>> 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.
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.