GeForce Now shilling thread

[insertwackynamehere]

I’ve been debating getting a gaming PC for years now. I missed playing Doom 2016 because I didn’t have one. When I was younger I thought I’d spend my disposable income on sick builds and play any new Doom the second it came out, but that’s not what happened.

 

Anyway, I signed up for beta access to GeForce Now maybe a year ago if not more. Forgot about it and on Friday received an invite code. I bought Doom on Steam for $15, and downloaded their Mac application, fired it up and logged into Steam on the Remote Desktop of the cloud gaming rig it dropped me into. I “downloaded” Doom in the cloud Steam instance but the fact it was instantaneous makes me believe that Nvidia has a cache of Steam games so downloading isn’t an annoying burden (which makes sense depending on how disposable these virtual machines are, I’d imagine they are quite disposable so long download times every time a new one fires up would be a mess).

 

Anyway suddenly I’m playing Doom 2016 on my 2011 iMac without the feeling of struggling and straining that games generally give off on subpar hardware. Twice in maybe a few hours of gameplay I’ve had a jerky frame for a second. The only downside I can see is that the video frames are compressed using MPEG or something similar which makes text artifacty especially when the gamma/brightness settings are low.

 

Since I’m in the beta, this service is free. I don’t know how much it will cost when released but assuming they target the typical price point of subscription services these days, I can see it being worth it, especially if once every few months you reactivate your account to play a game you wanted to try, and then get to turn it off again (basically some kind of a la carte subscription whether paying in monthly intervals with easy account suspensions or paying by the hour).

 

The only requirement they claim is 15mbps connection.

 

Anyway I know this reads like a shill post but this really does seem to be like it could be the future of PC gaming. My friend pointed out how you could have a LAN party and bring a thin client laptop versus a gaming PC and everyone just fires up a server plus N clients all with enough power for everything to run smoothly in the cloud and equipment won’t go out of date because the cloud specs will always be pushed up as needed.

 

Maybe someone who’s more of a hardcore gamer would have more criticisms but personally this felt great and I’m sure the people interested are like me and don’t really want to invest in alternative (full personal quickly depreciating rig) for the diminishing returns it may offer.

[GuyMcBrofist]

My main concern would be with input lag, did you notice any of that?

[GuyMcBrofist]

Breaking news, Google just announced Stadia, their own offering of cloud-based gaming. Doom Eternal will be supported. Looks like cloud gaming is going to happen, we'll see how it turns out.

[KVELLER]

Yeah, I don't like this. The "you don't actually own your games" thing that Steam started is already bad enough, but actually fully depending on someone else's servers (and your ISP)? No thanks. Plus, it basically kills modding since you can't access the game's files.

[AndrewB]

How could this possibly have a low enough latency? After ping and video buffer length, 50ms round-trip seems impossible, and even that would be pushing the limits on what would be considered an acceptable amount of lag.

[insertwackynamehere]

Yeah I’m surprised also that it’s doable, but it definitely works, at least as far as I’m concerned. I’m sure professional gamers have a different bar than I do but I find it usable.

 

As for owning the game, I do own the game, it’s in my Steam account. I just log in remotely. If the Steam model bothers you that makes sense, but this doesn’t really change ownership at all beyond Steam’s existing ownership model. There isn’t really a trade off on that front when playing on someone else’s computer, which is pretty much what this is comparable to.

[deepthaw]

Bumping this to say: Finally bought Doom 2016 because I got into the GeForce Now beta.

 

No way I could play this on my potato, but I'm getting surprisingly good performance. I don't even notice the input lag - the video is noticably softer/blurrier due to compression artifacts, but it's 1000% better than I'd get running it locally.

[geo]

On 3/19/2019 at 2:24 PM, GuyMcBrofist said:

Breaking news, Google just announced Stadia, their own offering of cloud-based gaming. Doom Eternal will be supported. Looks like cloud gaming is going to happen, we'll see how it turns out.

I wonder how Google Fiber turned out. All that hype and it's been years since I've heard about it.

[seed]

On 3/20/2019 at 1:53 AM, KVELLER said:

Yeah, I don't like this. The "you don't actually own your games" thing that Steam started is already bad enough, but actually fully depending on someone else's servers (and your ISP)? No thanks. Plus, it basically kills modding since you can't access the game's files.

 

Yeah, that could definitely be a problem.

 

Anyway, unlike others, I'm actually looking forward to this and see where it leads to. A good alternative for us folks that don't have 2000$ to spend on gaming hardware.