Nvidia GeForce Now - Is On Demand Gaming Viable?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,844 words · ~9 min read
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they said gaming in the cloud couldn't be done they said the latency would be
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too high they said we'll always game on
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our own local hardware they were what in
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the world could that
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be the master case 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your
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midtower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories check
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out the link in the video description to learn more all right so as I alluded to in my
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entirely spoiler-free AKA completely useless intro the subject of today's
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video is GeForce Now NVIDIA's new
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product that could be described as a way to play games over the Internet which No
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actually that's not going to work it's okay because it's not multiplayer gaming
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we've had that for decades so let's call it something else let's call it game
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streaming which yeah know that sounds awful lot like what they do on Twitch TV
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all right fine I will use the c-word cloud GeForce now is a cloud-based
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gaming service that uses NVIDIA's grid technology in one of their data centers
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in North America Europe and APAC to take input from your keyboard and mouse or
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controller send it to an instance of your game running on a virtual machine
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render out the game frames at 30 or 60 FPS per second depending on the title
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compress them on the Fly and beam them to your supported device over the
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Internet with the objective being to do this at a reasonable price while
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delivering the utmost an image quality and with little enough latency that is
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the delay between pressing a button and seeing an action on screen that it
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doesn't feel like trying to op and Counter Strike by yelling at your
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neighbor to move the mouse and press buttons for you so let's address the
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first point first is the price reasonable at $799 NVIDIA is clearly
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borrowing an established price point in the streamed content industry so the
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real question becomes one of whether they are delivering enough value for
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that price point compared to a service like Netflix here I have a few
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criticisms game variety as can be expected of a new service is okay for
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casual users but a bit of a low point if
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you're a pretty avid gamer that wants to make this service your go-to when you
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pick up a controller and settle down on the couch while there are a couple of
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exceptions the list of games included with your members ship fee is mostly a
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metric butt ton of Lego games uh and older AAA titles like The Batman series
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and Walking Dead Season 1 with newer games like Witcher 3 requiring an add-on
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purchase in order to be streamed that means I actually had to buy Metro last
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Light at Full Steam retail price for my
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performance testing more on that later even though I own that game on Steam
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already the good news is that if you're playing new games versus one that you
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already own most game purchases on GeForce now come with a steam or Gog key
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that you can activate on those services for local play if you want but there are
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still two issues here one it would be nice if I could bind my Steam account to
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my GeForce now account and be allowed to use the service to stream titles I
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already own and two this one is a much bigger deal IMO I shouldn't be paying
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full sticker price for games on a service where I not only have to pay
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monthly to be a member but I also have to buy a specialized piece of streaming
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Hardware from NVIDIA a shield portable tablet or Android TV for a couple
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hundred bucks in the first place let's move on to objective number two image
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quality here NVIDIA gets full marks and this isn't anything surprising to me
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since I've been such a huge fan of gamestream since it launched that I
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haven't even considered a non- envidia graphics card for my personal rigon over
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two years but the power of NVIDIA grid
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on the other side means running games at 60 FPS steady at 1080p is a nonissue and
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NVIDIA's realtime h264 encoding continues to deliver good enough image
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quality that on a handheld device or from the couch you will be hard pressed
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to find any issues with it aside from the same blockiness or color banding
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that you'll find in low contrast scenes in pretty much any internet streamed
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content which ties in pretty nicely with performance Game launch times were nice
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and snappy especially after the first time you launch them and as long as my
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internet connection was stable I noticed very few hitches or hiccups in the game
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animation but while you might be pleasantly surprised to see the same
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Graphics quality menus that you would find if you were running the game
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locally including anti-aliasing sliders improved texture quality Etc turning any
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of these dials past default will result
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in stuttery playback and the default
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suggested settings will reapply every time you launch a game this is pretty
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disappointing but the good news is that
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these settings are still going to spank what you'll get out of a modern
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generation console and there's definitely room then for NVIDIA to add
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more power per user as time goes on
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which is fine and good lonus but I've been watching this video for 5 minutes
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and none of us were worried that a building full of GTX Titans couldn't run
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Toy Box turbos what about the latency
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yes the Achilles heel of gaming over the Internet whether we're talking about
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some jackass on dialup teleporting all over the place or in this case the
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actual delay between executing a command on your controller and seeing the
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results on screen too much of which can result in a visually pleasing but
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downright unplayable gaming experience since you could end up turning left when
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you mean to turn right and vice versa so
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for my testing methodology I chose Metro last Light because it's a available on
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all the platforms I wanted to test it delivered consistent results and it only
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takes about 2 minutes to get from the very beginning of the game menu to a
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point where you can actually fire a gun a necessary component of my testing in
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the opening attack sequence I used a BenQ RL 2460 monitor with a Makey Makey
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hanging in front of it I would execute five left Mouse clicks which illuminates
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an LED on the PCB of the Makey Makey nearly instantaneously then using a
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high-speed camera in this this case the 240 FPS slow motion recording mode on
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the iPhone 6s I can measure how many frames there are between the LED
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flashing and the muzzle flashes from the gun with each frame representing about 4
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milliseconds some of these results are not surprising at all gaming on a local
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machine is much more responsive and experience than encoding frames beaming
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them somewhere and decoding them on the other side so if you're a super
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competitive gamer who is concerned about the couple of millisecond of latency
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that a wireless mouse adds none of this is going to matter to you run your games
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directly on your PC but it wasn't as bad
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as I thought it might be and if local game stream was already good enough for
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you then GeForce now probably isn't going to break the experience for you
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since it added the 25 milliseconds reported by the network analysis tool
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about a frame and 2/3 on our office internet
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connection with that said I don't know how much I can trust that tool right now
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my office connection a business grade gigabit symmetric dedicated fiber line
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with a service level agreement and my residential connection a 100 down five
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up docis 3.0 Affair tested almost
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identically using the built-in tool the actual performance though of the fiber
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connection crushed my home cable connection like to the point where I
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could definitely recommend GeForce now if you're on fiber or located a little
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closer to one of the data centers than I am here in West Canada but could not for
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any but the most casual gamers at 1 of a
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second of delay probably closer to a quarter of a second if you're on a TV
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with data caps being yet another consideration giving you're looking at
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similar bit rates to Netflix but you're more likely to game for 6.3 hours in a
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day than watch a movie for that long that is to say unless you've already got
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