Is PC Cloud Gaming Any Good? A GeForce NOW Review

I have ALWAYS prefered doing everything locally, and with wires. Need internet? I use an Ethernet cable. Listening to music? Get my wired Sennheiser headphones. Playing games? OF COURSE I’m going to play that with my own hardware, right?

Well, I recently decided to test out the GeForce NOW cloud gaming platform and I was genuinely surprised at it. It has some really neat features and the graphics were AMAZING – much better than what my own 12 core PC could muster.

Of course, there WERE some issues along with way – so I discuss all this (and more) in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byIY2UBT6DE&t=424s

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

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone, cloud gaming has genuinely impressed me. When playing Cyberpunk 2077 LOCALLY on my 12 core Ryzen, I get THIS:

But with cloud gaming, I get THIS:

And on my 6 year old budget laptop that can barely play Rocket League, I get THIS – which should basically be impossible.

But there ARE some clear downsides to cloud gaming too, like weird glitches and popups, laggy mouse input, blurry menus and REALLY long wait times on the free tier. BUT overall I’m impressed… after paying NVIDIA’S monthly fee, that is.

GeForce NOW Overview

So here’s everything you need to know about cloud gaming with GeForce Now, and I’m going to start with a brief recap of the service. Cloud gaming is all about “renting” a small chunk of a powerful cloud gaming computer, and the games are rendered on THOSE cloud servers – not on your own computer. That means that you could have a cheap £200 laptop, hook it up to a 4K monitor and play a triple A game with all settings maxed out – which is pretty sweet:

Well I SAY that you can play at 4K resolution – this is only possible if you pay for the Ultimate plan, and this isn’t exactly cheap. Yes it WOULD be cheap if it included unlimited games, but it doesn’t. With GeForce NOW you have to own the games first. You then link your game accounts with NOW and it’ll then allow you to play various games through the platform.

Yes there IS a free tier with GeForce NOW but it contains ads, you don’t get RTX support PLUS there’s some other big flaws – which I’ll cover in the next section. If you’re interested in trying out cloud gaming, I probably would just pay for one day or one month’s Priority or Ultimate membership and see if you like it.

GeForce NOW doesn’t support every game either – the website advertises over 1800 games being supported, which sounds great but there’s some notable exceptions here, like various Bethesda games, XCOM, some Total War games and a load more. Supported games can be removed at any time, meaning that you could happily be gaming one day, but not be “allowed” to play that game the following day.

One bonus though is that you don’t need to download the games in advance. Because you are “renting” a small chunk of a purpose built gaming rig, all supported games are pretty much all ready to go. You MIGHT need to click the “install” button which is a bit weird and confusing, but it will then “install” straight away. So you can play a 200 Gig game immediately, instead of waiting hours for it to download – and that’s pretty sweet.

You can play games through supported browsers, or you can download the separate GeForce NOW application which I did because there’s a bit of a performance boost (compared to running everything with Chrome’s extra overhead, for example) but it’s neat to have the browser-based option if you’d prefer it.

GeForce NOW ‘Free Tier’ Is Pointless

One frustration I have with the service is the free tier. Now it IS good that GeForce offers this, to advertise the NOW service of course, BUT I’ve barely ever been able to get through the long waiting lists here. Maybe it’s based on my location because you’ll be connected to a nearby gaming rig, BUT I once tried joining one afternoon and there were over 150 people ahead of me in the queue. After waiting for some time, there were still almost 100 people before me in the queue. Eventually I gave up, but I estimated it would have taken half an hour to get in. And this is just too long in my opinion. Can you imagine a group of friends all excitedly logging on to play a game, and they keep bugging you, asking you where you are – and then you reply that you’re in a 30 minute cloud gaming queue? 

It’s a bit rubbish. Equally the free servers are less powerful, meaning that you won’t be able to get fully maxed out graphics for your 240Hz monitor, for example. You’ll also see some ads, and your session will end after just 1 hour. So the free tier is probably better than NOTHING for casual gaming, but you can’t rely on it – especially for more serious or organized gaming.

I did try queueing up at a totally off peak time and then there were “only” 15 people ahead of me in the queue, but it locked up when I was the 4th person left in the queue. This happened to me twice, meaning that I had to restart and join the queue again and again. I did eventually get in after 10 minutes of messing about, but all-in-all I wouldn’t personally consider the free tier.

Initial Thoughts & Graphics

So I ended up dipping into my Linux Tax Write-Off Fund and paying £20 for a month’s Ultimate membership, and I WAS pleasantly surprised here actually. Well, I did have some bugs at first which I’ll discuss in a minute BUT after fixing them, the graphics were amazing. I firstly played Cyberpunk 2077 with everything maxed out – including ray tracing because you get this with the paid plans – and it looked great on my 4K, 60fps monitor.

I actually kept FORGETTING that the graphics were being rendered and streamed over the cloud, because everything was so seamless and snappy. Unfortunately GeForce NOW seemed to hate screen recorders – I tried multiple, but they all slowed things down a LOT – with my PC only rendering 20 fps or less (even though the NOW service was actually generating 90fps or more).

The amazing benefit of cloud gaming is that even though my CPU and GPU cost me over £800, there was zero chance that I could get this quality of graphics locally. I actually did try playing Cyberpunk 2077 locally with similar graphical settings, but it was like a dodgy Powerpoint presentation – with really low FPS rates. I had to decrease the graphics to medium to get half playable FPS rates at 4K, but naturally this meant that the quality was waaay lower than cloud gaming would have delivered.

I should point out that I originally had some screen tearing problems, but I tweaked some of the settings and disabling vsync in the GeForce overlay resolved the tearing issues – along with some annoying mouse issues that I’ll cover later.

I also tried GeForce Now out on my 6 year old laptop which doesn’t have a discrete GPU, meaning that it even struggles to play Rocket League at low graphical settings. The results were amazing (of course) – being able to play a maxed out Cyberpunk 2077 at the laptop’s native 1080p resolution. It feels like “cheating” to take my old, budget laptop and play a modern triple-A game at full graphical settings, but that’s obviously the whole point of cloud gaming. It opens up an interesting idea that I’ll cover later – why would you ever pay £3k for a gaming laptop or ultra powerful PC, when you could just pay £300 and put the savings into a cloud gaming membership… and a really nice holiday too?

The reason that GeForce NOW works so well, in my opinion, is that they don’t cut corners on the streaming quality. You know how YouTube and Netflix advertise “4k quality” but don’t ACTUALLY deliver true 4K, because the streaming bitrate is too low? Well I was worried that NVIDIA might have done this too, but they didn’t – thankfully. The GeForce NOW process (that renders the games in the cloud, then streams them back to the local PC) was often using over 70 Megabits per second of bandwidth.

That’s quite a lot which is actually a GOOD thing – assuming your internet connection is fast enough for this, of course. True 4K graphical quality DOES need to be streamed at a high bitrate otherwise the quality will suffer. So the fact that GeForce NOW doesn’t cut corners here is great, because you can see the full graphical quality of your game – without any annoying compression tricks.

There are two things I need to note here though. Firstly, GeForce NOW did default me to a 1440p resolution and a lower bitrate – despite my monitor and internet connection clearly supporting more than this. This led to quite blurry results at first, which was annoying and a bit disappointing because this was the first experience that I had with my paid-for membership. Also I couldn’t see a way of changing the streaming settings within the NOW app – I had to log into my NOW account on a PC, go to the settings there and EVENTUALLY I found the settings that I needed to change. Instead of going for NVIDIA’s “balanced” settings, I opted for custom settings and whacked everything up to max.

I was THEN able to get the full resolution and graphical quality that my monitor and internet connection supported. It’s a bit cheeky of NVIDIA to randomly go for lower settings without clearly asking me about this, in my opinion, especially when it resulted in a blurry mess when I did first try out the service.

The second thing I needed to note is that your internet connection and latency matters a LOT here. If you have unreliable WiFi and often get high pings, your cloud gaming experience will not be great – especially for competitive gaming. You WILLl get lower quality graphics and probably notice some input lag too. Thankfully I have a 550 MB internet connection and an Eero mesh WiFi system (and my desktop PC is connected over Ethernet), meaning that my laptop and desktop both had solid internet connections with low pings. This meant that cloud gaming was seamless for me and I didn’t experience any real issues (after fixing some initial bugs and settings).

Weird Bugs And Glitches

At first my mouse was really laggy, and it was almost impossible to select any menu items. I Googled this a bit though and disabling vsync helped fix this for me, along with resolving some screen tearing issues that I experienced early on.

When you’re playing a game, the service is often really seamless and you forget that you’re cloud gaming, BUT at first it can be quite clunky and buggy to actually launch the game. That’s because when you click “play” on a game, it just loads your game’s launcher – like Steam or Epic Games. You then have to find the game there and often click “install” before clicking “play” – again. Some games will then have a secondary launcher appear, like the Cyberpunk RED Launcher – so you have to click “play” for a third time. Smooooth, not.

Equally sometimes you try to launch a game, but Steam News will pop up. Or one time I thought I had launched a game, but then a random Epic Games webpage popped up asking me for permission or something. I WAS able to ignore this and still play a game, but it’s all a bit jarring and random.

I also found that I wasn’t able to play Cyberpunk 2077 while it was downloading to my local PC – the NOW launcher just kept failing to launch up the game. I guess this sort of makes sense because Steam must have been thinking “huh, the game is still downloading” – but it was still a bit annoying.

Some BIG Downsides Of GeForce NOW

That brings me onto a few final “ranting points”. Firstly GeForce NOW often doesn’t support mods. Because you’re only temporarily renting a “cloud PC”, you don’t get permanent storage for loads of custom mods. In-fact this could be a massive security flaw for NVIDIA too, so they only tend to support official mods through things like the Steam Workshop. Many games just don’t have modding support though, so if you wanted to play a fully modded Skyrim with 4K textures, you’re out of luck. Well, Skyrim isn’t actually a supported game so you wouldn’t be able to play it anyway, but you hopefully get my point.

Secondly as I covered earlier, cloud gaming is naturally very dependent on the quality of your internet connection  – and this means the SPEED of your ISP connection, but also your internal latencies. If you have a 50 Meg internet package, for example, then you won’t be able to play maxed out 4K games – sorry. Equally if your computer’s WiFi has a weak signal and you often have lag spikes when playing multiplayer games, cloud gaming probably won’t work out well for you because high graphics frames are constantly being streamed from NVIDIA’s platform to your computer and so if your PC’s connection is weak, many frames will be lost or skipped – resulting in low FPS rates.

Finally I found the initial GeForce NOW experience quite disappointing. I tried it out as a free player, and I could barely get through to games – either due to ultra long waiting lists, or due to the queue freezing up. And even after paying for the highest membership level, GeForce NOW defaulted my settings to 1440p resolution and a lower bitrate that resulted in a fair bit of blurriness. Once you get through all these annoying niggles though, it is a pretty sweet experience.

When/Where I WOULD Use Cloud Gaming

So, would I ever use cloud gaming myself – especially when I already have a half decent gaming PC? Well surprisingly YES, I would. Firstly it’s summertime now and we all know that a gaming session in 30 degree celsius temps is never fun, because the last thing we need is a mini space heater pumping out extra heat. Naturally with cloud gaming, this isn’t an issue – my PC was completely silent and cool, DESPITE playing many hours of 4K games at the highest possible graphical settings. That’s pretty sweet, and I could imagine myself paying for a month’s GeForce NOW subscription during the peak of summer.

Finally I’ve always half dreamt of buying a super expensive GPU, like a £1000 4080 Super or whatever. But now I don’t think that I’d ever do that. I mean, I DO still need a GPU because I do a lot of video editing, but I’m personally happy to stick to a mid range GPUs for basic local gaming, and THEN buy a cloud subscription to play through the latest triple A games as needed. That would work out better for me, while also saving me a lot of money.

So that’s pretty interesting, actually. I thought when planning for this video that I’d be really negative about cloud gaming, proclaiming that “local gaming is always best” – but it’s kinda not. I was genuinely surprised at the seamless nature of GeForce NOW… after fixing the initial bugs and niggles. I would happily use it again, and that wraps up this video, I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please click the thumbs up button and please subscribe to see more videos like this. Thanks for watching!