Last year I tested out GeForce Now, the most popular cloud gaming platform. But since NVIDIA have whacked a 100 hour playtime cap on GFN, I wanted to try out alternatives. Can Boosteroid live up to the hype?

I tested it on a laptop, TV and PC and in this video I give my full thoughts. I tested at different bitrates and resolutions (1080p and 4K) and overall I am impressed, but there were a couple of annoyances.

(Link to direct YouTube video)

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone! If you told me 10 or even 20 years ago that I’d be able to play computer games on my TV using an Xbox controller without having a console or a PC actually hooked up to the TV, I would have thought you were mad. But that’s now the position we’re in because many Smart TVs actually support cloud gaming apps like GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud, and Boosteroid. But it’s not just a TV where you can play cloud gaming. You could play on a Chromebook just by opening a Chrome tab and going to boosteroid.com, or you could play on a laptop as well. This laptop has, like, an eighth-gen Intel CPU, a mid-range one, and no graphics card at all. It shouldn’t be possible, but of course, that’s how cloud gaming actually works, because the games are rendered on the cloud gaming servers, and then the gaming graphics are streamed back to your Chromebook, your laptop, your TV, or your computer—whatever you use. You can play with it as long as you’ve got access to a web browser, or you can actually download the Boosteroid app. Boosteroid used to have two different packages that you could sign up for, and they came with different resolutions. But recently they’ve streamlined that. They just have a single 4K package. And there used to be a deal on… oh, I just realized my guy is dying here! I was in a hazard zone, wasn’t I? Oops! But basically, as I was saying, Boosteroid now has a single package which comes with 4K resolution support and supports up to 120 FPS. I’ve tested that a bunch of times, and actually, it works really well, as we’ll see later. One of the reasons I was eager to try out Boosteroid is that last year GeForce Now announced they were introducing a playtime cap.

So basically, each month you have 100 hours max to play games. That might sound like quite a lot, but actually, 3.5 hours a day will exceed that cap. So I was quite interested to test out the Boosteroid service. It does work on a laptop, but for now, I’ll actually go back to some quick TV testing to see how it works there. This is a completely independent video. They did reach out to me and see if I wanted to try it out, so I said yes. But actually, I have no issues paying for it, like I did in my previous GeForce Now video. So this is a fully independent review, and I have found issues with the service, which I’ll talk about throughout this video. So let’s try out a training course and see how that works. I suck at using a controller; I’m used to using a keyboard. I shoot with RT, aim with LT. Okay, okay, that worked, and there’s no input latency, you’ll be pleased to know. Let’s have a look… ah, aim! There we are, that’s what we want. Aim. Right, that’s not too bad. X to reload… I’m getting the hang of this. Moving target… yeah, that’ll be fine… oh no, it’s not! It’s so hard with a controller! Let’s try that out. This looks really good as well. I did notice a little bit of lag every so often, but overall, it’s pretty good. And actually, this is all via the cloud, but you wouldn’t even know that. It does feel really seamless.

And yes, this is wired Ethernet; it might be a bit buggier with Wi-Fi. But overall, this is a fairly good experience, and it looks good and everything else. I’m going to try a different game now. Oh, no gamepad detected… oh, there we are, fine! I was going to be worried then. I said no gamepad detected, but this is always the buggiest bit of playing cloud games. I found this with my GeForce Now review as well: often, you just get empty screens, and you’re waiting for everything to load. Right now, I need to accept this legal agreement, which is a complete pain because I can’t see how to do that on my controller. So I’m going to have to switch to cursor mode, which is a complete pain. Can I just click accept? Yes, I can. With some of them, you need to scroll all the way down, which is a complete pain. Again, this looks really good. It’s a lot better than my current system, and that’s no massive surprise because, effectively, these cloud servers are really powerful systems. And obviously, even though you’re just getting a small chunk of it, other people are playing on it in a virtualized environment. You’re still going to have access to really good gaming hardware, ultimately. So this is the 7900 XT. Cloud gaming does have a place, I think. Actually, if you look at what’s happening at the moment with AMD delaying their latest graphics cards and Nvidia’s being in really short supply, cloud gaming can be a good way of tiding yourself over. So I think that worked fairly well. Cloud gaming is always a little bit clunky when you’re launching the game, especially if you’ve never played that game before with that particular cloud provider. But once you’re actually in a game, it was really flawless. So if we switch over to a PC now, whether you’ve got a graphics card or not, the actual hardware in their cloud servers is going to be a lot better than you probably have. So if we go over to Hogwarts Legacy, for example, let’s play that on the PC and see how that works.

So it says I’ve got inline game installation. Here we are. We now need to accept this, and immediately, this has gone into full-screen mode. The browser has, and if I want to get out of it or look at any of the config options, I can press Ctrl+1. And obviously, here you can change the FPS rating and things like that, which is quite cool. This monitor only supports 60 FPS, but it’s good it can go up to 120 FPS if you wanted. This is obviously 4K. Let’s go back in there. So, game installation… I’ve got to accept this. And this is a weird thing with cloud gaming: it sometimes has to download everything onto the cloud servers, even though it already has it, which is a bit strange. Sometimes you click install and it works immediately; in this case, it obviously hasn’t done that. But that’s fine. You do often see a blank screen quite a lot with cloud gaming. It was the same with GeForce Now, where you just wait for everything to actually initialize. Finally, we’re in, and it’s loading, which is good. And yeah, this looks really, really good.

The bitrate is really high, as you can see, and that means you’re at 4K. If you were at 1080p, you’d probably look at a bitrate of around 20 megabits per second. The fact we’re at more than 80 is impressive because that means it’s streaming the full 4K quality. Actually, this looks really good. It looks better than on my own computer. I’m curious what rendering resolution it’s running at now. So that is… not there. Oh, everything’s low! That’s interesting. By default, Boosteroid sets the resolution, and it says ideally you shouldn’t tweak it. Actually, yeah, the rendering resolution here is upscaled. Let’s see what happens if I turn off upscaling and go to native 4K. Okay, so still looks pretty good. It hasn’t hammered the FPS; I’m still getting a stable 60. That’s pretty good. Even though I don’t have a monitor that supports 120Hz, I’m going to change my FPS rate to that. But overall, this is as close to max settings as you’re going to get. Obviously, it’s streaming at close to 120 FPS, so if you did have a 120Hz monitor, you could play something like Hogwarts Legacy through Boosteroid, which is impressive. I’m going to move on to another game now. Let’s go to Sniper Elite.

I like playing that sometimes; it’s a simple mid-range game. I just want to see how that performs, and it should perform fairly well, of course. Oh, another agreement to sign. You basically have to do that every single time you relaunch the game or potentially when you relaunch the game because if you end up on a new cloud server, you’re going to have to redo it again, which is a bit annoying. No, what just happened? Oh, that’s annoying. “Sign in with your Epic account.” Can I say no to that? That’s another annoying thing. You’ll see when I play natively, it doesn’t do that. Let’s click cancel. Can I just play the game? No, it’s gone. That’s annoying. It was launching the game, and then Epic decided to show me that message. Now it’s gone, and I can’t play the game anymore. Let’s click play again. Do you want to keep playing this game? Well, yes. No, it’s launched a new window, but Boosteroid says, “Oh, you’re already playing the game.” It’s taken me back to this blank screen. That’s not going to work. So if I want to play Sniper Elite 5, I’ll have to play a different game and then go back to Sniper Elite 5. There we are, that’s Metro launching, and it did launch, to be fair. I’m going to end that session, and now I can go back and play the game I wanted to play before Epic disrupted me. Brilliant, it’s loading now. There we are. No… Epic… oh, it’s so close! Okay, allow. I have to click allow, otherwise it’s not going to work, is it? “You’re now logged in. Please close this window and return to the application.” How do I do that? There’s nothing there. There’s no button for… um, where’s the button for this? I can’t actually play.

How do I launch it? Oh, I know. Can I start and stop? Will that work? Right, there we are. Third time lucky, this might actually work. So for future reference, if this does happen, I can just stop the game and restart it within the Steam client. It’s all a bit jarring and buggy, to be honest. It feels messy. Once you’re in the game, though, it’s great. We’ve seen that when I was playing on the TV and on my laptop. Once you’re in a game, it’s fine. Actually, this looks really good. Headshot! Brilliant! Testicle shot… sorry, I’m a big kid, but yeah, I always do that, sorry. Let’s try again. Body shot… there we are, that’s what I meant to do. So what are the graphics like? It looks really good to me, to be honest. Game options… I’m in 4K. There’s no upscaling or anything like that. Let’s whack it straight up to ultra, because it should support that. You can see the background… yeah, you can see everything changing quite a lot. So let’s go up to ultra. This is native 4K, and it’s got no issues. It’s using close to 80 bitrate, which, again, is what we saw with GeForce Now as well. If I try going up to 120 FPS, let’s see what happens. It is rendering at 120 FPS, and I can’t benefit from that on my monitor, of course. But the Boosteroid service is supporting that, which is pretty cool. I’m going to go back to 60 FPS, though. And what’s nice as well—I forgot to mention earlier—is that if you have a slower internet connection, like 50 megabits per second, you can lower the bitrate down. So you might say, “I’m going to game at 40 megabits per second and leave the rest for people watching Netflix or whatever.” Now I’ve done that, and things still look pretty good even though the bitrate is lower. It doesn’t look quite as sharp, but the fact that you have that option, as you do with GeForce Now, is really good. I think now I’ll play Cyberpunk.

That’s always a good game for judging graphical quality and things like that. So that’s it starting up. Let’s see how long it takes to actually get into it. Right, there we are. That’s loaded, and yeah, that looks really nice. So much better than on my own computer with an RX 6700 XT. You can see the reflections are really good there. That’s pretty impressive. Everything looks pretty good. This is native 4K, so it’s quite computationally expensive. But we’re seeing fairly good results. Obviously, we could probably turn on FSR and stuff if we wanted, but we haven’t needed to. This is pretty impressive. I’ll try one final game. Once I’m in the games themselves, the Boosteroid service is flawless. The graphical quality is brilliant. As we’ve seen, it would work fine on a 120Hz monitor, too. Maybe I’m getting slightly fewer FPS than that, but nothing major. This is pretty good. So let’s go into one final game. I’ll go with Serious Sam 4. That’s a slightly older game, but I want to see if there are any bugs because it’s a slightly less popular game. What’s it doing? Oh, “The system doesn’t meet the minimum requirements. Unable to detect graphics hardware.” What do I do? “Do you want to continue anyway?” Yes. “Do you want to skip this message in the future?” Yes. Oh, that doesn’t look good… bloody hell, that’s awful graphical quality! Please… oh, we can’t have that. Options… ultra GPU speed, ultra GPU memory… let’s put everything to ultra. Let’s see if that’s better. Yeah, so this looks fairly good. Apart from being quite a stressful game, this is actually quite a good experience. It’s an older game, but in general, this works well. I completely suck at this game, but that works too. So, there, four games I’ve played in my library, and they work fairly well overall. So there you have it. I’ve played Boosteroid quite a lot over the past few days, and my own experience has been pretty good. You sometimes see people criticize it on Reddit, saying they had low performance, or the bitrate wasn’t very good, and hence the gaming quality wasn’t great. Or maybe they had long queues or too many crashes. I didn’t personally see any of that. I tried playing at peak time and off-peak time, and everything was fairly flawless.

But it might depend on where in the world you’re based. If you’re in an area without many Boosteroid cloud servers but with lots of players, you’ll obviously have a slightly worse experience than if you live somewhere with fewer Boosteroid players. When I think back to my GeForce Now experience, it wasn’t that good. By default, GeForce Now actually sets things to 1440p. Even though I tested it on a 4K monitor, it defaulted to 1440p, and everything looked a little blurry, especially the Steam client. So when I was trying to launch games or accept an agreement, everything looked blurry and rubbish. Especially since GeForce Now limits your bitrate way down at first, you’ve got to trawl through all your settings to actually increase it to 4K resolution. So, my initial experience with Boosteroid was better than with GeForce Now. I tested it on a 4K monitor, for example, and it just supported 4K with the maximum bitrate and everything else with no hassle. I felt that was better than GeForce Now. I also had fewer issues with things like screen tearing, which plagued my experiences on GeForce Now. Often, I had to look in the settings and enable VSync or other features, but I didn’t have to do any of that with Boosteroid either, which was great. I probably noticed a little more lag spikes with Boosteroid compared to GeForce Now, so there are some tradeoffs. But overall, I was fairly happy with Boosteroid. In terms of pricing, they have a sale on right now. I think it was supposed to expire at the start of this year, but they’ve extended it to April 2025. Overall, I was fairly impressed with Boosteroid. I wouldn’t say it’s a worse service than GeForce Now. The main issue I had with it was that it supports fewer games than GeForce Now. You can actually go on the website for both services and scroll through. I’d always suggest you look through your favorite games to see which cloud platform supports them before you subscribe. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to take out a subscription only to find an issue where your game isn’t supported. Overall, I’m pretty happy with Boosteroid. At least for me personally, I’d happily use it as an alternative to GeForce Now. I didn’t see it as a worse service or anything like that. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please click the thumbs-up button and subscribe to see more videos like this. Thanks for watching!