Examined: Nvidia’s GeForce Now simply breathed new life into my Steam Deck

I don’t need gaming to develop into one other streaming subscription service that retains going up in value. I don’t wish to put much more energy in Nvidia’s arms, notably not proper now.

However I can’t deny that the corporate’s $20-a-month* GeForce Now’s a near-perfect match for the Steam Deck. I’ve been overlaying cloud gaming for 15 years, and that is the very first time I’ve needed to maintain taking part in indefinitely.

Handhelds have already develop into my favourite method to play video games. The Steam Deck is snug and simple to choose up each time and wherever the temper strikes. However neither my Deck nor my getting old desktop PC have saved up with the most recent titles. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur’s Gate 3 can appear like a fuzzy mess on a Deck, and I’ve by no means seen Alan Wake II, Portal RTX and Indiana Jones and the Nice Circle in all their ray-traced glory on my RTX 3060 Ti desktop.

However as we speak, with Nvidia’s just-now-released GeForce Now app for the Steam Deck, I can play each a kind of titles at near-max settings, wherever in my house, for hours and hours on a cost. And if I dock that Steam Deck to my 4K TV, it may well output 4K60 HDR and/or ray-traced graphics that put the PS5 Professional to disgrace.

After we examined GeForce Now’s final large improve in 2023, Tom and I agreed it wasn’t fairly on par with taking part in on a local PC.

However on a Steam Deck, the place I’m both taking part in on a low-res handheld display screen or sitting throughout the room from a TV the place I don’t discover so many imperfections, it may well really feel like the perfect of each worlds.

Right here’s what Expedition 33 appears like working natively on my Steam Deck as we speak, versus the Deck with GeForce Now:

One of the best half is perhaps this: whereas handhelds just like the Steam Deck barely get two hours of such a sport at potato graphical settings, I may get 7 to eight hours of GeForce Now. I noticed the cloud gaming service persistently sip underneath 7 watts from my Steam Deck OLED’s 49.2 watt-hour battery, barely greater than the system consumes at idle.

And the brand new native app makes it a cinch to arrange, with no extra internet browser-and-script workaround: simply maintain down the ability button and change to desktop mode, obtain the app, run it, and scan QR codes along with your telephone to hyperlink your numerous accounts.

Oh, you’d greatest consider there are caveats. Large gaping gotchas galore, which I’ll clarify as we go. However after testing the service for almost two weeks, I’m beginning to consider in cloud gaming once more.

Now, you is perhaps questioning: how on earth am I taking part in a sport the place timing is so vital by way of distant management? Right here’s the primary large caveat: you want a low-latency web connection, a great Wi-Fi router or wired ethernet, and it’s essential to be inside vary of Nvidia’s servers for the magic to work. Obtain velocity isn’t as key: 50Mbps ought to suffice for 4K, and you may get away with much less.

However I’m armed with a AT&T Fiber connection, and I reside possibly half-hour away from Nvidia’s San Jose, California servers, which makes me a best-case situation for this tech. Nonetheless, Nvidia has over 35 worldwide information facilities now, together with 14 distinct places in the US, and my colleagues with Xfinity and Spectrum cable web in Portland and Brooklyn inform me Expedition 33 performed simply as properly for them.

“The latency was negligible to the purpose that I wasn’t lacking parries,” Cameron Faulkner tells me, saying he nailed the Unhappy Troubadour on the primary strive. Jay Peters and I discovered we wanted to regulate our timing a bit, however I wound up taking part in roughly half the sport over GeForce Now and virtually by no means regarded again.

Even with the perfect of connections, although, GeForce Now isn’t bulletproof. A few times a day, my seemingly secure gameplay session would at the very least briefly unravel right into a uneven mess.

In single-player video games like Expedition 33 and Indiana Jones I may simply forgive a couple of minutes of bother, however my colleagues Antonio Di Benedetto and Erick Gomez noticed it in in any other case secure twitch shooters the place lag might be a much bigger situation. “I noticed a handful of lag spikes / hiccups that will undoubtedly screw anyone over in a aggressive shooter, however fortunately they weren’t on the worst instances and so they quickly subsided,” Antonio tells me.

You additionally quit among the Steam Deck’s portability. When you can plug and unplug the Steam Deck from a TV dock and seamlessly change between large display screen and small display screen play, you may’t simply put the Steam Deck to sleep with out ending the session and shedding unsaved progress. (In contrast to, say, Chiaki.) And though the native GeForce Now app helps 4K60, a giant leap up from 1440p, chances are you’ll end up squinting at tiny textual content as a result of it doesn’t scale the UI appropriately.

Talking of portability, public Wi-Fi usually isn’t adequate for GeForce Now, and neither are most mobile connections — even with 4 bars of Verizon 5G UWB service and a wired USB tether to my telephone, my stream shortly deteriorated into the jumble you see under. Solely the easiest mobile connection in my whole neighborhood, a spot proper underneath a 5G tower the place I can get 1,200Mbps down and 30 millisecond ping, felt playable to me.

You might have seen an asterisk* or two earlier on this story, again once I mentioned I used to be testing a $20-a-month service that offers you the ability of a GeForce RTX 4080. That’s as a result of Nvidia’s GeForce Now additionally technically has a free tier, and a “Efficiency” tier, and I extremely advocate you ignore each of them, even simply taking part in on a Steam Deck, as a result of they’re dramatically subpar.

For me, it was the distinction between taking part in Expedition 33 via a clear window, or a unclean window. (Epic spec, native decision, vs. Medium spec, 50 p.c decision with DLSS). It’s the distinction between taking part in Alan Wake II and Indiana Jones on the Deck’s display screen with full ray tracing, or none in any respect and a few graphical compromises in addition. It’s the distinction between comfortably stretching to 4K with some DLSS methods, or not.

However the largest caveat with GeForce Now could also be exterior the corporate’s management: you must deliver your individual video games, and but you solely can deliver video games the place Nvidia has explicitly struck a distribution deal.

Nvidia has made progress: 165 of my 457 Steam video games at the moment are accessible to play, up from 85 two years in the past. The corporate affords over 2,100 video games in complete throughout Epic, Battle.internet, Ubisoft, Xbox, and GOG too. However Nvidia has no video games from Sony, so I’m not taking part in Helldivers 2, no video games from Rockstar, so I’m not taking part in GTA V or Purple Lifeless Redemption 2, and no Elden Ring, no PUBG, no Schedule I or Soccer Supervisor or FIFA or NBA or The Sims. We by no means fairly know which video games GeForce Now will get, or when, or if they could disappear.

Cloud gaming has by no means felt like a greater deal, now that the service has matured, now that handhelds could make such good use of it, and now that purchasing your individual GPU is such a ridiculously costly proposition. Perhaps I’ll defer my very own subsequent GPU improve in favor of a subscription.

But it surely’s not for everybody — you need to undoubtedly strive a $8 GeForce Now Final day cross first — and there’s nonetheless lots of psychological friction. I’m not trying ahead to the day that Nvidia alters the deal additional.