GeForce Now: Review, games list, price, supported hardware and more. How much will geforce now cost

We’re aware that NVIDIA introduced a “Competitive” mode last year, which reduces input latency by 30%. However, these cut-down numbers are still far from a local gaming rig. A major downside to this low-latency mode is that it lowers the streaming quality to 720p.

5 Reasons Why NVIDIA GeForce Now Isn’t Worth Your Money

Thinking of subscribing to NVIDIA’s cloud gaming platform? We urge you to think again, and here’s why.

NVIDIA GeForce Now has been around for quite a while at this point in time. In 2020, the service left beta for a full release with a paid subscription plan. More recently, NVIDIA doubled the pricing for new customers.

Unlike Google’s Stadia, NVIDIA has had plenty of time to improve its GeForce Now platform since it entered the market way early. However, we still cannot fully recommend it if you’re looking for an ideal PC gaming experience in 2021.

Here are the top five reasons GeForce Now is not worth your hard-earned money.

What Is NVIDIA GeForce Now?

For those who don’t know, GeForce Now is a cloud-based game streaming service developed by NVIDIA. It basically lets you rent a remote desktop and leverage its hardware to play games on your computer, tablet, or smartphone. The service will rely on your internet connection rather than your own hardware to stream games from this cloud computer.

Sounds too good to be true, right? You may wonder, what’s the point of building a gaming PC anymore?

While GeForce Now is a good choice for someone who doesn’t have a powerful PC or uses a MacBook, it’s not a service that aims to replace your local gaming rig. In most cases, you’d be better off buying a gaming console instead of paying for GeForce Now.

Nvidia has Highlights, which can automatically record notable gameplay, and FreeStyle, for applying filters to your games. And Ansel – the high-resolution capture tool in Nvidia’s drivers – will be arriving soon in GeForce Now. However, they’re not available on all games. Highlights, for instance, seems to be added on a case-by-case basis.

Nvidia GeForce Now

• Impressively stable gameplay.
• Doesn’t require that you buy new versions of games.
• Expanding to new devices pretty quickly.

Don’t like

• Your ability to play a specific game may be at the mercy of IP licensing contracts.
• Still limited to 1080p at 60fps

Like Google Stadia, Xbox Gamepass Ultimate game streaming (formerly xCloud) and other cloud-gaming technologies, GeForce Now renders and streams supported PC games from its data centers to phones, Chromebooks, PCs and Macs so you can play on devices that might otherwise not be able to run them. One added benefit is you don’t have to deal with keeping the system updated or worry about stability.

The service debuted on the company’s Nvidia Shield streamer long before it went into beta for PC, Mac and Android phones. But the Shield has one advantage over all the other devices GFN runs on: It’s always connected via a wired line to your modem or router. That eliminates one of the biggest variables for cloud gaming: wireless latency. Sure, you can connect PCs and Macs via Ethernet, but that can be really cumbersome depending upon how your space is laid out.

How GeForce Now works

GFN differs from the competition in that it works with games you’ve already paid for (primarily on Steam) or gotten for free (mostly through the Epic Games Store) rather than requiring you buy a special version of the game (like Stadia) or stream games from a particular subscription library (like xBox Gamepass Ultimate or Sony PlayStation Now).

It’s also similar to virtual machine services like Shadow; they provide you with an entire, persistent Windows system in the cloud that you can access via phone as well as other devices, which means you can essentially play any existing Windows game. That’s a more expensive solution, though it offers one perk the others don’t: It works on iPhones and iPads as well as all the other devices.

You boot up the appropriate app for Android, Windows or Mac OS, find a supported game in your Steam library (or one of a few you’ve gotten directly from Ubisoft or Epic Game Store) and commence play. There are also about 90 standard free-to-play games. The app connects to the closest data center, which hosts the engine to render the games and stream them to you. Gameplay syncing and account management is handled by the respective services.

Before we go into more detail about how you can play the latest AAA-rated games on any PC regardless of specs, let’s first explain what Nvidia’s cloud-based GeForce Now for PC and Mac is.

Nvidia GeForce Now compatible devices

The Nvidia GeForce Now service is playable through the company’s own Shield TV set-top-boxes. It can also be accessed through desktop apps for PC, Mac and Google Chromebooks.

Any Android device with 2GB of RAM and sporting Android 5.0 is compatible, but you will need a separate controller.

That also includes Android TV boxes that aren’t the Shield TV, but as the app is only in beta form at present, Nvidia makes no guarantees on performance or that all functionality will be available.

Only the Korea-only LG U + UHD Android TV box is officially compatible (save for Shield).

There is support for iOS devices too, through the Safari browser. Just load play.geforcenow.com in a new page.

How much does GeForce Now cost?

There are currently two membership options for Nvidia GeForce Now and the best news is that one of them is free. A third plan has been added recently, with pre-orders now open.

Free membership allows you to play any of your compatible games for up to an hour at a time. You might also have to wait in a queue until a slot on one of Nvidia’s machines becomes available as paid members get priority.

Paid members, called Priority, get extended session length (up to 6-hours), priority access (hence the name) and games are played using the highest level of graphics, with RTX cards and ray-tracing where applicable.

Priority membership costs £ 8.99 / $ 8.99 / € 9.99 per month. You can also pay for 6-months in advance to save some cash – it costs £ 44.99 / $ 49.99 / € 49.99 this way.

A new RTX 3080 tier is now available to pre-order. It will launch in November in North America, December in Europe and offer 8-hours of playtime in a single session, exclusive access to servers running on hugely impressive RTX 3080 graphics cards, ray-tracing and up to 1440p 120fps gaming. Nvidia Shield TV owners will also be able to play in 4K HDR.

RYX 3080 membership costs £ 89.99 / $ 99.99 / € 99.99 for 6-months and is available in limited quantities initially.

Founders members who signed up in the service’s first year as a public offering will continue to pay at their old rate “for life” (unless they upgrade to RTX 3080).

The catch, of course, is that GeForce Now is still the most unwieldy cloud-gaming option on the market. To its credit, the service is also the most flexible and storefront-agnostic.

Streaming

I tested GeForce Now on a 13-inch Samsung Notebook 7 Spin with an Intel Core i5 processor and integrated graphics. I had no problems running any GeForce Now game on this notebook, which, it should be noted, has no dedicated 3D graphics.

While GeForce Now can stream up to 1080p60, the games it runs default to 720p. I had to manually change the resolution of most games I opened to 1080p myself, which is another minor inconvenience, but it hardly renders the experience unusable.

Once I linked my accounts and made sure everything was signed in, installed, and properly configured, I had a nearly flawless experience with GeForce Now. Every game I played, including The Legend of Bum-bo, Disco Elysium, Diablo 3, The Surge 2, and Dark Souls 3 looked and felt excellent, with 1080p graphics that appeared to be a solid 60 frames per second (after I made sure each game was set to play in that resolution). More importantly, controls felt extremely responsive, and I couldn’t detect any lag between my inputs and my characters’ on-screen actions. That’s vital for any game streaming service. Even my cloud saves carried over without any input on my part nearly flawlessly; Dark Souls 3 was the only game to not import any save games from my PC installation.

Good Remote PC Gaming (With a Little Bit of Effort)

Nvidia GeForce Now is one of the best game streaming services available, letting you play some of the finest titles on Steam, Battle.net, Epic, and UPlay on nearly any computer or mobile device. The way it integrates those digital libraries into its own is occasionally wonky and awkward, but if you don’t mind taking a few extra steps to load a game on a system that otherwise couldn’t play it at all, it works very well.

If you have a big collection of PC games and want to play a good chunk of them on the go, GeForce Now is the service to get. If you want a huge Netflix-style library of older games to try and have no interest in building up a personal collection, PlayStation Now is a fantastic choice. As for Google Stadia, unless the service works out its issues with limited game choices and opaque pseudo-ownership of purchases, it doesn’t even make the list.

Amazon’s nascent Luna gets around the restriction by playing via Safari using a web shortcut, and we’ll probably see a lot more like that. Most of the platforms that already have web support – notably Stadia – only work with Chrome on all but iOS at the moment.

Which devices is GeForce Now available on?

In Australia, GeForce Now is available for a variety of browsers, smartphones, tablets and Smart TVs. Here’s the list of eligible devices:

• Windows PC (Windows 7 or later)
• MacOS desktop and laptops (MacOS 10.11 or later)
• Chromecast with Google TV
• Sony Smart TV
• Android smartphones and tablets (Android 5.0 or later)
• iPhones and iPads via the Safari web browser (iOS 14.3 or later)

However, in our experience so far, there have been some weird caveats. For example, when we tried to test GeForce Now on a 2020 Sony Bravia Smart TV, it would only allow us to connect an Epic Games Store account, not a Steam account, despite Steam being connected to the account in the PC app.

What else do I need to stream GeForce Now?

We’ve established you don’t need cutting-edge hardware to stream games with GeForce Now but you do need — and this might be a bit hard to stomach for some Australians — a stable internet connection of at least 15Mbps and that’s just for 720p streaming at 60fps. If you want 1080p streaming at 60fps, you’re going to need a minimum of 25Mbps (NBN Basic II speeds). Lastly, you’ll also want to be hardwired with an Ethernet connection to a 5GHz router for the best experience, which could be the one big hurdle for a lot of gamers. That’s according to Nvidia’s Help Page, though we managed to connect just fine over WiFi.

Is my internet fast enough for GeForce Now?

If you’re not sure what your current internet speed is, use the internet speed test tool above to find out. If you find you’re lacking the required megabits-per-second, take a look at the popular NBN 100 plans below for a potential upgrade path.

Brodie Fogg is the Australian editorial lead at Reviews.org. He has covered consumer tech, telecommunications, video games, streaming and entertainment for over five years at websites like WhistleOut and Finder and can be found sharing streaming recommendations at 7NEWS every month.

To start things off, you can access GeForce Now for free with some limitations in place. Impressive, yeah? Well, not if you’re looking for uninterrupted gaming sessions. Here’s why:

What is Nvidia GeForce Now?

Before we go into more detail about how you can play the latest AAA-rated games on any PC regardless of specs, let’s first explain what Nvidia’s cloud-based GeForce Now for PC and Mac is.

First revealed back at CES 2017, Nvidia GeForce Now provides gamers with the ability to stream gameplay rendered remotely, negating the need to worry about local PC requirements – all you need is a fast-enough internet connection! Nvidia recommends download speeds of around 25-50mbps, although it can function on as little as a 15Mbps connection.

Unlike the likes of Google Stadia that require you to purchase games from the platform store, GeForce Now allows you to play games that you own via the likes of Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG and Uplay.

This allows you to play alongside your friends as you usually would, with no need for them to sign up to yet another online store to continue playing together.

Not every title is on the service though; some publishers block the use of their games through GeForce Now, meaning there are omissions in the GeForce Now library, but the company regularly adds new titles to keep things fresh and interesting.

As mentioned, the games are rendered remotely at one of Nvidia’s 20 server sites scattered around Europe and the US and provide a graphical output similar to that of a high-end gaming PC.

In fact, if you opt for the Priority Plan or upgraded RTX 3080 Plan you’ll be able to play games with real-time ray-tracing via upgraded RTX servers.

You’re limited to email protected when streaming via the free or Priority tiers, but if you cough up for the high-end RTX 3080 tier, you can ramp that up to email protected on supported devices, and up to 4K on Nvidia’s Shield TV.

How can I access Nvidia GeForce Now?

The best part about cloud-based gaming is its accessibility, and GeForce Now is a great showcase of cloud gaming tech. The Nvidia GeForce Now app is available to download for PC, Mac, Android, Shield TV and Chromebook.

There’s no native iOS app due to Apple’s restrictions on cloud gaming apps, but Nvidia has provided a workaround in the form of web app available via Safari, allowing you to play AAA games on your iPhone or iPad without the need for a dedicated app.

As mentioned, the games are rendered remotely at one of Nvidia’s 20 server sites scattered around Europe and the US and provide a graphical output similar to that of a high-end gaming PC.

How GeForce Now fits into the stream-iverse

The catch, of course, is that GeForce Now is still the most unwieldy cloud-gaming option on the market. To its credit, the service is also the most flexible and storefront-agnostic.

Thus, before I get to the best parts of Nvidia’s new “GeForce Now 3080” option — its faster performance, its higher maximum resolution, and its higher maximum frame rate — I should set the stage for how the service works and compares to its contemporaries , so bear with me.

To add a game to your GeForce Now library, manually search for it, then “add to library.” You’ll have to buy it elsewhere. Nvidia GeForce merely checks whether you paid for it — though it does conveniently pull up your save file from those storefronts’ cloud save features.

Use GeForce Now’s Steam library-scanning feature to automatically gather games you bought via Steam. This doesn’t work for EGS, Ubisoft Connect, or EA Origin. (Artifact? That works on GeForce Now? Huh.)

Type in something like “free-to-play,” and GeForce will get you up and gaming without requiring a single purchase.

Most cloud-gaming services demand that you rely on their store ecosystems in one way or another. You can only play games on Google Stadia if you buy those games’ Stadia-exclusive versions (or access freebies via the paid Stadia Pro subscription service). If you want to stream games within Xbox Game Streaming, you have to pay for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and you can only stream that service’s selection of approximately 200 games — as opposed to additional Xbox games you individually purchase. And Amazon Luna offers a variety of “channels,” each with individual costs and unique content, that you can pick and stack the same way you might do with video-streaming subscription services.

The cost of GeForce Now, conversely, has nothing to do with games you might buy or borrow and everything to do with the Nvidia hardware you’re leasing in the cloud. In some ways, GeForce Now is just a cloud computer that you can use as you see fit. When you use GeForce Now, you log into other storefronts on its server farm, load games you’ve already purchased, and play them using their profiles and save files. Nvidia’s cloud-gaming service doesn’t care where or how you buy games. It just wants to power them.

One big catch, however, is that some game publishers do not allow Nvidia to stream their games. (Remember: when you buy a game via an online storefront, you’re only paying for access to a license. This, among other things, means publishers can yank your access around in exactly this way.) Upon the service’s 2019 launch, Nvidia was forced to remove games that it originally supported after certain publishers cried foul — particularly games from Activision Blizzard’s Battle.net service. In good news, over time, many more games have been added to the service from the following storefronts, now totaling a little over 1,100 games:

• Steam
• Epic Games Store
• Ubisoft Connect
• EA Origin

Up until this week, GeForce Now only had two tiers: $ 98 / year or free. The latter includes performance downgrades and required waits in server queues, so if too many people are using the service, you have to wait behind paying customers. That free option is a decent way to basically confirm that your ideal streaming device — a smartphone, a set-top box, or a weak netbook — can connect to the service and translate your gamepad taps or keyboard-and-mouse frenzies to cloud- streamed video games. But it’s not great for image quality or computing power.

RTX 3080 tier wins, even at a higher resolution

The paid version, meanwhile, includes rudimentary “Nvidia RTX” support. Its server instances include Nvidia’s proprietary GPU cores that are dedicated to ray tracing and Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS), but only a few per instance, as powered by an RTX-upgraded variant of Nvidia’s Tesla T10 server-grade GPU. The results are generally powerful enough to get average, modern PC games up to a steady 1080p, 60 fps refresh, usually with a number of graphical bells and whistles enabled.

As I’ve previously attested, if you’re within the right geographic range of Nvidia’s servers and have a low-ping wired Ethernet connection, you can expect all-but-unflinching performance while playing with mouse-and-keyboard on a variety of shooters on the service. But 1080p resolution at 60 fps and medium settings is basically what the rest of the streaming fray offers. How much more juice can the same Nvidia app ecosystem muster, especially if Nvidia itself, manufacturer of so many high-end GPUs, applies its own hardware upgrade?

The best way to answer that is to let a few of its compatible games do the talking. These are the exact same PC versions of games that you might install on your own computer, after all, and some come with built-in benchmark sequences. Thus, I ran a few tests on the existing $ 98 / year service, dubbed the “founders” tier, before Nvidia invited me to a pre-release test of the $ 198 / year “3080” tier so I could compare the sheer power of both server options.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s benchmark results on the GeForce Now 3080 service tier. “Ultra” graphics settings, 1440p resolution.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s benchmark results on the GeForce Now founders service tier. “Ultra” graphics settings, 1080p resolution.

Watch Dogs Legion’s ray tracing-intensive benchmark results on the GeForce Now 3080 service tier. “Ultra” graphics settings, RT at near-max, 1440p resolution, with DLSS enabled in “quality” mode.

Watch Dogs Legion, ‘s ray tracing-intensive benchmark results on the GeForce Now founders service tier. “Ultra” graphics settings, RT at near-max, 1080p resolution, with DLSS enabled in “quality” mode.

The above benchmarks for the computationally brutal Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (no ray tracing) and Watch Dogs Legion (substantial ray tracing) are explained in their captions. To summarize: all tests from the newer 3080 service tier are run at a higher 1440p resolution, yet they still soundly outpace the same tests run at a lower 1080p resolution on the service’s founders tier. Sadly, we couldn’t run these tests with a frame time chart attached, so we’re left with Ubisoft’s vague, squiggly line charts. Still, all of those benchmarks do come with crucial “lowest 1 percent” counts, and when those are higher (which they are, by a large margin, in the 3080 tier), you can expect fewer frame time stutters and refresh rate dips.