Nvidia Launches Cloud Gaming Service GeForce Now for $5 Per Month

jowifi writes: NVIDIA officially launched its GeForce NOW earlier this week, making the streaming gaming service available to all with no waitlisting. It is advertising a free tier which allows 1-hour of game play at a session, and a premium tier that allows 6-hour sessions and preferred access to the streaming servers. The premium tier is being offered for a limited-time discounted price of $4.99 for 2020 with the first three months free. The service does not include any games, but provides access to games in your digital library (e.g. Steam) and free-to-play games like Fortnite. It supports Windows, MacOS, Android, and NVIDIA Shield (no mention of Linux).

So old who cares?

[AndyKron]

I'm glad I don't care about this crap anymore

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

ok boomer

Re:So old who cares?

[AxisOfPleasure]

Hmmm, you're making an out of date generalisation. I'm 50 and my wife is 45, we're avid gamers and have been gamers since we were both about 10 years old, our teenage kids very rarely play video games and more or less stopped when they got about 10 years old and start ramping up their school studies. Our kids love to read and play board games far more than video games. Sure the vast majority of gamers are likely to be under 20 but the days when video games were a generational thing are fading fast, you have gamers in their 70s and 80s now.

I like the idea of renting my game service, I do it for other services so long it's unlimited game access based on time, I refuse to pay for game titles only to have the service shutdown and take my titles with it. I'll be giving this at least 2-3 years to bed in properly then check out the subscription numbers before I sign up.

Who is this for?

[alvinrod]

I get that not everyone can afford a top end GPU, but odds are that most people don't have a good enough internet connection that they can stream 4k content from this service or use a reduced resolution with higher frame rates. If it came with games, I could see the purpose, but since it doesn't I'm just not seeing the value here at all.

Re:

[PhrostyMcByte]

Who cares about the bandwidth; think about the latency. There's no way anything that relies on reaction time will work with this.

Re:Who is this for?

[Bengie]

I tested this out on some FPS games like Overwatch and CS:GO. I couldn't tell the difference. It was snappy. Even games with graphical cursors and button clicking felt instant. But I have FFTH with an ISP that promise to be net neutral and guaranteed bandwidth. The only really annoying this was every time I loaded a game, I was prompted to log into Blizzard/Steam and all the 2-factor that goes along with it. Switching games was a pain. Not sure about WoW if you want to use addons.

Re:

[Bengie]

I forgot to mention. 1070GTX @ ~25% load doing video decoding.

Re: Who is this for?

[ArmoredDragon]

Depends on your internet connection. On CenturyLink's fiber service I get about 8ms to Google's stadia servers, with less than 1ms jitter. Forget about anything anywhere close to that on cable, even with the lower latencies CableLabs is promising in the future. Could be possible on wireless, depends on the tech, though the bandwidth needed won't happen any time soon.

Re:

[AHuxley]

Depends on your part of the USA and the network.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

I haven't tried Stadia, but I've been streaming my own games for a while.
I initially had reservations/fears over the latency... Turns out, it's surprisingly a non-issue.
There's already a few ms of latency just in the render pipeline. You really don't notice a few more.

Re:

[rtb61]

How about the reliability of Nvidia hardware. I was foolish enough to buy Nvidia shield TV, it worked mostly to start with, they did an update and it crashed every single day for years, just go stupid refuse instruction and crash, and no off switch so you hand to unplug it from power and plug it back it. I warned people how bad that model was and Nvida banned me from the forum, for a fucking CENTURY and whole century (you have been banned for 36450 odd days or some such), seriously, what a pack of ignorant

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Who cares about the bandwidth; think about the latency. There's no way anything that relies on reaction time will work with this.

To which I say just give it a try.

I was shocked too - you'd think with all the latency involved, it would be terrible to do cloud gaming. I mean, a cable connection is around 30ms RTT and you typically have at least 1-2 frame delay for input capture (when the controller is sampled), 1-2 frame delays from the processing, and several frames from the compression - real time compressi

Re:

[Bengie]

Even though the latency of each step is serial, they are not all accumulative. Some steps have deadtime between when they're polled. If you can get part of your latency in during those times, you can hide some portion of it. Even with the simplest of tests of rendering a 2d pixel on key-press, the delay from key-press to displayed can be anywhere from 10ms-30ms depending on your keyboard. That's already a 20ms variation and I've never met someone that said their keyboard was slow.

The real magic isn't that

Re:

[AHuxley]

People with money per month and the fast quality bandwidth who want to play a lot of different games.

It's for the corporations

[rsilvergun]

who want to turn our home entertainment centers into expensive Arcades. A few years back the CEO of Activision was furious over how much Call of Duty players played his games without giving him more money. With streaming games he can charge you and me for every second of gameplay, the maximum amount the market will bear, leaving not a dime on the table. For Nvidia's part they want to be the gatekeeper to that, taking a chunk for themselves.

Re:

[Esteanil]

It's not 4K, it's 1080p. I signed up to try it and was rather disappointed.

Solution looking for a problem

[Somervillain]

Prove me wrong NVidia! :)

I am skeptical any ISP will provide me enough bandwidth that you can stream to me without it being a painful experience. Ever try presenting in WebEx?

I am on a high-speed corporate network that theoretically is magnitudes faster than anything I can buy at home and any scrolling of a webpage is painful and choppy and like 1/2 a frame per second.....sure Nvidia/Stadia will do better than WebEx...but will it be able to send high quality video at 30fps with low enough latency I can play a nice game? That is the paradox. I'd only want to stream games my local hardware cannot handle...and if my local hardware cannot handle it, I am skeptical it can be streamed at low latency...solitaire...sure....we can easily stream that....Doom Eternal?...I am skeptical you could get good detail levels and frame rates at a latency level low enough for me to actually play it.

Re:

[Mark of the North]

So I've owned an NVidia Shield for at least a couple of years. It can use the GeForce Now service. I also live in rural western Canada. We have decent internet service (fibre), but we are still a long way from wherever NVidia's servers are. GeForce Now mostly works. I think I was booted off of the service once or twice and there were times that the picture degraded enough to be distracting, but that vast majority of the time it worked well enough that we didn't complain.

I'm not much of a gamer, but my two

Re: Solution looking for a problem

[ArmoredDragon]

Your corporate access is probably throttled more than your home internet connection. Honestly it doesn't make any sense for them to pay the high cost of leasing a multi-gig backbone when one or two will do.

Typically we limit wan access for each person to 20x20, as that is plenty for business use, and is small enough that even a sudden burst of traffic from say 50 users at the exact same time won't suddenly cause packet loss. (Datacenter is different, and has its own separate pipe.) We can comfortably oversu

Re:

[SmaryJerry]

I don't want to say dead on arrival just yet but the point of high powered graphics cards is to play at 120 to 300 fps and to have low latency. If they think people need to pay $5/mo to play at 30 fps with additional latency they must be smoking something. A person might as well dump their $60/year into a $60 graphics card for that kind of quality.

Re:Solution looking for a problem

[unrtst]

Wrong demographic. Almost all PC "gamers" are in the wrong demographic for this gaming service. If you already own the game, and you're a "gamer", then there's no need for this cloud service.

So who does this make sense for?
* Very casual gamers (I'd fall into this... 1hr here and there would be fine, and I can stop supporting a gaming PC)
* periodic gaming binges (I often go months without playing anything, and then play a game for a month or two... if I could pay $10 for 2 months, then drop the service, that'd be awesome)
* xbox/ps/nintendo people that want to get into PC gaming (drop the xbox live monthly fee, and this service is a wash at $5/month)
* kids - anyone that doesn't pay for their own rig. Much cheaper hardware in the house, no more upgrades or maintenance, and good control of the titles that can be played.
* gaming at work, where feasible (ex. third shift support; let them game on this, no need for gaming computers)
* cross platform gaming maybe? (if there's no Mac port, can a Mac still use this service to play the windows version?)
* maybe mobile 5g gaming?

Just my own 2 cents on it. I'm quite interested in the free tier, and periodically picking up a month... assuming it performs well enough from my neck of the woods.

Re:

[Bengie]

I just tried out the free tier, 1080p, max level graphics, fps game, 100+ fps as reported in the game but only 60 sent back, no screen tearing. Even with a 15ms RTT, it didn't feel remote at all, it felt instant. No pixelation or anything. I was running all over the place and I couldn't tell that I was playing remotely.

Re:

[RossGGG]

I am skeptical any ISP will provide me enough bandwidth that you can stream to me without it being a painful experience.

I have been using the beta of this service for quite awhile now (on cable internet from Charter Spectrum). I haven't seen any image degradation and the input lag has been, at most times, imperceptible. The frame rate has been maintained at the promised 60fps, and the graphics settings have always been at Ultra/Maximum (something I couldn't accomplish on my own hardware without some costly upgrades). It may not be 4k, like Google's offering, but it has been more smooth and reliable by several magnitudes (

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Given an RTT of say 8ms, with let's say 1-2ms of rendering pipeline latency, that gives equivalent input->render latency of around 100fps.
It's not as bad as you think. I've been streaming my own games from my home to other locations over the internet for a long time. Works like a charm- even for first person shooters.
As always, YMMV based on internet connection, but the latency and bandwidth requirements aren't nearly as stringent as you think.

Re:

[Confused_Enemy]

I totally get where you are coming from, but these services to me mean it may be possible to play high end games on a raspberrypi, or maaaaybe(big maybe) an arduino! I can totally see the value there for local couch coop etc launched off of sub $100 devices. Online FPS, racing pvp'ing seems DOA as far as I am concerned with latency issues not ever being resolved unless fiber hits EVERY home globally.

Re:

[Bengie]

You might have issues on the raspberrypi. My 1070 was hanging around 25% just video decoding, but my CPU was virtually idle. The service does have an option to reduce FPS to 30, which may help local computational loaded, not to mentioned reduced bandwidth.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Anecdotal, but my raspberry pi 3 decodes a 1080p60 Steam Remote Play stream with zero loss.

Linux or FreeBSD support

[laffer1]

If they supported all platforms they make drivers for, it might actually make sense. If I could play a few games in the cloud that I can't run natively, i would be able to ditch windows completely. That would be quite helpful.

So, for $5 a month I can...

[Atrox Canis]

... play games that I already own, that are in Steam, for free. And I'm limited to 6 hours per session. Got it.

Can someone explain why this is a good idea, for the end user?

Hardware Cost Avoidance and Travel Convenience

[Aero77]

For $60USD/YR you can stop upgrading your computer to play newer games and play high-end games on a lower-end device while traveling (or at home if that's all you have). If that isn't worth it to you, then you shouldn't subscribe to the service. Alternatively, if those benefits are attractive to you, but isn't worth $60USD/YR, you can subscribe to the $0/YR FREE service tier and limit your game sessions to 1 hour in duration.

Re:Hardware Cost Avoidance and Travel Convenience

[Dunbal]

For $60USD/YR you can stop upgrading your computer to play newer games

1. I don't upgrade my computer anywhere near as often as I used to. There is simply no need. The performance over time curve is flattening out. and has been for years.

2. There is no guarantee that the service will still be costing $60/yr in the future. In fact it's quite likely that it will go up in a hurry - like everything else has from electric, telephone and cable bills to streaming services. $60 is the introductory price but don't you doubt they are in this to make money. After a few years at the new price you might actually start thinking that you would have been better off upgrading.

3. There is no guarantee that their servers or the bandwidth will be able to deal with the games of the future.

4. Failure is built into the model. If this becomes terribly successful and lucrative, every major publisher will want one and start rolling their own - and pulling content through exclusivity deals from other providers - just like streaming services are doing today. So to get all the games you will have to pay several monthly rents to several different providers. How many AAA games does nVidia make and publish?

Re:

[Voyager529]

For $60USD/YR you can stop upgrading your computer to play newer games and play high-end games on a lower-end device while traveling (or at home if that's all you have).

I hate this argument. Primarily because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

The "upgrade your computer argument" is crap, and has been for years. As an example, Jedi: Fallen Order has a minimum system requirement of a GTX650 - released in March 2013, and it wasn't a flagship card, either. Sure, it's unlikely that one will be able to sustain a solid frame rate in 4K with that card, but it's likely to be playable at 720p. It'll probably play just fine at 1080p with 'good' settings with basically any decent card r

Re:

[jowifi]

According to TFA, the $60/year is a "limited-time discounted price," meaning you can expect it to go up in 2021. Here's the link to the official NVIDIA blog post [nvidia.com] that I included with my submission. I don't know where the TechCrunch link came from.

Re: So, for $5 a month I can...

[ArmoredDragon]

Well, a decent graphics card for current games at any given time tends to be at least $300. That would take about 5 years to cover at $5/month, and that's not even for 4k graphics, nor is it considering the cost of upgrading your motherboard and CPU occasionally to be able to get current generation RAM.

I could see the value in that.

Re:

[rogoshen1]

This would have made way more sense back in the late 90's/early 2000's when near-quarterly computer upgrades were still a 'thing'.

Nowadays though, unless you're into the uber-nerd bleeding edge territory (or into FPS games that demand 120hz and infinite FPS), a modest i7 (lets say 5 years old?) and 10xx series card from 3 or 4 years ago is still more than adequate for 1080p/1440p gaming. Though, I think a lot of this is down to game studios making games for xbox/ps4; and the PC port is secondary -- who kn

Re: So, for $5 a month I can...

[ArmoredDragon]

Even at max graphics settings for the newest games?

Besides, gtx1080 isn't 5 years old, rather it's almost three years old. If you bought it when it was brand new, at its MSRP of $599, that would take roughly 10 years at $5/month. And it's still not 4k.

If this worked well enough, that's a far better deal than buying a new graphics card every 2-3 years.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

And it's still not 4k.

Yes, it is.

Re:

[mobby_6kl]

Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB / AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB HDD

That's really not very steep, considering the scope and scale of the game.

That's not very steep but a machine like this will still cost about $500 unless you ebay everything and probably won't get you 60fps at high detail. For the same amount you can use the service for like 8 years assuming you can lock in the current price. They'll keep upgrading the VMs but you'll be stuck with a gtx1060 until the end of the decade.

I'll certainly stick with my own hardware for now but it's not as bad of a proposition as it might seem.

Re:

[Sarten-X]

I have a $150 mini-PC hooked up to my TV. It can stream video decently enough, but anything 3D chokes after a few frames. For a few bucks a month, I can play the latest greatest games from my living room couch, and basically never need to upgrade my little terminal. It'd probably pay for itself in one upgrade cycle, which is about every 3-5 years for me...

Now, granted I don't actually have time to play video games these days... but I would have been a big fan of this a few years ago. In fact I was, having q

Let me guess

[Dunbal]

Lag, screen freezes, pixellation and all the same problems Google has been having with Stadia....

They need to get it into their heads that we are nowhere near capable of delivering the data bandwidth required per frame, frame rate AND the response time CONSISTENTLY in order to provide a reasonable gaming experience. If you're playing some multiplayer game and a player has lag for a moment and does a bit of rubber banding, it's no big deal. But if you're "immersed" in a game and suddenly your frame rate dr

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

Complete nonsense. I've been streaming 1080p games for years now.
The bandwidth require per-frame isn't even a metric that means anything here, since streaming happens with either h.264 or h.265, and both use temporal compression.

I can tell by your post that you haven't actually tried it. So why do you judge it as if you had?

Re:

[Dunbal]

If I'm not mistaken these compression protocols depend very much on large sections of the screen remaining unmodified from one frame to the next, and only modify the part that has changed, conserving bandwidth. Now if you had any idea what new techs like DOTS will mean for future games where you can literally have almost everything on the screen moving without reducing frame rates at all, these protocols will not be as useful.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

If I'm not mistaken these compression protocols depend very much on large sections of the screen remaining unmodified from one frame to the next

You are not mistaken.

Now if you had any idea what new techs like DOTS will mean for future games where you can literally have almost everything on the screen moving without reducing frame rates at all, these protocols will not be as useful.

That's fucking nonsense.
Increased processing power (fucking hopefully) does not mean your game looks closer and closer to white noise.
You are correct, they don't compress white noise for shit.
But you're insane to think that frame-per-frame will ever be anything but nearly the same.

Re:

[Dunbal]

nearly the same.

Yeah but there are real limits. The human eye can perceive changes and stutters in frame rate - in fact changes in motion are instantly more noticeable than changes in color or intensity - it's the way we're wired as part of our survival. This is even more noticeable if you're actually participating in a "simulated" fight or flight situation versus passively watching a video about ants [youtube.com].

In highly demanding graphical environments - which is after all what they CLAIM to be replacing because a run of the mill

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

we might soon be reaching levels were either the compression algorithm is going to have to force too much loss of info/detail

No. Just no.
The loss of detail is based on the bandwidth. The more bandwidth you allocate to the stream, the more frame-divergent detail you can pack in there.
Currently, I can play 1080p60 games using around 30mbps of bandwidth. As bandwidths increase, it will get *easier* to accommodate this. 4K streaming is a thing on youtube.
I'm not arguing such a level doesn't exist, but not for practical human purposes.
You seem to be arguing for the end of all internet video recordings of games due to some kind of

Just what I'm looking for /NS

[BLToday]

No sarcasm. This is exactly the type of service I would pay for. I have a gaming PC (old Haswell + GTX 970). But I find myself working and traveling on my laptop often. Just tried it out with Wolfenstein: New Order over ethernet and ATT 50Mbps; pretty playable, slight lag but not horrid. One major problem is that you're only allocated 256GB of storage and most of the games I would run are 50GB+.

Hey, it works

[Bobrick]

The usual frustated geezers commenting on Slashdot are wrong, as usual. The thing works surprisingly well. I can't imagine using a streaming service to play games, but for those that do, it really does work -and- it's not a complete shitshow like Google's failed Stadia offering.

Re:

[DamnOregonian]

The thing works surprisingly well.

Which isn't even weird. Game streaming isn't new. I've been doing it for the better part of a decade.
My game machine sits behind my couch. It streams games to my ipad, my laptop, or my TV, or my cell phone, depending on my level of boredom. It works just fine over the internet. I've been using a combination of Steam Remote Play (used to be called In-Home Streaming) and nVidia GameStream (moonlight client)
I can't remember the last time I played a game that wasn't streamed.

The usual frustated geezers commenting on Slashdot are wrong, as usual.

I can't tell if they've got an ax

Supported store list

[twocows]

I'm genuinely interested in this (because it has a free option and because I have a Shield TV) but for the life of me I can't figure out where the hell it lists what stores are supported. I'm sure it supports Steam and I heard it supports BNet, which is great, but I also have a huge library on GOG and a smaller library on Origin, UPlay, and EGS. Are those supported? Their FAQ (which is buried [nvidia.com]) doesn't say.

In Hindsight...

[Anonymous Dotter]

This will always be a niche market for most with the current state of data infrastructure in most areas. Your gaming experience is only as good as the data infrastructure available through an ISP to you with this gaming platform model.