Quote:
Originally Posted by
jcbaggins
Well, this is a first. I was playing around with one of my Shields this weekend and tried GeForce Now. I always thought this was a paid service or required a PC (clearly i was wrong) but within 5 minutes I was playing Bioshock Remastered and then Batman: Arkham City for free. I spent about 10 mins on one tv just trying it out and then later that night i switched to another tv with a different shield and picked up one of the games right where it left off. What a great experience! There was no lagging, no downloading other than a brief minute or so when i got the games..etc. I don't game much but i was really impressed with the video quality, speed..and the fact that it was free.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DaveFi
Eventually Geforce Now will be a paid service but for now it's free. The main issue I have with it is that I usually get the annoying "Bandwidth Low" indicator popping up constantly. Tried both wired and wifi and the same problem. I have a Gigabit connection so it's not that.
That said, Geforce Now only works with games you already own (with the exception of a handful of old games), and I have a decent PC so I'd rather just use Gamestream. I can see it being useful for people without a decent gaming PC or if you travel a lot.
It used to be an $8-a-month subscription that gave you unlimited access to their Cloud gaming service. The $8-a-month gave you access to a list of ~50ish maybe "included with subscription" games (Orcs Must Die, Sonic Racing, and Street Fighter X Tekken got a lot of play in my house, for example) and the ability to "buy" more games on the service at an additional price; purchased games USUALLY came with redemption codes to a service like Steam or Great Old Games, but progress made on GeForce Now was completely separate from progress made in Steam.
They completely revamped their plans, and now are just acting as an alternative way to link/access your Steam/Activision/Great Old Games accounts. You don't buy games on GeForce Now anymore; you buy them on Steam/Activision/GOG and, with your accounts linked to GeForce Now, you can use NVidia Cloud Computers to game (at framerates/resolutions up to the equivalent of a GTX 1070, I believe) on your Shield. For now, it's in Beta, and free-to-use.... I believe the latest information I'd heard was the pricing was planned to be on something like a "per-20-hour-basis" or similar, whenever it gets outta beta.
Alternatively, you have always been able to locally install (supported) titles to a PC on your network with a (supported) NVidia Graphics card, and use your own local resources and the Shield's "Gamestream" capabilities to play the titles on Shield. I've done that with Windows Universal Platform purchases (like Gears of War 4) on my Shield(s).
I'm not sure if it's just because we were paying GeForce Now monthly subscribers when they canned the service and changed directions or not, but we still have access to all the titles that were "included with membership" when they stopped the monthy subscriptions... I haven't paid the $8-a-month for my subscription in quite sometime (more than a year), we still have access to Orcs Must Die, Sonic Racing, Street Fighter X Tekken via Shield (and I don't own those titles anywhere)... and we are taking advantage of the Beta service to 2-player-coop titles like Warhammer Vermintide 2 in my house, where we own two copies of the game on two seperate Steam accounts, and play the one title back locally on the PC with the GPU in it, and the other copy back on the other Steam account using NVidia's cloud computers.... works great! Great perk, for now..... not sure what we'll do when they exit Beta and start to charge (decision will be based heavily on how they decide to price it).