GeForce Now: A Review

Cloud streaming will probably never be my preferred option, but the tech has gotten to an impressive place. Microsoft’s implementation is amazing. The thing I find less useful about it is that it requires a good internet connection. And where I have a good internet connection is home. At home, the advantages of a cloud streaming platform are minimal, so I am not sure if this will ever be for me, though I can see a world where this is preferred to many consumers because they have no up front cost of a device.

> near-imperceptible network latency

> I play on a tablet

> Xbox controller

None of these instill any confidence in me that Stadia has tolerable input latency. Geforce Now certainly doesn't. A mouse has a much lower tolerable input latency than a controller. Then again gimped experiences like aiming on a controller are just as bad so you do you.

> 4K HDR

HDR could mean a lot of things. Geforce Now substantially cuts the color depth even when using only a small fraction of the available bandwidth. It's night and day. I'm sure Stadia does the same (otherwise adds more lag).

> my experience is that it's flawless and indistinguishable from native in twitch games like fortnite and counterstrike

This is just your opinion and it's wrong for at least 50% of humans. Nobody with a mouse will find fortnite or cs playable with 40ms added lag. 40ms lag is higher than the mere 16.66ms you get from going from 60 FPS to 60 Hz vsync (that is, running the monitor at 60Hz and enabling vsync. it will be the same framerate but much laggier). In the 60 FPS days, EVERYONE complained about this mere 16.66ms added difference. This included people who just started playing their very first video game one day ago. On Twitch, still everyone notices vsync and turns it off once they figure out that it is the cause of the shitty sluggy mouse feel.

Your next idea

> The "trick" here is that native devices already have some amount of latency, just they are in an acceptable range for most people. However nvidia can optimize PC hardware to reduce the device's latency such that even with the network latency added it's still faster than the average person's native device. Hope that makes sense.

Is also utterly wrong. You don't need "le graphics pipeline" to make input lag noticeable. Just plug in a monitor with 16ms input lag to your computer and you will notice that the mouse is annoyingly difficult to position over anything in the Windows or Linux desktop.

OR another explanation: Make a program to move a small shape around the screen using the mouse position. It waits until the monitor is about to start scanning out a frame from the framebuffer and only then draws the shapes new position in the framebuffer where the mouse is at that time (since it's just a blank image with a small shape it's near instant to do this in the CPU, a few microseconds). If you use a monitor without lag (like a CRT) and it's running at 60Hz, that means there is now a total input lag of up to 16.66ms (accounting for the time between frames), and perhaps 1ms if you run the mouse at 1000Hz like you should be doing, then maybe some small delay from the OS. Now if you make this program render the slow vsync way, i.e, rendering the frame to temporary memory and doing nothing for the next 16.66ms then swapping it to the framebuffer once the monitor is about to scan out the next frame, this adds another 16.66ms of input lag. And it will feel terrible.

Ergo, getting far greater than 16.66ms lag caused by some network streaming service will NOT magically feel less laggy than native hardware. Also the idea that optimizing small isolated components randomly will fix input lag is laughable, it's all about timing. Almost no lag is caused by CPU (or GPU core) bottlenecks, aside from the straight up most basic problem of low framerate.

That’s true, but this is an easy cognitive dissonance for me to resolve, since I can think of it like paying to recover the handful of weeks I would have lost playing Civ over the past two years :)

Besides, I’m mad at 2K, not Nvidia. And I already bought the license for Civ, so it’s not like I can withhold money from 2K (I’d even pay for another license if it was an option to run it on the cloud - just let me do it).

GeForce Now itself is outstanding, and the technical quality of its product is exceptional. I suppose I could be mad at them for respecting questionably legal opt-out requests from publishers, but I understand their strategic reasons for cooperating with those.

And I suppose I’m only assuming 2K is the party at fault. I wish 2K would share its side of the story - maybe Nvidia tried a shakedown and asked 2K to pay for inclusion in its catalog? I doubt it though – the nature of GeForce Now means it supports any game by default, and requires effort to prohibit one. Given the obscure titles available in the GeForce Now library, I assume inclusion is opt-out by default, and 2K made their choice for whatever misinformed reason.

You're also using concepts and tradmarks from Zelda and the Youtube channel for "Project Rito" appears to be for somebody else's cosplay, so it sounds like you own a little slice of a game.

I'd like to play it though. Maybe "Project Birdperson"? Nobody would name a character "Birdperson".