Hey guy, you look like you could use an
upgrade. I can get YOU NVIDIA'S LATEST $1,000 GPU FOR JUST 20 BUCKS.
>> REALLY? What's the catch? >> THERE'S NO CATCH, FRIEND. With GeForce
Now, you don't need to own a GPU. You can use ONE OF NVIDIA'S. THEY'VE GOT
LOTS. >> BUT cloud gaming? Come on. Everyone
knows the input latency sucks and compressed video looks super low res.
>> No way, buddy. With NVIDIA's new Blackwell 5080 Super Pods, those
problems ARE IN [screaming] THE PAST. IF THAT'S TRUE, it sounds like a pretty
good deal. I mean, it would take 4 years to spend the same money on my
subscription. And the service includes the whole gaming PC, not just that GPU.
Besides, I already rent my games FROM MICROSOFT ANYWAY.
>> YEAH. And the best part is when new generations of GPUs COME OUT, YOU'LL
AUTOMATICALLY HAVE THEM. WAIT, NVIDIA
has raised the prices with new generations before. Can I really count on that value? And what if my internet
goes down? Then I can't game at all. Hey, where is the other guy that's
supposed to bring up all the counter points? >> Oh, sorry. Sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. I was
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[music] Sponsor sponsor
sponsor. While the sales pitch for cloud gaming
is affordability, performance, and convenience, the reason that NVIDIA
actually invested untold amounts of money in cloud gaming is, of course,
economics. See, the old deal was you give NVIDIA a thousand of your dollars.
They buy a nice leather jacket, and you get a GPU that you can keep for a very,
very long time. But then they thought, "Hold on a second. What if we lease that
same GPU to gamers for just $20 a month?
Then we could have leather jackets forever. It's the same you'll own
nothing and be happy strategy that has led to inflated prices in other markets
because for the owner class, renting is more profitable than selling over time.
But I don't know, maybe I'm being too harsh. Game journalists are raving about
the iniccernable experience of the latest GeForce Now compared to local
hardware. And it is certainly impressive what NVIDIA is doing. Taking input from
your local peripherals, then running the games in a virtual machine in their data
center, compressing that gameplay footage, and shooting it over the
internet to your screen at up to 5K resolution or up to 360 frames per
second at 1080p. This support for higher resolutions and higher frame rates is a
big improvement since we last looked at the service 4 years ago. And there's
more. There's a lot more titles you can play if you own them on Steam or other
platforms, including [music] Xbox Game Pass now. So,
I'm going to go into this with an open mind. It's a problem with having an open
mind, though. Sometimes your brain falls out.
For our test machine, we targeted the type of system that you'd probably build
around an RTX 5080, except we're running
an older, more affordable GPU, the RTX
3060. We're going to put the 5080 back in later to compare the experience of
GeForce Now to running our games locally on the same hardware. Let's kick things
off with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Now, our original plan was to
run our tests on our CPU's integrated graphics, and you can do that. You don't
need a GPU, but in our case, our onboard
graphics is limited to HDMI 2.0, O, meaning we would have been limited to
[music] 60 Hz 4K and couldn't have experienced the full power of the latest
GeForce Now, which can do up to 4K 120
[music] frames per second. Uh, well, it's already not completely bugree.
Second attempt. Oh, this is fun. If you interact with the Steam interface before
the VM finishes launching and then opens up the game, you can actually see system
information. Oh, wow. Eight physical CPU
cores gives us a [music] clock speed, but that doesn't tell us how much it
boosts to. Yes, sir. Indiana Jones on the Great Circle gives us an RTX 5080 as
advertised, except what? With 48 gigs of
VRAM. Clearly, this is not a 5080. Then
it's [music] probably an RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell, which is obviously a much
more expensive GPU, except for NVIDIA.
You know, they make them, so they can pay however much they feel like for them, I guess. detects our monitor
refresh rate at 120 Hz. [music] Windows 11. Yeah, I guess they could if they
want the best game support. Yeah, that makes sense. And the OS itself doesn't
need to handle any kind of specific virtualization stuff. It just needs to
run in a virtual environment. 57 gigs of RAM. Okay. No, that actually makes sense
because they would reserve some of the system memory for the hypervisor and
then whatever's left, they would divide up evenly for all of the VMs that are
running. I believe is going to work perfectly this time.
Hey. Oh, I can feel the latency already. In fairness though, it's a lot easier to
feel on a mouse than it is with a camera. And in fairness, guys, this is
the first game that was designed from the ground up to require ray tracing
hardware for its lighting. And seeing this run on a couple generation old
mainstream card at 120 frames per second, 4K, and wow, I mean, looks
pretty damn good, doesn't it? Sharp even. I do notice some blockiness and a
little bit of compression, especially when in motion, but I wouldn't say that
it feels like playing at 120 frames per
second locally, but it's [music] very usable. I think the most impressive
thing about the image quality, though, is that we're not even at the highest setting. We're running at 60 megabit and
we're running at 120 FPS. And my understanding is it can go as high as
100 megabit if you're in the cinematic mode, whereas this is balanced. And I'd
probably prefer to play in balanced. looks good enough and the latency is uh
better. If you didn't tell me anything, I'd say I'm probably running at around
75 80 FPS local because that additional latency feels like you a little bit
lower frame rate. It's improved a lot since the last time I used it and I'm on
a mouse. I should try with a controller where it's even harder to tell how much
latency there is. Do we have one? I wouldn't notice. Damn impressive.
>> How does this compare to your last impressions of GeForce Now? Even 4 years
ago, it was pretty good. Now, it's even better. [music] And with a controller,
from a reasonable distance,
I don't think I would notice that this is not running on local hardware. I
wouldn't think it's 120 frames per second, but I would think it's [music]
running right on this computer right here. Our next game's going to be Borderlands 4. But before we do that, I
want to experience cinematic mode for myself. And while one of the features of
the ultimate tier is that you can go into the game settings menu and alter
things, there are certain elements that you have to configure before you launch
the VM. And this is one of them. Never
mind. We got stuck on the dreaded loading user profile bug and we were not
able to launch cinematic Indiana Jones. Seriously, we tried like many, many
times. Borderlands it is. I think it's important to acknowledge these sorts of
bugs as part of evaluating the experience. Now, this this I like. This
is an art style that lends itself extremely well to compression. And don't
mistake any of my lack of skill for the game not running correctly. This is kind
of freaking awesome. Anything with a first person view, I'm going to be able
to tell that the mouse movements have an extra 25 milliseconds total. Extra, I'm
going to say 30. And so it should. I mean, this is one of the first games
that was validated as being optimized for their new Blackwell servers, which
means what exactly? I mean, obviously, a 5080 can run anything that a 4080 can.
So, we think this list is likely less about working on the new servers and
more about NVIDIA identifying which games they feel require a 5080 for an
optimal experience. To test this, we fired up control on a 5080 enabled
account and a 5080 enabled location and noticed that we were dropped down to an
older 4080 server because that was all it really needed. On the subject of
control, I mentioned before that NVIDIA gives us control over the in-game
settings. So, what I wanted to do is set
this to exactly Gearbox's recommended
settings for an RTX 5080 and see if our VM is bottlenecked in some way where it
doesn't give us an optimal experience. Here we go. And wow, that looks way
better. Also, this is still running at over 200 frames per second in game,
which is more than enough to stream it at 120 FPS. With that said, I can
definitely see stuff that doesn't look that great with compression artifacts.
Like, see what's happening as I go through these god rays.
That's a yuck yuck yuck. I'm not even getting the benefit of the extra level
of detail and stuff like this grass. It just ends up looking kind of gross when
I'm in motion. Still, if I'm paying for Ultimate, I would appreciate the ability
to be able to set this stuff. And you can even configure GeForce Now to
remember your settings. So the next time you launch it, if there's something you like better, you can totally do that. It
feels like the latency might be a touch higher here. So it's possible that
NVIDIA had things turned down to ensure that the GPU doesn't get overburdened by
the encoding and then end up running a little bit slower. Let's drop it down to
1440p and see what happens. Oh boy.
Oh, I still definitely suck at video games.
Ooh, distant objects definitely fuzzier.
If you have a 4K monitor, you're going to want to use it. And I gotta say, I
don't think the latency is really much better. Like maybe we gain back another
10 milliseconds, five. It's still very noticeable in a firstperson application
like this. I would want to play at 4K if I could. Garbage in, garbage out when it
comes to compression, man. So, the cleaner an image you can put into this thing, the better it's going to look
once you transmit it over the internet. Time to find out if I'm right about the
latency with a little device called an LDAT. This is a creation from NVIDIA. It
basically automates mouse clicks and then it checks for the muzzle flash,
measuring the time between the click and the weapon firing. So, this is adding
more like 50 milliseconds plus. Damn. Of
course, we won't know the exact amount until we throw a 5080 into this machine
and actually run that. And we can't do that until we do one more game. The
spiciest game yet. See, PC gamers said
that they could not tell the difference between local hardware and GeForce Now
while playing Apex Legends at 1440p on
medium to low settings. That was before it was rolled out publicly and it was in
a different geographical location. So, we're not sure that we can 100%
replicate their test conditions, but what we can do is play the game and see
if we agree. to try to replicate their experience. I've set everything to low
to medium settings, whatever exactly it is that that means. It feels way better
than Borderlands. Like way better than Borderlands, dude.
I would guess that this is a solid like 25 milliseconds better than what I just
played. Okay, I need the LDAT back. A very big
difference. However, and this is kind of
hard to know how to explain to you guys, the difference we're measuring right now
could be because this game runs way better in GeForce Now. It could also
just be runto- run variance because when they tested Borderlands at the same
settings that I was using just now, when they were prepping for this video, they
got more like 50 milliseconds, like way better than what I got. That's the thing
about cloud gaming. The experience can be great and other times it can be not
as great. Just ask Luke. He knows. Dude,
this is way better. Like, we're averaging freaking 45 milliseconds. This
is very playable. And we have seen only
a fraction of its full power. I want to try the 360 Hz competitive mode. In
order to get the most out of competitive mode though, we need to reconfigure our display. This is a dual mode display
from LG. So, it was running at 4K 120 Hz before, and now we've reconfigured it to
run at 1080p 360 Hz. Woo. The image quality is uh not
as good. Like that's pretty rough. But
the latency, if you told me this was local and just, you know, not that great
of a computer, dude, I think I believe you. And not just cuz I'm on a
controller or whatever, like with Indiana Jones, like in a Twitch shooter.
But I'm going to guess. I'm going to guess. I'm going to say 25.
Man, I'm good. That's really impressive. 25 milliseconds full change. I mean,
back when we were gaming on 60 Hz monitors, that would have been
impressive even, cuz that's up to 16 milliseconds right there, just from the
monitor. What's interesting, though, is this time my results are the same as
when my team tested it a week ago. Maybe I just got a more favored connection
when I put it in competitive mode. That's a possibility. But another
possibility is that by running at such a high frame rate, NVIDIA is able to pair
down the total latency. You can really feel it. Now the question is, is it
worth what we're giving up compared to if we just spend the money upfront and
get a GPU? Let's check it in. Naturally, I'll be doing so with my trusty
transparent LTT screwdriver. Where can we get it?
>> lttstore.com. >> Now, I fully recognize that most people
are buying GeForce now because they don't have a 5080 in their gaming PC,
but we have the luxury of trying them side by side. So, the way that I see it,
we should. And I got to tell you, yeah, it looks a lot better, but if I was my
brother-in-law, sorry, Alec, I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
At 1080p, you're still getting a bunch of, you know, shimmering and aliasing
all over everything. And in some ways, it looks worse here. So, you're kind of
trading one version of low fidelity for another one. As for the latency,
yeah, it's lower, but not in a way that my weak human body could probably
perceive without like really focusing on it.
Yes, it's lower. Can confirm not using the internet to stream your game video
is faster. A lot faster. About 15 millconds, which is cool because that
actually tells us best case scenario running at 360 hertz. How much latency
is NVIDIA's encoding? and transmission of this video data actually adding and
the answer is not that much like 15 milliseconds. Oregon the GPU that we
were gaming on was now it's right here that only cost me 15 freaking
milliseconds of course. Okay, this was at 1080p. So this is kind of the worst
case scenario for the local experience. Let's see how we feel about it once
we're running at, you know, 4K with all the eye candy turned on. I think we
could just go straight to Indiana Jones. >> Sure. I don't know that we need
Borderlands. Jumping into Borderlands, this immediately looks way better, but I
got to admit something I didn't really think about before when we were testing
GeForce Now is that a bunch of our
latency was actually added by frame gen,
not by video encoding, and not by our distance to the NVIDIA data center. So,
even though I'm running this locally, it's a little bit on the higher side.
The animation is super smooth cuz we're probably running at hundreds of frames
per second. But because we're running at 3x frame gen, just like NVIDIA was,
feels a little jelloy, if you kind of get what I mean
by that, man. So, how do I evaluate what
it feels like? Because there's sort of two different versions of it. It's
definitely better. Looks so smooth, but it feels so spongy. Say 35. 30.
Damn. [music] To its credit, Frame Gen
bamboozled me here. I don't know what's more interesting here. The fact that
Frame Gen seems to be adding almost as much latency as GeForce Now was or the
fact that my perception of it is better
than it actually is. It's definitely the kind of thing that like older TVs, if
you're a good enough gamer, you can get used to it. When we tested locally
without frame gen, it was 20 milliseconds, just under.
>> So, it's adding like 20 milliseconds and then it was only what, like another 25
to get to the GeForce Now results. Like, that's crazy. Here we go. And
yeah, it's sharper. But one of the things that I didn't realize because I
hadn't done a side by side yet is that part of the blockiness that I was
observing was probably just the game's built-in film grain filter not being
interpreted that well. to go back. I'd probably just turn that off and it would
help at least a little bit. The latency is obviously better, though, and that's
not something that I could fix just by, you know, turning off film grain,
though. Man, this is a beautiful looking game. Either running locally or with
GeForce Now. Clearly, you're getting more with local hardware in terms of the
feel and in terms of the image quality, which totally makes sense. I mean,
streaming by definition can only add overhead compared to bare metal. But
that doesn't mean that the value proposition is total trash either. It's
true what the devil said. If you commit and buy GeForce Now annually, you're
paying $1,000, which is the RTX 580s MSRP, over 5 years. And during that
time, you probably won't need to upgrade your other hardware. So, if you're on a
5-year upgrade cycle for your computer, that's some pretty significant savings.
And if it works as well on LG TVs and Chromebooks as NVIDIA says, you might
not need a computer at all. But the Angel meant to make some pretty good
points, too. You don't own your cloud gaming PC, which puts you completely at
NVIDIA's mercy for price increases and hardware upgrades. At least you can
install your own Steam cloud supported games now, but unless you pay extra to
NVIDIA for persistent storage, you're going to need to install those fresh
every time you fire up GeForce Now. And yeah, what if your internet goes down?
Steam has an offline mode, but GeForce Now, [snorts] that makes every game
always online all the time. And this
entire conversation completely ignores that if you're in a rural area that
doesn't have fiber, or if you just happen to be on a node that's unreliable
or far away, you can just forget the whole thing. Uh, was there anything else
you wanted to add? Oh, uh, sponsor,
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this video, why not check out the first time that I checked out GeForce Now. It
was impressive, but man, has it ever
come a long way.