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GeForce Now: A Review

whatever.scalzi.com

141–150 of 198 posts

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#141
post #30

Rather offtopic, but would anyone recommend one of Scalzi's books if I enjoyed Old Man's War?

I've enjoyed Interdependency trilogy immensely and now reading "Kaiju Preservation Society" and it is awesome too.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#142
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally already the case with GeForce Now - you're NOT allowed to play your whole library because the publishers sued nVidia for allowing you to play the GAME YOU OWN on the machines YOU PAY FOR in their cloud.

>GAME YOU OWN You can't own games. You can only get a license to play one.

A license with very specific terms and conditions, it appears.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#143
post #89

Okay hackers gather round let's scoff at how hilariously bad this consumer oriented article is. It's not only content-free, but the guy is such a casual at gaming that he even has 400 games (that he never plays, as any Silicon Valley type would) and still doesn't notice game breaking lag. I tried Geforce Now on two occasions. Both times, it was completely unplayable for literally anything. Remember how bad vsync feel…

No post body was provided.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#144
Why did he compare the cost of a 3090 an expensive nicety available to few gamers vs a virtual and possibly imaginary 3080 while playing games at a resolution that could have been achieved by a 2060.

It's no small difference, $1740 given by the article for a 3090 and $290 for a 2060. I've found that when decisions are somewhat arbitrary one chooses numbers that best make the argument for us. Best practice is not to pick your examples in a fashion that amounts to fudging the numbers and stick to more practical details like the fact that you can only play a fraction of the games and they can be taken away at any time or become more expensive. Altogether a nearly worthless service. A novelty without substantial value.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#145
> but also because GPUs (the processors that run graphics cards) are really efficient for cryptocurrency mining. Wannabe Bitcoin barons have been snapping graphics cards of all kinds and driving prices to ridiculous levels.

Not Bitcoin, but Ethereum. Several years ago people have stopped using graphic cards to mine Bitcoin, and instead use dedicated ASICs.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what’ll happen. It’ll start as bring your own library with the odd exclusive, but eventually it’ll evolve into the only way to play AAA games. The pricing isn’t great either. I tried the 3080 tier for $25 CAD per month. It was really cool, but not realistic for my gaming budget. To me the pricing looks bad even with the hyper inflated, unrealistic prices of GPUs right now. I can buy a 3080 for about 3…

> I can buy a 3080 for about 3 years worth of GeForce Now (3080) and after 3 years I still have a half decent card to hand down to someone else. Yeah but you need to have a desktop PC to start with. And also don’t forget to add the energy prices.

You need a PC anyway the price differential is nearly exactly the price of the GPU over the useful life of the GPU given that most users keep their hardware for about 6 years its 700 to buy once, 1200-1400 if you intend to buy the next best thing in 4 years and potentially sell the old one, or 2160 to rent something that can play a tiny fraction of the total games if they don't decide to take it away because its not economical at a moments notice.

If you game 10 hours a week the difference in power usage is probably about $30 a year kind of a rounding error.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#147
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand this though. I bought the games. What does a publisher have to say about where and or how I play them afterwards? If Nvidea wants to provide me with a cloud computer at a certain price then they should have any say in that.

Agreed. I'm highly disappointed that Nvidia rolled over so easily, with zero resistance. They should have told the publishers to pound sand, as what they're doing is nothing like Stadia or Game Pass. They're just letting me play games I purchased from the comfort of my own couch, as far as I'm concerned.

Nvidia is highly dependent on the game publishers making sure their games work well with Nvidia cards. The whole "best played on Nvidia" thing would fall apart if publishers stopped working with them. Unfortunately, this leads to them being unable to be more of an opponent here.

A third party would need to sue them or the government would have to introduce legislation to stop this bullshit. I'm not hopefully that either will happen in the near future, which is sad. Compared to e.g. Stadia Geforce Now has the far more customer friendly business model.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#148

Comparatively, I play a fair bit on Google Stadia, a similar Gaming-in-the-cloud service powered by Google. My experience with Stadia has been pretty great. Since November 2020 I've been playing Destiny 2, an MMO FPS, so perhaps the worst-case latency-requiring kind of game, and it's been pretty great, at least for PvE activities. (PvP has been less great, but perhaps that's more the fault of my aging reflexes than n…

The main problem with Stadia is that I have to buy games exclusively for it. That makes it far more comparable to a game console than to Geforce Now, which is basically rent a PC, a - for me - far more customer friendly approach.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#149

You guys are walking into a trap. This is going to be way worse than movie streaming, and unlike movies, when one of these companies pulls a game you once loved and it's not available, there will be no pirates to save you, because the software is trapped in the cloud. The future may well be streaming-only. Mods will be greatly impacted eventually, with only sanctioned mods allowed to run in the cloud. There'll be no…

This is all true… but GeForce now let’s you bring your own gaming library. If you ever decide you don’t want to stream - you can build a gaming PC like people already do. Those games that come out to $1500 over a decade? Don’t forget that a decade is probably 2x $2000 for building gaming PCs.

I've historically got along fine with $600-$800 machined used for 6 years at a stretch. My current machine is a $700 affair with a Geforce 1080 which plays all games at 1080p and some at 4k. I guess the GPU is about half the value so I guess if you divided that by 72 months gaming on my hardware instead of someone else's costs about $4.86 a month. I shouldn't be surprised if more people are gaming on the cheap than building $2000 machines.

Disregarding this is comparing the cost of leasing or buying a Porsche while ignoring the fact that the Carolla exists.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#150

Comparatively, I play a fair bit on Google Stadia, a similar Gaming-in-the-cloud service powered by Google. My experience with Stadia has been pretty great. Since November 2020 I've been playing Destiny 2, an MMO FPS, so perhaps the worst-case latency-requiring kind of game, and it's been pretty great, at least for PvE activities. (PvP has been less great, but perhaps that's more the fault of my aging reflexes than n…

>For example, if I try to go to stadia.com right now from this mac/safari, I'll just get a page that says "Stadia requires Chrome", Not exactly encouraging that Googles cares about the service. Google IOT seemed like it had a lot more revenue promise (probably cheaper to host as well), and even that could not survive the graveyard.

Of all the things speaking against Stadia, this is probably the least important one. It doesn't surprise me that Google would stipulate a client they have (more or less) complete control over. Geforce Now also uses their own client and no one bats an eye.
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