A Quick Nvidia Geforce Now Review (2021)
I recently got an original Nvidia Shield Portable which is a rather neat device to my collection and it works great.
Primarily I do stream games from my computer to it when I want to play them however I thought I would try out Nvidia’s Geforce Now Service.
The App
Being that I was running it on an Nvidia Shield handheld the app was already installed, I click the Nvidia logo on it and it pops up ready to use.
The UI is Ok, one thing I don’t like is that it always defaults to showing you games the platform supports rather than just ones I own as it looks like many games are available.
However I was able to sign in with my Steam account and view my library without issues and get playing rather quickly.
Waiting Times
I tried to play without signing up to premium 4 times in a row of which only once I was able to play a bit of a game within about 5 minutes. The other 3 times was estimates of an hour waiting. This kind of surprised me as it was around Midnight I was attempting to play these and would have expected demand on the EU servers to be quite low.
Thinking I would use it quite a bit I did pay for a month of premium, however I’ve already cancelled the automatic renewal as I don’t think I will be unless it improves.
The Streaming
Streaming was actually rather smooth, now I do have internet that exceeds all of Nvidia’s recommendations (50Mbps+) and a Ubiquity Access Point and was connected via it’s 5GHZ capability in the room furthest away from the AP.
I didn’t notice any stuttering, quality decrease or any clear latency and it felt the same as when I stream games from my computer
I do suspect that if I was still using my ISP’s provided router I would have possibly had some issues as I used to even with in home streaming, which this service is partially targeted towards somebody who might not own the latest kit.
Overall I can’t really critacise that at all.
The Game Selection
It’s been in some reviews as bad, but it’s worse than I expected.
Only 53 out of around 450 games I own on steam show up, and I can’t see any of the games I have brought or gotten for free on epic that I play show up either.
Really this is the main downside as only around 11% of my library is playable, I kinda would have expected it to be more that say out of 450 games that I could play 300 of them or such.
You then have some oddities where even some games are missing from the same publisher.
However the other issue is, out of the 53 games I can play 20 of them are ones that require a Keyboard and Mouse to play. Really a service like this is targeted that you’re running it on your phone, a widget plugged into your TV etc.
While it does support desktop for those games, you might as well run it natively as most of them aren’t demanding even for lower end laptops.
Overview
Overall services like this could be much better if there wasn’t the politics of games publishers not allowing games to be on the platform.
Really I don’t see why you shouldn’t be allowed to play any game you “own” as it’s no different in my view to running it on my Computer and streaming it instead.
