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GeForce Now: A Review

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21–30 of 198 posts

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#21
post #10

I found that it worked really well on the free tier. There are hiccups and i can’t tell why my isp gives me 1-5% packet loss but I really like that it kicks me out after an hour so I have to have reasonable play sessions. Wait times are rare the service is too good for a free tier

It's true, I agree, the 1 hour limit is a feature not a pain point lol.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#22
post #5

I tested out GeForce Now and Stadia two years ago and decided fairly quickly to build a desktop machine instead. Turns out that lots of PC games work really well on desktop Linux these days! The author discusses his internet connection, but for me even with a 500mbit connection and ~10ms ping to NYC area data centers I felt the video compression artifacts and periodic stutters were too noticeable. I also had some inp…

It's unclear in this comment if you are lumping them together, but GeForce Now's performance and stream quality is leagues ahead of Stadia's. As someone who exclusively games on the cloud. My main driver, though, is ShadowPC, which gives me dual monitors, 4k, and full desktop access (for modding etc) on a stream

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#23
GeForce Now was/is great. Bethesda though (amongst others) have lost a formerly loyal fan due to pulling their games. Why? I own the games, I paid for them. If I had my old PC still I could play them just the same. Presumably so that in several years they can run their own cloud service.

The greed of companies will be their own downfall.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#24
post #5

I tested out GeForce Now and Stadia two years ago and decided fairly quickly to build a desktop machine instead. Turns out that lots of PC games work really well on desktop Linux these days! The author discusses his internet connection, but for me even with a 500mbit connection and ~10ms ping to NYC area data centers I felt the video compression artifacts and periodic stutters were too noticeable. I also had some inp…

> video compression artifacts

yes! I'm surprised how many people are ok with these. This is also the biggest problem with streaming, in addition to input latency.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#25
post #5

I tested out GeForce Now and Stadia two years ago and decided fairly quickly to build a desktop machine instead. Turns out that lots of PC games work really well on desktop Linux these days! The author discusses his internet connection, but for me even with a 500mbit connection and ~10ms ping to NYC area data centers I felt the video compression artifacts and periodic stutters were too noticeable. I also had some inp…

> video compression artifacts yes! I'm surprised how many people are ok with these. This is also the biggest problem with streaming, in addition to input latency.

I have vouched for this comment, but you should be aware your account is shadowbanned and every single comment you make is automatically marked dead.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#26

>> My rural internet connection is 40mbps/sec down in theory — in practice it’s between 25 and 40 depending which second you poll it, and the speed is affected by whether someone is downstairs watching Netflix while I’m upstairs playing a graphics-intensive game. I'm surprised he even bothered trying the service let alone he found it playable. A rural area with 25-40mbps with someone using the internet at the same ti…

25 Mbps is plenty for 1080p60 even for real-time video. Latency is more important. GFN says they can even cram 2560x1600 at 120 FPS into 35 Mbps.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#27

GFN is tested to be faster than native consoles in terms of input latency. https://imgur.com/TzPnCLs People are talking about turn based games but my experience is that it's flawless and indistinguishable from native in twitch games like fortnite and counterstrike. But then again I live on the East Coast pretty close to a datacenter and I'm on fiber, so obviously this won't be the case for people in rural areas. But…

I've unfortunately played way too many twitch shooters on PC and latency is really noticeable to me.

To the point where I can't stand using my work-supplied laptop because of slight mouse lag (I think the mouse travels maybe 30-40ms behind my hand) and 60hz screens. This is somewhat annoying coming from 165Hz, gaming peripherals. Then I have to connect to a VM to do development. Absolute hell.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> video compression artifacts yes! I'm surprised how many people are ok with these. This is also the biggest problem with streaming, in addition to input latency.

I have vouched for this comment, but you should be aware your account is shadowbanned and every single comment you make is automatically marked dead.

And it's been that way since their very first comment was flagged dead in 2017. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858411 If you write to the contact email address (at the bottom of the page here), maybe they'll unban you.

Re: GeForce Now: A Review

#29

>> My rural internet connection is 40mbps/sec down in theory — in practice it’s between 25 and 40 depending which second you poll it, and the speed is affected by whether someone is downstairs watching Netflix while I’m upstairs playing a graphics-intensive game. I'm surprised he even bothered trying the service let alone he found it playable. A rural area with 25-40mbps with someone using the internet at the same ti…

For the most part, I have found that GeForce Now is not bandwidth limited.

NVIDIA has spent a lot of time and money tuning the service to do clever dynamic upscaling locally on your machine to minimise the sort of block compression artifacts and frame skipping that you would normally see from say YouTube or Netflix.

It's not even particularly latency bound, since round trip times less than 40ms are for most people (unless you're a very competitive player), completely unnoticeable. I've played with latencies at around 60ms and I still find it tolerable (although occasionally a bit annoying).

Instead it's very sensitive to network jitter. Even 1 or 2 ms of random jitter can dramatically reduce the quality of the service. And given the distance between your local machine, and the number of hops required between your device and the server, there's a lot of room for random jitter. Part of the problem can be mitigated, by carefully ensuring that everything in your home network is dimensioned properly. But the rest of the pipe is owned by your ISP, and they could apply all sorts of dodgy QoS parameters that increase your likelihood of experiencing jitter.

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