shooters on PC and latency is really noticeable to me.
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.
Yeah, it won't match the requirements for very high end competitive gamers. I was just talking empirical results found by Digital Foundry matching consoles.
> 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.
given GFN is running the same software as you'd run locally (the game), and using the same local hardware (keyboard, mouse, etc) to send the inputs, and then the same local hardware to display the server rendered output (your monitor/TV)... how can be true that GFN doesn't add at least the same input latency as running it locally?
unless there's some trick I'm missing it's going to be at least the same (plus the network latency)
I said same as native console, not the same as the equivalent hardware on PC. If you look at the chart it's comparing different hardware not the same hardware.
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.
> and using the same local hardware (keyboard, mouse, etc) to send the inputs, and then the same local hardware to display the server rendered output (your monitor/TV)... how can be true that GFN doesn't add at least the same input latency as running it locally?
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.
I'm getting the feeling that you want a test of the internet connection or something like that by your standard of what a fair test is. I don't think that's what they're going for, but a more holistic "typical usecase" test. That said I haven't bothered to check the video for exactly how the test is setup maybe someone will comment with that info.
I'm having trouble understanding this part - GFN being faster than a console for latency. Is it simply the particular game delaying actions in an arbitrary way? Are the GFN machines just _that_ much beefier that they simulate and render a frame significantly faster than a console?
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.
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.
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.
> my experience is that it's flawless and indistinguishable from native in twitch games like fortnite and counterstrike
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.
It's not 40ms of added latency. The chart can't be used like that. I agree 40ms would feel incredibly laggy, like 20fps laggy. That's not how GFN feels, it's perfectly smooth, more smooth than native hardware. Just look at any video of people moving around in gfn. Here's a random one I found. https://youtu.be/q-Fzkp-az9Q?t=154
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.
The chart says there is a total latency on PC of 80ms. It's unplayable. 80ms is actual garbage. Comparing it to console works because consoles typically are garbage these days. FPS/TPS on console sucks. Yes, Geforce Now may be comparable to a console, because you're just running the PC version of the game remotely, and the PC version of games typically probably have less lag due to consoles sucking. Of course, Geforce Now is still back to the 80ms a console might get, that's still terrible.
> 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.
Comparatively, I play a fair bit on Google Stadia, a similar Gaming-in-the-cloud service powered by Google.
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.
The main problem with Stadia is that I have to buy games exclusively for it. That makes it far more comparable to a game console than to Geforce Now, which is basically rent a PC, a - for me - far more customer friendly approach.
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).
>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",
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.
Of all the things speaking against Stadia, this is probably the least important one. It doesn't surprise me that Google would stipulate a client they have (more or less) complete control over. Geforce Now also uses their own client and no one bats an eye.
>> My rural internet connection is 40mbps/sec down in theory — in practice it’s between 25 and 40 depending which second you poll it, and the speed is affected by whether someone is downstairs watching Netflix while I’m upstairs playing a graphics-intensive game.
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.
For the most part, I have found that GeForce Now is not bandwidth limited.
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.
Ultra-low latency is important, but zero packet loss and low jitter is even more important.
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.
GeForce Now has a free tier so you can try it without spending money: The session is limited to 1 hour and there is a queue when many people want to play, but otherwise it's the same you get with 1 tier up. Worth giving it a shot, I was surprised how well I could play Witcher 3 on a FireTV Stick plugged into a TV.
I've found it to be a pretty good product, at least for my use case. I only have an hour or two/wk to play games these days, so it doesn't make a ton of sense to spend the time and $ to buy and install a new video card. So I got whatever the bottom paid tier is for GeForce Now and, while there are occasional lag-spikes and jitters, they're generally rare enough to only rise to the level of minor annoyance.
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.
GeForce Now was/is great. Bethesda though (amongst others) have lost a formerly loyal fan due to pulling their games. Why? I own the games, I paid for them. If I had my old PC still I could play them just the same.
Presumably so that in several years they can run their own cloud service.
The greed of companies will be their own downfall.
All (or at least most, though I didn't notice any missing that aren't super old - it has Morrowind on there) of the Bethesda games are available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It's more expensive but comes with the games so might be worth a look if you particularly like Bethesda's products.
One way I’ve benefited from this is by using Epic’s free games deals. They’re a bit iffy over the summer, but during the holiday season they gave away a bunch of games like the Metro series, the Tomb Raider series etc. I have a founders subscription which makes it good value but even without, by maximising the free games potential and Steam sales etc, I have a great gaming library I can spin up in a minute or two without needing a gaming PC. Not had noticeable latency issues. YMMV as always, but if I ever decide to build a gaming PC, I have those games in my Steam or Epic library and can run them locally (and most games will sync saves etc. so no progress lost).
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.
I tested out GeForce Now and Stadia two years ago and decided fairly quickly to build a desktop machine instead. Turns out that lots of PC games work really well on desktop Linux these days!
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.
It's unclear in this comment if you are lumping them together, but GeForce Now's performance and stream quality is leagues ahead of Stadia's. As someone who exclusively games on the cloud. My main driver, though, is ShadowPC, which gives me dual monitors, 4k, and full desktop access (for modding etc) on a stream
I did find Geforce Now to be better than Stadia, however I remember being super distracted by the compression artifacts on both. Dark scenes with motion and lots of detail/particles just didn’t look good to me.
This is exactly how I feel streaming 4k. One stupid little black square and it breaks my immersion. I stick with UHD discs and 4k files on a usb drive.
I came to the same conclusion really, it's a neat service but even using something like Parsec locally induces enough latency that I just can't use it.
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!
Yeah, don't use Steams streaming system, it's buggy and so low quality. Personally I've had allot more success with Parsec. Even when playing with others across the internet.
And it's been that way since their very first comment was flagged dead in 2017. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858411 If you write to the contact email address (at the bottom of the page here), maybe they'll unban you.
I found that it worked really well on the free tier. There are hiccups and i can’t tell why my isp gives me 1-5% packet loss but I really like that it kicks me out after an hour so I have to have reasonable play sessions. Wait times are rare the service is too good for a free tier
I tried it over the end-of-year holiday break with my 3 boys to play Guild Wars 2 from our Macs. It sucked down over our 1.2 TB of Xfinity bandwidth within maybe just a day's worth of playing. If we would have continued, I would have easily hit the $100 additional bandwidth fee and decided we had better stop before I broke the bank.
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.
It’s almost good enough. Much better than Stadia. I can imagine if your geographical location was close enough, and with fiber gigabit, it would be good enough to never need a gaming rig again (for noncompetitive single player gaming).
FWIW I’ve had a blast with GFN, but I have fiber internet and use a wired Ethernet connection to the router. It’s not very good over wifi IMO. I would recommend it but only for those with great bandwidth and a wired connection.
Cloud streaming will probably never be my preferred option, but the tech has gotten to an impressive place. Microsoft’s implementation is amazing. The thing I find less useful about it is that it requires a good internet connection. And where I have a good internet connection is home. At home, the advantages of a cloud streaming platform are minimal, so I am not sure if this will ever be for me, though I can see a world where this is preferred to many consumers because they have no up front cost of a device.
This crap looks like the next step towards total personal computing annihilation by SaaS. I hope I'll be dead before computers will be turned into stupid terminals forced to download and store everything remotely, lacking even the hardware needed to render graphics in favor of capabilities that can be used only to show what is served from elsewhere. That will be the future if we don't leave that path asap.
> It gives me access to 88 out of my over 400 purchased games, with the emphasis being on more recent and/or more popular games.
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...
Because game vendors think they can double dip. As mentioned in another post, all of the Firaxis games worked brilliantly on GFN, but despite the fact that it's my own copy that I'm playing, in my own Steam account, Firaxis decided that they would remove all of their games from GFN unless they get a payoff.
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;
> My rural internet connection is 40mbps/sec down in theory — in practice it’s between 25 and 40 depending which second you poll it, and the speed is affected by whether someone is downstairs watching Netflix while I’m upstairs playing a graphics-intensive game.
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.
Cloud gaming is inevitable because of the Moore's law but as Moore's law slows down "fewer and fewer computer users will think their computer is too slow[0]." And they won't buy new computer or laptop for gaming because the computer they already have will be powerful enough to run most of the games. This is where the complexity of managing games and managing the whole gaming experience comes along. Simply offering cloud gaming service is not enough, you need to include extra services and perks in order for people to consider signing up and using your cloud gaming service.
Why did he compare the cost of a 3090 an expensive nicety available to few gamers vs a virtual and possibly imaginary 3080 while playing games at a resolution that could have been achieved by a 2060.
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.
I tried GeForce Now a few years ago, overall it was a rather underwhelming, and quite weird experience; Felt more like logging into a remote desktop.
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.
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)
I have always enjoyed strategy games the most and a few years back I briefly used a service like GeforceNow. Since input lag is not super important for those games, I enjoyed using it and didn't have a lot of problems. If I would start some casual gaming now, I would probably use such a service since I would definitely not get an extra computer and like the simplicity and availability (I just need a laptop and a stable internet connection). I use an old macbook with a crappy inbuilt graphic card, I can't play anything.
I like the idea of cloud gaming a lot. I don't need a Gaming PC, I don't need to chase new hardware, I don't need to shut down all my software to maximize available resources, etc.
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.
I would urge people to try out Shadow. It’s a cloud based windows gaming machine that you remote connect to. It’s great. You can install anything you want.
I had to Ctrl/⌘ + F because I couldn't find anyone mentioning Shadow. Why is GeForce Now still more popular than Shadow, especially when Nvidia limits the games you are allowed to play.
I haven't plugged my local gaming PC into the wall in months. The future of Mac gaming for me is Shadow.
I played a couple of slowish action games like the Metro series on GeForce Now and couldn’t be happier. Tons of games from my old Steam library, all on my MBP. No more separate gaming rig required. A CoD campaign should work just as well, but I don’t trust it to be fast enough for competitive MP or Doom 2016.
Stadia does not exist and Shadow PC had an eternal waiting list.
> but also because GPUs (the processors that run graphics cards) are really efficient for cryptocurrency mining. Wannabe Bitcoin barons have been snapping graphics cards of all kinds and driving prices to ridiculous levels.
Not Bitcoin, but Ethereum. Several years ago people have stopped using graphic cards to mine Bitcoin, and instead use dedicated ASICs.
How feasible would it be to put together a DIY solution? Could I for instance spin up a GPU EC2 instance on AWS with SteamOS and get a similar experience? I would love to give Nvidia my money but until rent seeking game publishers stop ruining it for everyone I'm reluctant.
That would probably be fun to try. I looked for pricing and I think it’d be $0.50+ per hour, so not super cost effective unless you only play a few hours a month.
My experience with GeForce Now is that despite having fiber internet and WiFi 6, games are still unplayably laggy. I also wasn't able to play Cities Skylines, because none of my Steam Workshop mods would install.
It's better if you have Ethernet, that way I get no stutter and the lag is almost unnoticeable (I get 9ms ping which is lower than the duration between 2 monitor refreshes at 60Hz)
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.
In principle Wi-Fi devices should be able to find a free frequency channel to communicate in (especially Wi-Fi 6 that parent refers to), so yes, this is surprising. Maybe there is a reason GeForce Now has a page about recommended Wi-Fi routers:
Wi-Fi power is limited by country, so a cheap router will have the same power as an expensive one. The expensive ones can direct it better, so I think you want your neighbor to have one so the power is used for their devices and not yours.
Not really. Input latency is what matters here. Even with great netcode, streaming games just doesn't fit certain genres.
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.
I used GeForce Now to play Valheim for months before deciding to plonk down to build a gaming PC in 2021. It's worth it if you want to dip your toes back into PC gaming!
Okay hackers gather round let's scoff at how hilariously bad this consumer oriented article is. It's not only content-free, but the guy is such a casual at gaming that he even has 400 games (that he never plays, as any Silicon Valley type would) and still doesn't notice game breaking lag.
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.
I think this service is the future of PC gaming. Owning computers with powerful graphics cards is like owning a car or a suburban house - will be a thing of the past soon. Society has less and less resources to indulge greedy people who don't want to share. You're not using your GPU most of the time. You don't need to own it.
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.
At risk of responding to a troll post, the idea that cloud gaming somehow brings equality to society, is retarded. As is the idea of games needing more powerful GPUs (it's a bug). Ironically, the reason games need more and more powerful GPUs is because greed: they can't support basic stuff like supporting less powerful systems, because the boss doesn't want to.
>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.
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.