GeForce Now Lets You Stream Games on an Hourly Basis
You can have an ultraportable laptop or an entry-level MacBook, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to enjoy Triple-A gaming. Nvidia’s game streaming service, GeForce Now, is already installed on its Shield, but you can try it on your Mac or PC and start streaming games from the cloud, all without purchasing an expensive PC. Just be prepared to pay extra if you are serious about gambling at any time of the day.
The previously announced pricing structure for GeForce Now is pretty straightforward, but it gets expensive if you consume regularly. Cnet has a quick calculation based on the average play time of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds survival game. With an average playtime of about 12 hours every two weeks (up to 325 hours per year in total) and a cost of $ 25 for every 20 hours of streaming, GeForce Now customers will pay $ 410 for the privilege of playing PubG on their underpowered laptops.
That annual cost can make the idea of buying your own decent gaming PC easier. Needless to say, GeForce Now and RPGs are incompatible if you’re on a tight budget and casual gamers will find themselves shelling out even more just to buy games from the service.
How GeForce Now works
Rather than offering you a library of PlayStation Now-style streaming games, GeForce Now acts like a muscle that supports the games you already own. There are a few free games available, but for the most part, you will need the games you want to play through Steam, Battle.net, or Uplay. Your game must also be supported by GeForce Now , so check to see if your favorite games are available before you decide this is the streaming service for you. (And during beta testing, you’ll be limited to streaming games for four hours at a time.)
For the best experience with GeForce Now, you’ll need a fairly fast internet connection, which can be the biggest hurdle for this service. The minimum requirement of 25Mbps is sufficient for streaming games, but Nvidia recommends a 50Mbps connection, as well as connecting to the device via Ethernet or a wireless router that supports 5GHz bandwidth. If your connection is fast enough, you can stream games at increased frame rates (up to 120fps) using GeForce Now’s Ultra Streaming Mode.
As it stands, GeForce Now is more suitable for gamers with a second, less powerful computer on which they want to play games, rather than regular gamers with a single computer. Since the service streams the games you already own, you’re unlikely to have a large library unless you have a computer powerful enough to play the games that GeForce Now lets you stream.
You can subscribe to the Nvidia GeForce Now beta and wait for the invitation. In the meantime, you can prepare for your eventual invitation by downloading the GeForce Now app for PC or Mac at the bottom of Nvidia’s FAQ page.