NVIDIA this month is unifying its GeForce NOW service across all platforms that it supports, extending the latest iteration of the service for PCs and Macs to include NVIDIA’s SHIELD TV consoles. From now on, all 225 games supported by the game streaming service will also run on the Android TV STB.
The gaming industry’s wet dream: no physical media, no downloaded games – just streaming.
does this work with most people’s domestic internet?
don’t you need super fast super-low latency and super-low jitter for this to work?
or is this for streaming Solitaire?
It’s for rich no-life anyway.
Depends on the game… For most games high-speed cable is good enough. For twitchy FPS games though you pretty much need fiber for the experience to be good. Not great, just good.
I have gigabit fiber and with the PC on wired ethernet it is pretty decent. On my Shield TV on wireless, not so much… Although I guess if you have Wireless AC its probably ok (I just have N).
Ive only used it once or twice out of curiosity though with some free games… Not my bag.
Edited 2018-07-16 21:38 UTC
I am on 12mbit ADSL, only tried Fortnite and it was surprisingly playable even on wifi. Not good, but playable nonetheless. Getting fibre next week and expect it to be good enough for me, I’m not really a gamer though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Streaming single player games, split screen racing games and street fighter have also worked fine, with only the occasional hiccup.
It’s pretty good for certain types of games, and it works even on my ancient 10 year old PC, and my 5 year old macbook pro.
It doesn’t beat native hardware – even the nVidia GeForce 650 in my laptop out performs.
Edited 2018-07-17 06:34 UTC
Considering that streaming from a PC with a GeForce card to a Shield TV over wired gigabit Ethernet is mediocre to terrible, I can’t begin to imagine the horror of streaming a game as it’s rendered “in the cloud” over my 100Mbps cable Internet connection.
First world problems, to be sure, but I don’t feel like paying full retail price for a game, then paying for a service to stream that game with lag and blocky graphics, and never getting a downloadable or gods forbid, physical copy of what I paid so much for.
Of course it doesn’t work. Only a utter moron would think playing games or watching tv or movies via streaming would be a viable solution for anything other than for getting ripped-off.
What’s wrong with movie/TV streaming?… (latency here doesn’t matter)
The ultimate DRM.
that’s where modern software is headed. all you need is a dumb terminal to The Cloud, in the guise of a web browser.
So we can party like it’s 1969! The time-share computer system reimagined for the 21st century.
…are always the ones that requires the most bandwidth. Right?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you still have to pay full price for the game, plus the streaming price on top of that? If so, it’s basically like renting someone’s gaming PC to play your own games on, except you don’t actually own said games. Don’t see how that’s a good deal.
If it’s something like Spotify, where the GeForce Now cost includes a library of games, then yeah, that could make at least some financial sense to the consumer.
Edited 2018-07-17 13:18 UTC