GeForce Now: A Review

As a side bonus, the fewer people will have powerful GPUs at their disposal, the fewer of them will be able to secretly generate deep fakes and do other nasty things.

And as a side deficit, fewer artists will be able to run ML models to template their next works and do other creative things.

Which made the process of entering login credentials for my uPlay account (wanted to try some Assassins Creed game) kind of creepy.

The final experience was predictably a bit latency heavy and lots of artifacting/unclean picture quality from the video compression.

Tho the Microsoft version of it on the Windows 10 Xbox app, sees a bit more use from me due to GamePass; Way more streamlined, easy and quick way to test a game before I decide actually download several GB worth of it.

I tried Geforce Now on two occasions. Both times, it was completely unplayable for literally anything. Remember how bad vsync feels if you use it at 60Hz? This is like that but multiple times worse. And to top it off you can easily feel the latency increasing and decreasing as you play, so you couldn't even lead your shots consistently. The first time I started it, it shows me a VNC type window where I can login to Steam, a portent of future disappointment.

The second time, I ran two games at 1024x768 and I measured and saw it only uses a small fraction of my bandwidth: 7mbps for mostly still scenes, and 20mbps for spinning the mouse around. And the latency was still unbearable. This was on a machine with very low latency to begin with (so it should be even harder for a game to bring the latency within human perception, than with an average machine): CRT, and mouse and keyboard at 1000Hz.

Further debugging:

Ran the built in network test in the Geforce Now menu, latency 14ms.

Opened the status window in the games (ctrl+alt+f6), it shows ~50ms RTD (is that round trip duration?) at all times. That would explain the lag. I don't know enough networking yet, but I'd say once you're receiving multiple megabits (as opposed to maybe a few kilobits with most games), you no longer get good latencies.

For one more test, in the Geforce Now settings, I lowered max bitrate to 5mbps, kept framerate at 60fps (highest you can get for free), and turned vsync off. This time it showed RTD 30ms. It was less bad this time (could be a coincidence), but still much worse than 60Hz vsync would feel. The graphics were ultra crap at 5mpbs too.

In all of the above tests, it was never smooth either. This is to be expected as I don't think you can just go from 7mbps to 20mbps each time something interesting on screen happens and have a constant amount of latency in those instances. I did notice that whenever I flicked 90 degrees it stuttered.

On all these tests, the games were on lowest graphics settings.

I also noticed the color depth vastly improved after switching back to the realm game on real hardware (on a 90% dead CRT).

To confirm that this is a pure streaming service (no advance stuff like 3D acceleration offloading over the net), I also tested downloading something at max speed while playing the game to confirm the graphics do degrade to sub crap jpg quality and the sound starts skipping.

But what about casual games, you say? Like an RPG? The lag is still so bad that you will likely strain your wrist or arm due to constantly having to readjust your mouse to do basic tasks.

I want games that don't have constant stutters due to their team not caring about a baseline resource usage. Most games will still stutter on a 3080 RTX. Streaming doesn't fix this.

Streaming gaming sucks and will likely to continue to suck for the next decades. I want at least 240Hz if I'm using an LCD for smoothness but mainly because 120Hz is still too blurry, and with 1080p at the very least so it can be on a 24" monitor without too much moire, and with zero input lag on top of what the game itself already has. I feel like if streaming gaming takes off, the chance of games ever running good will never happen. It's already hard to get a baseline 240FPS at a reasonable percentile, and networks are bloated with garbage and streaming gaming will absolutely worsen this problem. Games should engineer to reduce jitter. The reason you see enemy players teleport is because their latency changes (or their network straight up cuts off for a while).

And last but not least, streaming gaming is the next level after Steam where you don't own your games. Steam (and competitors) already sucks ass because it's terrible half-assed software, but it also prevents you from being able to revert whatever version of the game you want.