
Nvidia Geforce Now launches at $5 a month - madhato
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/
======
mrspeaker
Holy cow, I've never tried any of these types of services before but I'm blown
away! I just signed up for the free version to give Fortnite a go. I've played
it a tonne on mobile, but never PC because my 2012 Macbook Pro could only pump
out about 5 FPS at the lowest graphics settings.

5 minutes of setup and I'm playing on amazing-looking (to me) settings and it
seemed damn fast FPS (to me): looks so good and played great! The input lag
was not noticeable (again, to me - not a gamer... I died in Pleasant Park
trying to figure out how to build a cone).

I think I might be their core audience for this, and am extremely tempted to
sign up for $5 a month. My GPU sucks, hard drive is always "nearly full" so
keeping games around isn't an option. For a casual like me this seems...
futuristic!

~~~
danielbln
you desribe almost my exact usecase and limitations. 2015 MBP, never free disk
space. Being able to play these games and not having to think about hardware
and installation is great. I've signed up for the $5 tier.

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creyes
I've been using NOW for ~6 months now and it's incredible. Are you going to
get 144hz 4k gaming performance? No for sure but I've been using it for a
couple of reasons:

1) Games that aren't available on my Macbook. Simple things like Legends of
Runeterra and Magic Arena and Magic Online. Not super graphically intensive
Geforce Now has worked better than Wine/VM solutions

2) Games that my Macbook just can't play like F1 2019. Good enough for both
single and multiplayer.

Gonna miss it being free but easily worth $5.

~~~
datashow
Mac or laptop seems to be a good reason for this service, but I am not sure
about its value for a PC desktop. $5 / month for 2 years is $120. I can get an
OK graphic card to play game on my PC with this price.

~~~
ksec
You didn't include the cost of Games. Which is easily a lot more than $120.

~~~
spzb
Geforce Now is a 'bring your own license' system. The subscription doesn't
include the cost of the game.

~~~
ksec
What? Interesting. Sorry I am an idiot, how did I miss that. Thanks for
pointing it out.

------
endorphone
This is a fantastic service. I signed up to the beta just a few weeks ago and
love it. The fact that it just uses my Steam account (or my son's Epic
account) makes it an easy winner over alternatives.

The performance, in my experience, has been fantastic. Suddenly on my MBP I
can play games that were only previously on my Windows box with a beefy GPU.
Better still the fans stay at a minimal level -- on this machine it's barely
more than streaming a video. I have a dislike for hearing the GPU fan grinding
and this is a relief.

On the flip side if you aren't really close to one of their data centers, it
isn't a great experience for twitch FPS games. I tried pubg and it...worked,
but I fell from competitive to pretty mediocre given that everyone else had a
couple of frames head start.

Still, it's an instant sign up for me. Even for games that I can play locally
on my laptops, like Civ 6, doing so with minimal local power suckage, heat and
fan grind makes it worth it. I'm outsourcing those to an nvidia datacenter, of
course, but better than than in my lap. My experience with this has been much
better than even Steam in-house streaming (where I used that big beefy Windows
box with a high-end GPU in another room to play from my MBP).

And for those who questioned how the process works, for a steam game it kicks
you into a virtualized version of steam that you log into. On first play you
"install" the game but they seem to have images for everything so it's
instant. Then you play in a virtualized session. It's very well done.

~~~
DanielleMolloy
Thanks for the explanation! I have no idea why your comment is downvoted right
now.

The link to Steam is extremely interesting to me, I did not own gaming
hardware (except for a Switch) for long time.

~~~
endorphone
Thank you. As to the downvoting -- it takes just one angry guy mad that
something doesn't conform with their bias. It's all good.

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sickygnar
Just tried it from 5ghz wifi on a 200mbit connection. It looks like it added
me to the correct region (southwest) and set me to 720p@60fps. Tried playing
Mordhau, a "hardcore" first person melee game where milliseconds count, and
had a hard time due to input lag and occasional stuttering. The lag seemed to
bounce around a bit, sometimes it was ok sometimes it was worse. I only played
for a few minutes, but it seems like it would work better for more casual and
console oriented games. I'm optimistic it will work better on a wired
connection. For reference, I usually play it on a decent gaming pc on a wired
connection (ryzen 1700, 1660ti)

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kenforthewin
I had to scroll far into the page to tell what this service even offers.

> GeForce NOW instantly transforms nearly any laptop, desktop, Mac, SHIELD TV
> or Android mobile device into the PC gaming rig you’ve always dreamed of.
> Instantly play the most demanding PC games and seamlessly play across your
> devices.

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baybal2
Is this another streamed videogame service? I think these people don't learn.
There were 10+ failed gaming SaaS companies on my memory.

~~~
andrewmunsell
NVIDIA, Google, and Microsoft have more of a chance at success. They already
have the necessary infrastructure or hardware to scale the business so that
latency is acceptable, along with the software expertise to optimize the
streaming.

Sure, it still might not work out, but I still think they have a better chance
than the previous SaaS entrants.

~~~
henrikschroder
A problem that all the services face is that they can never, economically,
output the same quality that a local gaming PC or console can deliver, which
means hardcore gamers, who would want to spend money on gaming, will never be
customers.

Just look in this thread, the people who are impressed are casual gamers who
have no interest in building a gaming PC, and I kinda doubt that group is a
reliable customer base.

And when the gaming press reviews these services, they crank up their
magnifiers to figure out at exactly what quality level the games are actually
being rendered at, and since that is always lower than what hardcore gamers
can do themselves on their own hardware, the consensus is always "why
bother?".

Good enough quality simply isn't good enough for your prospective customers.
And this is why these service are doomed to fail.

~~~
endorphone
"which means hardcore gamers, who would want to spend money on gaming, will
never be customers"

I mean, either you're paying nvidia $5 per month, or odds are you're paying
them many hundreds of dollars for a GPU every two years. I don't think they're
really seeing the downside. Nor does your economic case actually make sense
(nvidia is filling their own data center full of their own cards -- they can
provide a much higher performance per dollar than they can feeding the same
through retail channels).

It's also worth noting that the quality offered by this service easily matches
or beats a PS4 or Xbox One X. Not sure why you felt the need to squeeze
console gamers in when defining "hardcore" gamers. Quite the contrary for
people with a console but who have a desktop or laptop that wouldn't normally
be able to give a good experience, this service is wonderful to bridge their
experience.

"Just look in this thread, the people who are impressed are casual gamers who
have no interest in building a gaming PC"

This is nonsensical gatekeeping. I _love_ the service. I normally game on a
pretty beefy "gaming PC" and had fed many thousands of dollars to nvidia over
the years. Do I not count because you disagree?

But that's irrelevant. People who talk about their "gaming PC" or try to gate-
keep who counts as real gamers are a minority. In no universe is that the make
or break market.

~~~
henrikschroder
> I mean, either you're paying nvidia $5 per month, or odds are you're paying
> them many hundreds of dollars for a GPU every two years. I don't think
> they're really seeing the downside. Nor does your economic case actually
> make sense

Sure, there's an upside for nVidia in this case, since they supply the cards,
but since you need to place your rendering farms as close to the customers as
possible for latency reasons, you can't have a global pool of cards to handle
peaks around the globe, so your utilization rate of the cards is going to be
pretty crap.

Better than the utilization rate of the card that sits in my PC, sure, but not
that much better.

> It's also worth noting that the quality offered by this service easily
> matches or beats a PS4 or Xbox One X.

...if you have the bandwidth for it. 4K video eats through data caps pretty
damn quick, and if you compress it too hard, you're removing details that you
spent GPU time on creating, so you have to balance the render quality with a
target compression rate, which means that for an acceptable video bitrate,
you're not going to run at full detail, which means a local gaming PC, or a
local gaming console, will provide better quality, simply because the
bandwidth of an HDMI or DisplayPort cable is unlimited and consistent.

Bandwidth caps are the norm at least in the US market, and you have to take
those into account.

> I love the service. I normally game on a pretty beefy "gaming PC" and had
> fed many thousands of dollars to nvidia over the years. Do I not count
> because you disagree?

The question is if you are an outlier or the norm. There's been plenty of
companies doing exactly this, and they have all pretty much failed. The one
good difference I see in this case is that nVidia allows you to grab games
from external libraries, games you already "own", that solves a trust issue
that plagued all the predecessors. But I'm still pessimistic about this, I
don't see what makes the underlying fundamentals different this time, that
would magically make this thing work, when all the others have failed.

------
Lorin
Tried founder membership to try Apex Legends - plenty of stutter and delay
when attempting to play from Toronto. I'll stick to ye old local play for now.

------
jorams
This landing page (and the associated support pages) weirdly never mention
what they include in "your favorite stores". This seems like crucial
information, and was certainly the first thing I wanted to know. Why not
mention it? First I thought they might not support Steam and be ashamed of it,
but the comments here make clear that they do.

Then there are comments here talking about 4K, but Nvidia only seems to
mention 720p and 1080p. Sure, most users' network connection probably isn't
good enough, but why not tell us? It could certainly be a selling point for
connecting this to a 4K television.

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makoz
I tested this out when it was in BETA about a year ago. It worked pretty well
with Path of Exile but it ran into issues when I was trying out Monster Hunter
World iirc.

Word of caution - if you have a bandwidth limit it burns through it pretty
quickly.

~~~
TMWNN
Yes, GeForce NOW forced me to get an ISP without a bandwidth cap, as I for the
first time found that 1TB/month was insufficient. I was hitting 130GB/day.

------
AbraKdabra
I instantly suspect of any service/product that fails to tell what it is in
the first view of the page, I mean, it's not hard, why should I scroll almost
to the bottom of the page to read it?

------
datashow
I have never used this kind of service before. What is the bandwidth required
to stream a game play on a server? And how does the latency affect the
experience?

~~~
tvb12
From the system requirements page: "GeForce NOW requires at least 15Mbps for
720p at 60fps and 25 Mbps for 1080p at 60fps."

I'm pretty sure I could get that most days even though I live out in the
boonies, but it looks like Linux isn't a supported platform and GOG isn't a
supported storefront. That's kind of a bummer.

------
zetazzed
Ars review: [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/nvidia-has-shaken-
up-...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/nvidia-has-shaken-up-the-
netflix-for-games-model-with-its-challenge-to-stadia/)

(Disclaimer: I'm an NVIDIA employee who works on unrelated projects, but I
really enjoyed using the beta of GeForce Now.)

~~~
xfalcox
Do you know if this runs on public clouds? just trying to gauge how long it
(if ever) would be available in Brazil...

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kaonashi
I read the page and I don't get what it is -- a store that tries to
grandfather in your purchases at existing stores -- with a subscription?

~~~
kodt
It allows you to stream your games from Nvidia's servers instead of installing
it locally. Mostly to play on underpowered devices such as a tablet, laptop,
or streaming stick connected to your TV etc...

~~~
kaonashi
ah yea, it does say "stream" once in the entire page

------
rcarmo
Good news. I’ve been playing Quake Champions on it every now and then (haven’t
for a few weeks), and the experience on my iMac is pretty good at roughly 30ms
ping:

[https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2018/09/30/1600](https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2018/09/30/1600)

------
hapless
Linux and MacOS are each about 1% of the market, yet this product supports
MacOS and excludes Linux.

That doesn’t seem like a wise choice.

Ordinarily no product needs to target 1% platforms, but this product
specifically seems like its early adopters would naturally be non-Windows
desktop users. Cutting off half of that crucial adoption seems ... stupid.

~~~
iamaelephant
Most articles I can find put MacOS at 9-15%, about 5-8 times greater than
Linux.

~~~
onli
And there are way more games available on Linux, plus many more Linux PCs will
have a strong graphics card. Probably a smaller market. Add to that the
strained relationship between Nvidia and the Linux community and Now not being
on Linux is really not surprising. A pity, I was about to test this.

------
billars
something is going on, I registered for the free service, clicking system
requirements or any other link gets me to a microsoftonline login, probably
some internal service that shouldn't be exposed,
[https://login.microsoftonline.com/43083d15-variousnumbers-39...](https://login.microsoftonline.com/43083d15-variousnumbers-39efd9ccc17a/saml2)

"Selected user account does not exist in tenant 'NVIDIA Corporation' and
cannot access the application
'[https://preview.nvidia.com'](https://preview.nvidia.com') in that tenant.
The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant first. Please
use a different account."

------
vorpalhex
The 60 minute session limit on free accounts is interesting. One can imagine
the future "Watch an add to get an extra 30 minutes!"

Something about it feels creepy to me, but I can't place what.

~~~
ArmandGrillet
... or this is just a good way to have people checking if the service works
with their connection? It minimizes the barrier of entry and makes people sign
up and install the app, it's a common way to do marketing (e.g. for freemium
games).

------
duxup
I like the idea that I can just try it for an hour.

------
knicholes
I can't help but wonder if these gaming-as-a-service offerings are just a way
to get more data to train ANNs.

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papermachete
Lag, no mods, no hacks, and compressed 4K looks worse than raw 1080p. When
will companies learn?

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totaldude87
Their game search is a joke, no filter, no sort, nothing..

~~~
NikolaeVarius
[https://static.nvidiagrid.net/supported-public-game-
list/gfn...](https://static.nvidiagrid.net/supported-public-game-
list/gfnpc.json?JSON)

~~~
totaldude87
Sorry, i was talking about searching for a game inside the NVidia
portal(currently its in final beta,... yet), post recent update to its beta,
they went full on with a minimalist search only box..

------
joshstrange
Synchronous XMLHttpRequest on the main thread, CORS errors, and more... Great
job Nvidia. I really enjoy clicking the button to join and having the whole UI
freeze for 30 seconds.

Oh even better... Logging out doesn't log you out, I had to clear cookies to
actually log out. Edit: Uhhh, even that didn't work, wth is going on here?

------
skay-
I have used "GeForce Now" for the past couple of months (during the beta) and
it works quite well overall. The latency exists but it is quite low; given
that my last few gaming years have been on the PS4 I am more used to this than
your typical PC gamer.

There are some quirks with it especially around getting the resolution right.
Sometimes the output is a bit blurry because it doesn't quite match the
resolution/aspect ratio of your screen.

I would say that it is worth giving this a try. The free limited version is
idea for as a trial.

------
shmerl
What OS is it using for backend?

~~~
byte1918
Windows of course.

~~~
shmerl
Why of course? Stadia is using Linux. Using Windows is a waste of license fees
for such services.

~~~
endorphone
I assume they chose Windows to support the widest array of games, and the most
comprehensive and timely support for things like RTX.

Stadia does use Linux, however Stadia has made an enormous number of missteps
and seems very close to DOA so I'm not sure they're a good example of much.

~~~
shmerl
I'd say using Windows is a misstep and DOA kind of choice for these things.

For the reference, RTX shouldn't depend on the OS, since it's supported as a
Vulkan extension.

~~~
endorphone
It's an abstract backend host for a remote desktop sort of thing -- there is
nothing "Windows-esque" about the experience for the end-user -- so I imagine
they could easily support alternatives as the need arises. But given that
Windows currently supports 100% of the top PC games, where alternatives
support a small fraction of that, it's something they certainly needed to
support for now.

~~~
yread
It's definitely Windows. You do see the Windows 10 chrome on windows
(sometimes the steam is there minized) and games in steam install to Program
files...

~~~
endorphone
Oh for sure they're using Windows to host most/all games, with a very good
justification for doing so, but the way the client app interacts with the
server they could just as easily have some games hosted in Linux. The point
being that they are in no way tied to Windows, it's just the best option for
what they're doing.

