Nvidia has been on the frontier of delivering efficient graphics processing to PCs and has been an invaluable company to gamers and game developers alike. While the company already has a lot of achievements and accolades through the years because of their products, it seems that they are set to outdo their selves once more with an innovative new Service called Geforce NOW.
What is GeForce NOW?
To put it rather simply, GeForce NOW is a service that lets gamers "stream" games. Not like a "Let's Play," but like a real-time stream of the game while they are playing.
That might sound confusing at first, but how it works is that GeForce NOW will let gamers access a high-performance computer in the cloud. All the game's processing - graphics, input, sound, etc. - will be done by said PC, and audiovisual feedback will then be streamed back to the gamer's rig.
How can this service flourish? Well, games are getting more and more sophisticated, with complicated systems that aim to emulate a more-or-less "realistic" experience according to the concepts and themes of a particular game universe. Graphics, of course, is the number one resource hog, but number-crunching on complex games can challenge even most modern PCs, as well.
If one can offload all these to a very high-end PC on the cloud and stream the audiovisual feedback, then it would be a different experience for gamers indeed — especially to those who can't afford the high-end rigs but can pay for a monthly subscription for GeForce NOW.
How does it hold up?
John Ballard from business and tech website The Motley Fool tried the service and found it to be quite satisfactory. It's simple to set up as installing a client, and then purchasing and downloading games from well-known online providers like Steam, Origin, or GOG.
"When I tried the service, the only negative I noticed was that my mouse movement was noticeably slower than on my PC -- others have reported this problem as well," Ballard wrote.
However, he did admit that this did not surprise him, as streaming from the cloud would inevitably lead to some latency issues.
Ballad also speculated that GeForce NOW was a move on Nvidia's part that has the ultimate goal of introducing more and more gamers to the power of PC gaming. The subscription is affordable enough that one can "stream-play" to test a game, but there's still no beating the stability of an actual high-end rig to run one's games from. In any case, the service can be like a showcase of how Nvidia's equipment could change one's gaming experience once and for all.
