Has anyone tried out Nvidia’s hosted gaming platform yet? Just booted it up on the free tier (with no wait queue!) on my meager Surface Book to take a look, seems to work as advertised. Was able to play Destiny 2 with some non-GeForce Now friends.
While I’m not planning on shelving my gaming rig any time soon, Nvidia has the right idea here in contrast to Google’s Stadia. Nvidia is simply giving users Windows VMs running Steam/Blizzard/EGS and letting you log in to those accounts to access your game library(s).
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try and get admin access to my Windows instance within the 60 minute time limit
I got access to it for free on my Nvidia shield. When it works well, it’s about as amazing as Stadia (I also have Stadia Pro for another 20 days or so.) When it screws up, it’s f**ing annoying. I just saw them announcing they’re going to try and charge for it, so I booted it up to see if there would be a change. They want me to “upgrade” or else stay on the “limited” option (yay for passive-aggressive marketing.) I find it keeps not launching right, or disconnecting frequently, so there is no way in heck I would pay money for this level of offering. And I am not attempting anything stressful for their GPUs, just playing a simple LEGO game. Stadia has had some disconnects for me to… and is equally annoying when it happens… so I don’t know if anyone has the concept working right yet.
TL;DR: It’s great when it works, but it doesn’t work right often enough for me to want to pay for it.
I tried this on my gaming pc and it worked pretty well although I wasn’t getting 4k which I would playing locally, but that’s not really the use case here.
I have been sitting on my couch for about 30 mins waiting for a slot but I’ve still got 39 people ahead of me so I think I’ll give up and try and a quieter time.
The UI is a bit fiddly on the shield, it seems to not always bring up and on screen keyboard so I’ve now attached a USB one as I wait patiently for my slot. I also have it a go on my phone but I could only see about a quarter of the screen on the crew ii. I think most non techies would have given up by now.
I’ve been playing with the some more on my Nvidia shield TV and it really is quite impressive when it gets going.
My broadband struggles a bit when other people are doing things but when I get the house to myself it plays really well on the living room TV, you would never know you were not playing it locally. It’s really good that you can play the games that you already own.
The UI needs some work, steam and uplay are dufficult to navigate. They really need to find a way for you to only browse the games you own on Steam, although maybe I’ve just not found out how to do that yet.
Cloud gaming no matter who it’s form just rubs me the worge way. See internet issues is my number 1 reason for not remanding any cloud gaming system to any body.
I’ll recommend it to casual/console gamers for the financial benefits, the capex of rendering local doesn’t make much sense for them when they’re pretty much oblivious to latency (or playing games where it doesn’t even make a difference).
I still struggle to recommend it to any serious gamer though. We’re simply shifting where the latency goes in the flowchart. Instead of latency in the game engine’s netcode, where developers have spent probably hundreds of thousands of man hours over the past three decades to mitigate, we’re now introducing that latency into the game control interface.
