Here’s everything you need to know about GeForce Now in Australia. How much is geforce now

Doing this will seriously affect your experience as you are connecting to a server that is far away from you. Expect input lag, pixelated channel, dropped connection, and other issues while gaming.

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

Thinking about subscribing to NVIDIA’s cloud gaming platform? We encourage you to rethink it, and here’s why.

NVIDIA GeForce Now has been around for a long time. In 2020, the service rolled out of the beta to the full version with a paid subscription. Recently, NVIDIA has doubled prices for new customers.

Unlike Google Stadia, NVIDIA has had plenty of time to tweak its GeForce Now platform since it hit the market very early. However, we still can’t fully recommend it if you’re looking for the perfect PC gaming experience in 2021.

Here are the top five reasons why GeForce Now isn’t 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. Basically, it allows you to rent a remote desktop and use its hardware to play games on your computer, tablet, or smartphone. The service will rely on your internet connection, not your own hardware, to stream games from that computer to the cloud.

Sounds too good to be true, right? You may be wondering why building a gaming PC is?

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 local gaming hardware. In most cases, you’d be better off buying a game console than paying for GeForce Now.

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 games on this notebook which, it should be noted, does not have dedicated 3D graphics.

What is GeForce Now exactly?

Unlike the Xbox Game Pass, the true value of GeForce Now lies in its connection to Steam and Epic Games Store accounts. It is primarily a game streaming (or cloud gaming) platform that allows you to stream games you already own via Steam or Epic using GeForce RTX graphics cards in a rack to ensure high gaming performance on a low or low machine average performance. So you don’t need the latest and greatest PC hardware to enable fancy features like ray tracing in your game library, all you need is a subscription and a compatible device (iOS, Android TV, PC or Mac, to name a few).

How does GeForce Now work?

After signing up for a free (basic) or paid (priority) plan, you’ll need to download the GeForce Now app to the device you want to play on. Here in Australia, GeForce Now is operated by broadband provider Perth Pentanet, so you can find the PC application on the dedicated landing page. If you don’t feel like downloading another app, you can also use it directly from your browser using the same link. For iOS devices, you’ll need to visit the link above in Safari, but for any other Android device, you’ll download the GeForce Now app from the Google Play Store.

After you download the app or log in through your browser, you need to find a few games to play. To do this, you’ll need to link your Steam or Epic Games account in GeForce Now.

Note: Your Steam profile must also be set to public in order for GeForce Now to find it.

GeForce Now has game recommendations on its homepage. Some of these games have to be purchased with your own money, while others appear to be free trials that still require a connection to a Steam or Epic account.

How much does GeForce Now cost in Australia?

Here in Australia, GeForce Now comes in two tiers that offer a different experience. The Basic tier is free and offers standard queuing permissions, one-hour playback sessions, and blocks access to RTX rewards such as ray tracing. Priority tier costs $ 19.99 per month or $ 215.88 for an annual subscription (which is $ 17.99 per month). Priority provides four-hour session times, priority access to game servers, and all RTX bells and whistles such as ray tracing and tensor cores for artificial intelligence.

GeForce Now plans and pricing

Zoom / GeForce Now works on all of these devices. But you’ll want to double-check that the perfect combination of hardware, screen, and Ethernet connection will give you resolutions up to 1440p and 120fps or 2160p and 60fps. If so, the new GeForce Now 3080 subscription tier might be perfect for you.

Games

Unlike Stadia Pro, which includes a handful of games, and PlayStation Now, which includes a huge library of PlayStation titles but doesn’t have an à la carte option, GeForce Now doesn’t include any retail games as part of the service. You can play lots of free titles like Destiny 2, Fortnite, and Path of Exile, but you need to have your own digital game libraries to really take advantage of the service.

GeForce Now connects to your Steam, Battle.net, Epic, and UPlay accounts to let you play many games you already own, run on high-end gaming PCs and stream to any compatible device. It’s a design similar to the Shadow, but with a much lower price tag and no geographic restrictions or completely open remote access to your Windows 10 PC.

However, that doesn’t mean GeForce Now works with all your games. The service supports hundreds of major titles, but does not cover all available on Steam. GeForce Now offers a search engine to see if the game you want to play is supported, but there’s no publicly available list of everything that’s available on the service, so you’ll have to do a search to make sure you can play your favorite games.

GeForce Now runs on its own on PC, Mac, and Android. This is a fairly simple game loader that allows you to search for games, add them to your GeForce Now library, and start a game.

Since GeForce Now connects to your digital libraries, you will have to log into each library individually when you first run a game in that library. The service prompted me to log into Steam to play The Legend of Bum-Bo, but after that I didn’t have to enter more information to play Disco Elysium or The Surge 2. However, after logging into Battle.net to play Overwatch I still had to log back into it to play Diablo 3. Then I had to log back into the service every time I played the game. This is a clear inconvenience that I found on my Battle.net account but not others.

The implementation of a digital library in GeForce Now is a bit awkward. The software runs a full screen window that accesses one of Nvidia’s computers streaming its feed to you. This window shows the closed background where the digital library appears, like a very closed Shadow version. In the case of Steam, I had to “install” my games on the streaming system (which, to be honest, only took a few seconds) before I could play them. Each window opens specifically for the game you’re playing, so while you can see your full Steam library, you can only play the one you’re supposed to play.

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 games on this notebook which, it should be noted, does not have dedicated 3D graphics.

While GeForce Now can stream up to 1080p60, the games that run by default are 720p. I had to manually change the resolution of most games that I myself opened to 1080p, which is another minor inconvenience, but hardly makes it useless.

After linking the accounts and making sure everything is logged in, installed, and set up correctly, I had an almost flawless GeForce Now experience. Every game I’ve played, including The Legend of Bum-bo, Disco Elysium, Diablo 3, The Surge 2, and Dark Souls 3, looked and felt great, with 1080p graphics that seemed to have a solid 60fps (after making sure each game was set to play at this resolution). More importantly, the controls were extremely responsive and I couldn’t detect any lag between my inputs and my characters’ actions on screen. This is vital for any game streaming service. Even my cloud saves transferred without any input from me almost flawlessly; Dark Souls 3 was the only gamewhich did not import any saves from my PC installation.

You’re limited to protecting your email while streaming through the Free or Priority tiers, but if you wish to take advantage of the RTX 3080 Advanced Tier, you can upgrade to email protection on supported devices and up to 4K on an Nvidia Shield TV.

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 recently been added and pre-orders are now open.

With free membership, you can play any compatible games for up to an hour. You may have to wait in line for a slot on one of the Nvidia machines to become available as paid members have priority.

Paid members, called Priority, get a longer session (up to 6 hours), priority access (hence the name) and games are played using the highest tier 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 upfront to save some cash – this way it costs £ 44.99 / $ 49.99 / € 49.99.

The new RTX 3080 tier is now available for pre-order. It will debut in November in North America, in December in Europe, and will offer 8 hours of playback in a single session, exclusive access to servers running on the amazingly impressive RTX 3080 graphics cards, ray tracing and gameplay up to 1440p at 120 frames per second. Owners of Nvidia Shield TVs 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 initially in limited quantities.

Founding members who signed up for the first year of service as a public offering will continue to pay the old lifetime rate (unless they upgrade to RTX 3080).

What games are available on Nvidia GeForce Now?

As mentioned above, the great thing about GeForce Now is that your own games are available for you. So, if you have a healthy game library on Steam, GOG, Uplay, or any other online library, you can simply install a huge number of them on a remote computer and play them whenever you feel like it. Some are even preloaded, so you don’t have to wait for them to install before playing.

It is also one of the few cloud gaming services that supports free games such as Fortnite, Hyper Scape, and Apex Legends.

Some games support Nvidia Highlights, which allows you to capture and share game footage. This includes Fortnite, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and many more titles that you can see on this list here.

PCMag editors independently select and review products. If you buy through affiliate links, we can earn commissions that support our testing. Learn more.

How GeForce Now fits into the stream-iverse

The catch, of course, is that GeForce Now is still the most bulky cloud gaming option on the market. Admittedly, the service is also the most flexible and independent of the store.

So before I move on to the best parts of Nvidia’s new “GeForce Now 3080” option – its higher performance, higher peak resolution, and higher maximum FPS – I should be setting the stage for the service and comparing it to its peers, so stick 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 just checks to see if you’ve paid for it – although it conveniently downloads the save file from the cloud save feature of these storefront.

Use the Steam Library Scanning feature in GeForce Now to automatically accumulate games purchased through Steam. This does not work with EGS, Ubisoft Connect, or EA Origin. (Artifact? Does it work in GeForce Now? Huh.)

Enter something like “free-to-play” and GeForce will give you the gameplay without the purchase.

Most cloud gaming services require one way or another to rely on their store ecosystems. You can only play games on Google Stadia if you buy the versions that are exclusive to those games (or get access to giveaways through the Stadia Pro subscription service). If you want to stream Xbox Game Streaming games, you’ll need to pay for an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, and you can only stream approximately 200 games as selected by the service – unlike additional Xbox games that you purchase individually. And Amazon Luna offers different “channels”, each with individual costs and unique content, that you can choose from and arrange in the same way as with video streaming subscription services.

The cost of GeForce Now, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the games you can buy or borrow, everything to do with the Nvidia hardware you rent 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 your server farm, load and play games you have already purchased using their profiles, and save files. Nvidia’s cloud gaming service doesn’t care where or how you buy your games. He just wants to power them.

The big catch, however, is that some game publishers do not allow Nvidia to stream their games. (Remember: when you buy a game from an online store, you only pay for access to the license. This means, among other things, that publishers can take your access this way.) After launching the service in 2019, Nvidia was forced to remove the games it originally hosted after some publishers hailed profanity – in particular, games from Activision Blizzard’s Battle.net service. We have some good news, many more games have been added to the service over time from the following storefronts, for a total of just over 1,100 games:

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

Until this week, GeForce Now only had two tiers: $ 98 / year or Free. The latter involves performance degradation and the required wait in server queues, so if too many people are using the service you have to wait for paying clients. This free option is a decent way to basically confirm that your ideal streaming device – smartphone, set-top box, or weak netbook – can connect to the service and translate gamepad taps or keyboard and mouse madness into a cloud of streaming video games. But it’s not good for image quality or processing power.

RTX 3080 tier wins, even at a higher resolution

Meanwhile, the paid version includes basic “Nvidia RTX” support. Its server instances feature Nvidia’s proprietary GPU cores that are designed for ray tracing and Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS), but only a few per instance, thanks to the enhanced RTX variant of the server-grade Nvidia Tesla T10 GPU. The results are generally strong enough to get average modern PC games at a constant 1080p, 60fps refresh rate, usually with a few graphical bells and whistles turned on.

As I already attested, if you are within the proper geographic range of Nvidia’s servers and you have a wired Ethernet connection with low ping, you can expect near unwavering performance when playing with your mouse and keyboard at various shooters on the site. But 1080p resolution at 60fps and medium settings is basically what the rest of the streaming fight offers. How much more juice can the same Nvidia application ecosystem gather, especially if Nvidia itself, producer of so many high-end GPUs, is applying its own hardware upgrade?

The best way to answer this question is to let a few compatible games talk. After all, these are the exact same versions of PC games you can install on your own PC, and some have benchmark sequences built in. So I did some testing of an existing $ 98 / year service, called the “founder” tier, before Nvidia invited me to pre-launch the “3080” tier for $ 198 / yr so I could compare the power of the two server options on their own.

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

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla benchmark scores at the GeForce Now founders service level. “Ultra” graphics settings, 1080p resolution.

Watch Dogs Legion intense ray tracing test results on GeForce Now 3080 service layer. Graphics settings “Ultra”, RT at almost maximum, 1440p resolution, DLSS enabled in “quality mode.

Watch Dogs Legion, GeForce Now founders’ service tier of intense ray tracing test results. “Ultra” graphics settings, RT at almost maximum, 1080p resolution, with DLSS enabled in “quality mode.

The above benchmarks for computationally brutal Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (no ray tracing) and Watch Dogs Legion (significant ray tracing) are explained in their captions. Bottom line: all testing from the newer 3080 service tier is done at the higher 1440p resolution, but still clearly ahead of the same testing at the lower 1080p resolution at the founding tier of the service. Unfortunately, we couldn’t run these tests with the FPS graph attached, so we were left with vague, wavy line graphs. Even so, all of these tests have the key “bottom 1 percent”, and when they are higher (which is, by a large margin, at layer 3080), you can expect fewer frame stuttering and refresh rate drops.

Historically, these players have been forced to run games at sub-optimal settings or lag behind, but not anymore. Nvidia’s cloud-based GeForce Now has the potential to revolutionize gaming on PC, Mac, Android or iOS devices – especially with the new top-of-the-range RTX 3080 already rolling out.

How can I access Nvidia GeForce Now?

The best part about cloud gaming is their availability, and GeForce Now is a great showcase of cloud gaming technology. The Nvidia GeForce Now app is available for download on PC, Mac, Android, Shield TV, and Chromebook.

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

How much does Nvidia GeForce Now cost?

Such an impressive cloud-based game streaming service must be quite expensive, right? Evil.

The service was free during the closed beta, and Nvidia kept this theme in full with a free plan along with a premium, but still budget-friendly, priority plan (formerly known as the founding plan) and the ultimate RTX 3080.

The Free plan

The free plan is limited to 1-hour broadcasts, and while you can disconnect and reconnect right away, you’ll need to queue to regain access.

You’ll still be able to play RTX games like Metro Exodus, but you won’t be able to turn on RTX if you’re on the free plan.

The Priority plan

The Priority plan, which costs £ 8.99 / $ 9.99 a month after increasing from the initial Founders plan £ 4.99 / $ 4.99, offers access to six-hour streaming sessions along with support for the RTX 20 series in compatible games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus with priority access to the service during peak hours.

It’s worth noting that if you signed up for the Early Bird Founders plan, you’ll still pay a discount of £ 4.99 / $ 4.99 per month through Nvidia’s Founders for Life benefit – only new subscribers pay a higher fee. However, this does not apply to an upgrade to the top-end RTX 3080.

The RTX 3080 plan

The RTX 3080 tier is the newest (and most exclusive) tier of GeForce Now, offering the best possible gaming in the cloud. The highlight, of course, is the exclusive access to servers with top-end RTX 3080 GPUs that enable ray tracing and the aforementioned increased 1440p / 4K resolution, but there are other benefits as well, including longer, 8-hour gaming sessions.

It’s now available in the US and Europe, but unlike the other tiers, it’s only available in six-month servings for £ 89.99 / $ 99.99 apiece.

Whichever plan you choose, go to the GeForce Now website to sign up and download the client for your chosen platform.

Unlike most of its rivals, GeForce Now does not sell games or provide access to its own curated library of titles. Instead, it connects to your Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, or Uplay online accounts to play games you already own or purchase through these digital storefronts.

Is GeForce Now for you?

source: Android Central

The gaming landscape is constantly changing, and as more and more gamers adapt to the digital future, game streaming services will continue to expand. When it comes to GeForce Now, the perfect user is someone who might want to experience high-end PC gaming but don’t yet have the money or knowledge to invest in it. Building a gaming platform can be an expensive endeavor, especially if you want to get the most out of some of the settings on the latest games. GeForce Now offers an incredibly inexpensive way to play games at their highest settings and only requires you to own the game.

GeForce Now offers an incredibly cheap way to play games at their highest settings.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of GeForce Now is that it doesn’t require a powerful device to use it. It’s made especially for those who may own Macs, NVIDIA Shield, low-end PCs, or Android mobile devices and want to play games on a variety of platforms. If you have one of the compatible devices, you can get started.

The only other thing you’ll definitely need to get the most out of GeForce Now is a solid internet connection as the service requires a minimum download speed of 15 Mbps to play. However, if you can overcome that hurdle, GeForce Now is the best option for you and will allow you to test what it’s like to play on a high-end gaming PC without having to worry about the aspect of owning it just yet.

GeForce Now free vs paid: Which is best?

source: Android Central

Both versions of GeForce Now offer players this service, but if you’re going to be using one, the Founders membership is almost too good to opt out of. Not only will you not have to wait in lines when loading games, but you’ll also have much longer game sessions at your disposal, which is almost a necessity.

Aside from the perks, the price of a GeForce Now Founders membership is also a great deal. At just $ 5 a month, GeForce Now is by far the cheapest subscription service that lets you stream games from other devices, and since it connects to your personal game library, there are no other fees to be added to it. The free version is a great opportunity to get used to GeForce Now, but a Founders membership is a must if you’re serious about streaming games.

A new way to play

NVIDIA GeForce Now Founders membership

NVIDIA’s cloud game streaming service is one of the best available today, delivering lag-free gameplay at 1080p / 60fps. Playing games is a breeze and the fact that you don’t have to buy any extra games is a huge plus.

Give it a try

NVIDIA GeForce Now Free membership

For those not yet ready for a paid subscription, there is a free GeForce Now option to give gamers a chance to try out the service. You may be limited to one-hour sessions, but this will give you a chance to see how good the service is.

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