I don’t get wowed easily. This is partly because my face simply doesn’t contort to the configuration that would convey that I’ve been wowed, but also because in the world of gaming and tech it’s increasingly hard to deliver anything truly groundbreaking. Geforce Now, Nvidia’s PC game streaming service is honestly the most impressed I’ve been by some tech since little me played an N64 for the first time. It’s absolute magic.
For those of you not in the know – and considering the relative newness and proliferation amongst the mainstream of game streaming, why would you know – Geforce Now is one of a bunch of services that allow people to play games, not running on a PC or console in your home but on a PC/console somewhere a long way away. A video of the game is then sent to your device (PC, phone, console) and you interact with it as you would if the game was running in the traditional way. Some services provide games as part of the subscription (Game Pass, Amazon Luna), but Geforce Now exclusively uses your own library of games (Steam and Epic Games Store mostly, but also EA and Ubisoft’s stores and a handful of games from GOG), provided they are supported on the platform.
This sounds like it would never work, right? How can a game running miles away be beamed to your home and feel like it’s running on a PC or console in front of you? Well, for a number of services it sort of doesn’t work. Even Xbox’s cloud gaming service (formerly xCloud and the most well-known service on the market) is far from ideal, with image quality being subpar and gameplay suffering from noticeable input delay. Your own setup (both in terms of internet speed and home network setup) plays a big part, but I’ve played many, many hours of games running on the Xbox service and it’s at best passable for some low-speed titles.