they said gaming in the cloud couldn't be done they said the latency would be
too high they said we'll always game on
our own local hardware they were what in
the world could that
be the master case 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your
midtower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories check
out the link in the video description to learn more all right so as I alluded to in my
entirely spoiler-free AKA completely useless intro the subject of today's
video is GeForce Now NVIDIA's new
product that could be described as a way to play games over the Internet which No
actually that's not going to work it's okay because it's not multiplayer gaming
we've had that for decades so let's call it something else let's call it game
streaming which yeah know that sounds awful lot like what they do on Twitch TV
all right fine I will use the c-word cloud GeForce now is a cloud-based
gaming service that uses NVIDIA's grid technology in one of their data centers
in North America Europe and APAC to take input from your keyboard and mouse or
controller send it to an instance of your game running on a virtual machine
render out the game frames at 30 or 60 FPS per second depending on the title
compress them on the Fly and beam them to your supported device over the
Internet with the objective being to do this at a reasonable price while
delivering the utmost an image quality and with little enough latency that is
the delay between pressing a button and seeing an action on screen that it
doesn't feel like trying to op and Counter Strike by yelling at your
neighbor to move the mouse and press buttons for you so let's address the
first point first is the price reasonable at $799 NVIDIA is clearly
borrowing an established price point in the streamed content industry so the
real question becomes one of whether they are delivering enough value for
that price point compared to a service like Netflix here I have a few
criticisms game variety as can be expected of a new service is okay for
casual users but a bit of a low point if
you're a pretty avid gamer that wants to make this service your go-to when you
pick up a controller and settle down on the couch while there are a couple of
exceptions the list of games included with your members ship fee is mostly a
metric butt ton of Lego games uh and older AAA titles like The Batman series
and Walking Dead Season 1 with newer games like Witcher 3 requiring an add-on
purchase in order to be streamed that means I actually had to buy Metro last
Light at Full Steam retail price for my
performance testing more on that later even though I own that game on Steam
already the good news is that if you're playing new games versus one that you
already own most game purchases on GeForce now come with a steam or Gog key
that you can activate on those services for local play if you want but there are
still two issues here one it would be nice if I could bind my Steam account to
my GeForce now account and be allowed to use the service to stream titles I
already own and two this one is a much bigger deal IMO I shouldn't be paying
full sticker price for games on a service where I not only have to pay
monthly to be a member but I also have to buy a specialized piece of streaming
Hardware from NVIDIA a shield portable tablet or Android TV for a couple
hundred bucks in the first place let's move on to objective number two image
quality here NVIDIA gets full marks and this isn't anything surprising to me
since I've been such a huge fan of gamestream since it launched that I
haven't even considered a non- envidia graphics card for my personal rigon over
two years but the power of NVIDIA grid
on the other side means running games at 60 FPS steady at 1080p is a nonissue and
NVIDIA's realtime h264 encoding continues to deliver good enough image
quality that on a handheld device or from the couch you will be hard pressed
to find any issues with it aside from the same blockiness or color banding
that you'll find in low contrast scenes in pretty much any internet streamed
content which ties in pretty nicely with performance Game launch times were nice
and snappy especially after the first time you launch them and as long as my
internet connection was stable I noticed very few hitches or hiccups in the game
animation but while you might be pleasantly surprised to see the same
Graphics quality menus that you would find if you were running the game
locally including anti-aliasing sliders improved texture quality Etc turning any
of these dials past default will result
in stuttery playback and the default
suggested settings will reapply every time you launch a game this is pretty
disappointing but the good news is that
these settings are still going to spank what you'll get out of a modern
generation console and there's definitely room then for NVIDIA to add
more power per user as time goes on
which is fine and good lonus but I've been watching this video for 5 minutes
and none of us were worried that a building full of GTX Titans couldn't run
Toy Box turbos what about the latency
yes the Achilles heel of gaming over the Internet whether we're talking about
some jackass on dialup teleporting all over the place or in this case the
actual delay between executing a command on your controller and seeing the
results on screen too much of which can result in a visually pleasing but
downright unplayable gaming experience since you could end up turning left when
you mean to turn right and vice versa so
for my testing methodology I chose Metro last Light because it's a available on
all the platforms I wanted to test it delivered consistent results and it only
takes about 2 minutes to get from the very beginning of the game menu to a
point where you can actually fire a gun a necessary component of my testing in
the opening attack sequence I used a BenQ RL 2460 monitor with a Makey Makey
hanging in front of it I would execute five left Mouse clicks which illuminates
an LED on the PCB of the Makey Makey nearly instantaneously then using a
high-speed camera in this this case the 240 FPS slow motion recording mode on
the iPhone 6s I can measure how many frames there are between the LED
flashing and the muzzle flashes from the gun with each frame representing about 4
milliseconds some of these results are not surprising at all gaming on a local
machine is much more responsive and experience than encoding frames beaming
them somewhere and decoding them on the other side so if you're a super
competitive gamer who is concerned about the couple of millisecond of latency
that a wireless mouse adds none of this is going to matter to you run your games
directly on your PC but it wasn't as bad
as I thought it might be and if local game stream was already good enough for
you then GeForce now probably isn't going to break the experience for you
since it added the 25 milliseconds reported by the network analysis tool
about a frame and 2/3 on our office internet
connection with that said I don't know how much I can trust that tool right now
my office connection a business grade gigabit symmetric dedicated fiber line
with a service level agreement and my residential connection a 100 down five
up docis 3.0 Affair tested almost
identically using the built-in tool the actual performance though of the fiber
connection crushed my home cable connection like to the point where I
could definitely recommend GeForce now if you're on fiber or located a little
closer to one of the data centers than I am here in West Canada but could not for
any but the most casual gamers at 1 of a
second of delay probably closer to a quarter of a second if you're on a TV
with data caps being yet another consideration giving you're looking at
similar bit rates to Netflix but you're more likely to game for 6.3 hours in a
day than watch a movie for that long that is to say unless you've already got
your tickets for the force awakens and you feel the need to binge watch all the previous Star Wars movies to
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