NVIDIA GEFORCE NOW
Nvidia finds the sweet spot between stable streaming and top game options
Nvidia delivers a very stable, good-looking stream, even at 60fps
Nvidia’s been working the cloud gaming market for a few years now, and those years of experimentation have paid off. GeForce Now, originally working on an all-you-can-play subscription model, went back to the drawing board for a lengthy beta testing phase. Launching officially in February 2020, it’s now in the best shape it’s ever been in.
What sets GeForce Now apart today is its openness. Nvidia has partnered with a selection of top PC gaming download stores to allow you to play hundreds of their games through its cloud service. So, if you buy a game through Valve’s Steam, Blizzard’s BattleNet, Ubisoft’s Uplay or a growing list of Epic Games Store titles, that one purchase can be tied to your GeForce Now games list, too – all you do is pay the reasonable £4.99 subscription cost to stream them in from Nvidia’s cloud-based network.
The point of cloud gaming of course is that you don’t need the high-powered hardware to enjoy top-notch games, and Nvidia duly delivers. GeForce Now can let you play high end PC games, not only on a low-powered PC, but also on a Mac, Android phone and Nvidia’s Shield TV Android set-top box (our preferred option). Nvidia auto-patches the games in the cloud so, while there’s rare occasions where you may have to queue for a spot on its servers, usually you’re right back into your games – download free – within moments.
While Nvidia’s recommended broadband speed is high, it delivers a very stable, good-looking stream, even at 60fps. Dip below the recommended speed and Nvidia will scale the visuals well, doing all it can to maintain your stream, and you can throttle more demanding settings like resolution and framerate to ensure a good experience.
The only drawback is resolution – though it doesn’t yet do 4K it’s still a respectable 1080p. Even with that slight restriction, there’s a free tier of play too with GeForce Now, letting you give the service a try, Spotify-style, before committing to a fee. It does however cut access to the more impressive RTX-enabled graphical features, and limits play sessions to an hour long (though you can fire up as many sessions as you like). It’s much more generous than the competition in that regard, making for the most comprehensive streaming service out there.