[HN Gopher] GeForce Now: A Review
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GeForce Now: A Review
Author : rcarmo
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-08-24 21:27 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (whatever.scalzi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (whatever.scalzi.com)
| wyldfire wrote:
| Is this Scalzi the author?
| Arubis wrote:
| Byline is "by John Scalzi".
| loeg wrote:
| Yes.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| GFN is tested to be faster than native consoles in terms of input
| latency.
|
| https://imgur.com/TzPnCLs
|
| People are talking about turn based games but my experience is
| that it's flawless and indistinguishable from native in twitch
| games like fortnite and counterstrike. But then again I live on
| the East Coast pretty close to a datacenter and I'm on fiber, so
| obviously this won't be the case for people in rural areas. But
| for people who are in situations like mine, it's great.
| jb_s wrote:
| I've unfortunately played way too many twitch shooters on PC
| and latency is _really_ noticeable to me.
|
| To the point where I can't stand using my work-supplied laptop
| because of slight mouse lag (I think the mouse travels maybe
| 30-40ms behind my hand) and 60hz screens. This is somewhat
| annoying coming from 165Hz, gaming peripherals. Then I have to
| connect to a VM to do development. Absolute hell.
| cpleppert wrote:
| >> My rural internet connection is 40mbps/sec down in theory --
| in practice it's between 25 and 40 depending which second you
| poll it, and the speed is affected by whether someone is
| downstairs watching Netflix while I'm upstairs playing a
| graphics-intensive game.
|
| I'm surprised he even bothered trying the service let alone he
| found it playable. A rural area with 25-40mbps with someone using
| the internet at the same time ( let alone netflix!) is basically
| worst case scenario. If you are playing near a datacenter with
| reasonable internet your experience will be significantly better.
| Geforce now is technically very good when configured properly; it
| is similar to parsec (which is probably state of the art).
|
| Worth pointing out: the Geforce now library is not great and and
| I wouldn't hold my breath on it improving too much. Most
| interested publishers have already signed up and the rest are
| either commited to other platforms or aren't willing to choose
| nvidia over other monetization options.
| sp332 wrote:
| 25 Mbps is plenty for 1080p60 even for real-time video. Latency
| is more important. GFN says they can even cram 2560x1600 at 120
| FPS into 35 Mbps.
| kcexn wrote:
| For the most part, I have found that GeForce Now is not
| bandwidth limited.
|
| NVIDIA has spent a lot of time and money tuning the service to
| do clever dynamic upscaling locally on your machine to minimise
| the sort of block compression artifacts and frame skipping that
| you would normally see from say YouTube or Netflix.
|
| It's not even particularly latency bound, since round trip
| times less than 40ms are for most people (unless you're a very
| competitive player), completely unnoticeable. I've played with
| latencies at around 60ms and I still find it tolerable
| (although occasionally a bit annoying).
|
| Instead it's very sensitive to network jitter. Even 1 or 2 ms
| of random jitter can dramatically reduce the quality of the
| service. And given the distance between your local machine, and
| the number of hops required between your device and the server,
| there's a lot of room for random jitter. Part of the problem
| can be mitigated, by carefully ensuring that everything in your
| home network is dimensioned properly. But the rest of the pipe
| is owned by your ISP, and they could apply all sorts of dodgy
| QoS parameters that increase your likelihood of experiencing
| jitter.
| WithinReason wrote:
| GeForce Now has a free tier so you can try it without spending
| money: The session is limited to 1 hour and there is a queue when
| many people want to play, but otherwise it's the same you get
| with 1 tier up. Worth giving it a shot, I was surprised how well
| I could play Witcher 3 on a FireTV Stick plugged into a TV.
| macNchz wrote:
| I tested out GeForce Now and Stadia two years ago and decided
| fairly quickly to build a desktop machine instead. Turns out that
| lots of PC games work really well on desktop Linux these days!
|
| The author discusses his internet connection, but for me even
| with a 500mbit connection and ~10ms ping to NYC area data centers
| I felt the video compression artifacts and periodic stutters were
| too noticeable. I also had some input glitches that were
| basically impossible to diagnose and made certain games hard to
| play.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Even using Steam in-home streaming on the same network games
| look much worse because of compression.
| broast wrote:
| It's unclear in this comment if you are lumping them together,
| but GeForce Now's performance and stream quality is leagues
| ahead of Stadia's. As someone who exclusively games on the
| cloud. My main driver, though, is ShadowPC, which gives me dual
| monitors, 4k, and full desktop access (for modding etc) on a
| stream
| boltzmann_brain wrote:
| > video compression artifacts
|
| yes! I'm surprised how many people are ok with these. This is
| also the biggest problem with streaming, in addition to input
| latency.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| I have vouched for this comment, but you should be aware your
| account is shadowbanned and every single comment you make is
| automatically marked dead.
| sp332 wrote:
| And it's been that way since their very first comment was
| flagged dead in 2017.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15858411 If you write
| to the contact email address (at the bottom of the page
| here), maybe they'll unban you.
| nullwarp wrote:
| I came to the same conclusion really, it's a neat service but
| even using something like Parsec locally induces enough latency
| that I just can't use it.
|
| I still run windows in a VFIO setup but Linux is really good
| for gaming these days. Was even playing Cyberpunk on the
| release day!
| [deleted]
| ralusek wrote:
| My experience with GeForce Now is that despite having fiber
| internet and WiFi 6, games are still unplayably laggy. I also
| wasn't able to play Cities Skylines, because none of my Steam
| Workshop mods would install.
| WithinReason wrote:
| It's better if you have Ethernet, that way I get no stutter and
| the lag is almost unnoticeable (I get 9ms ping which is lower
| than the duration between 2 monitor refreshes at 60Hz)
| djbeadle wrote:
| More anacedata: GeForce now over Ethernet is significantly
| better than Wi-Fi 6 in my apartment building.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| It's gotta be the wifi, you're probably dropping packets here
| and there.
| abridgett wrote:
| GeForce Now was/is great. Bethesda though (amongst others) have
| lost a formerly loyal fan due to pulling their games. Why? I own
| the games, I paid for them. If I had my old PC still I could play
| them just the same. Presumably so that in several years they can
| run their own cloud service.
|
| The greed of companies will be their own downfall.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft who are running their own
| cloud gaming service.
| burlesona wrote:
| FWIW I've had a blast with GFN, but I have fiber internet and use
| a wired Ethernet connection to the router. It's not very good
| over wifi IMO. I would recommend it but only for those with great
| bandwidth and a wired connection.
| rdtwo wrote:
| I found that it worked really well on the free tier. There are
| hiccups and i can't tell why my isp gives me 1-5% packet loss but
| I really like that it kicks me out after an hour so I have to
| have reasonable play sessions. Wait times are rare the service is
| too good for a free tier
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| It's true, I agree, the 1 hour limit is a feature not a pain
| point lol.
| urthor wrote:
| If I was 9 years old, again...
|
| I, urgently, must play the latest AAA extravaganza, again...
|
| ...I've only $30 to my name, again. I'm collecting my family's
| supply of $2 coins, again.
|
| I'd be all over it.
|
| ---------------------------------------------------------
|
| Tons of software works REALLY well on Geforce now. Asynchronous,
| turn based games. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is one.
|
| Server side rendering latency w/ monitor is a fascinating
| problem. I found the idea incredibly technically interesting.
|
| NOT so much for me, an engineer who one click buys electronics.
|
| I'm not the audience.
| rektide wrote:
| Follow-up to: "(Not) getting a new computer"[1].
|
| [1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/08/22/not-getting-a-new-
| com... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32553017 (58pts, 2d
| ago, 90comments)
| stavros wrote:
| Rather offtopic, but would anyone recommend one of Scalzi's books
| if I enjoyed Old Man's War?
| chatmasta wrote:
| GeForce Now is great for simulation games like Factorio or
| Civilization. Unfortunately 2K Games decided to arbitrarily
| restrict users of GeForce Now from playing Civilization VI, even
| with a licensed copy from the Steam store. In the beginning, it
| worked great. I could play on a giant map with 13 AI
| civilizations who completed their turns in a few seconds. And my
| laptop didn't sound like an airplane.
|
| I'm still bitter at 2K about this. If they offered an alternative
| cloud gaming subscription then I would purchase it to play Civ on
| a cloud machine. But they just decided to interfere in my choice
| of which hardware I use to run their software, while offering no
| alternative.
|
| Super disappointing. I do still pay for GeForce Now though,
| because it's a low price and because I have anxiety about what
| would happen to my save files if I stopped paying.
| simplicio wrote:
| I've found it to be a pretty good product, at least for my use
| case. I only have an hour or two/wk to play games these days, so
| it doesn't make a ton of sense to spend the time and $ to buy and
| install a new video card. So I got whatever the bottom paid tier
| is for GeForce Now and, while there are occasional lag-spikes and
| jitters, they're generally rare enough to only rise to the level
| of minor annoyance.
|
| If I wanted to spend a lot of time playing games, especially
| multi-player ones, I don't think it would be a good substitute
| for using my own machine, but for being able to occasionally dip
| a toe into a game when I get the itch, its a pretty good deal.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I've used it for about 14 months extensively - I wasn't able to
| upgrade my rig when cyberpunk 2077 came out. It was _brilliant_ -
| I played the game at max settings, looked beautiful, not a care
| in The world. Then I used it too for some turn based / strategy
| / rpg games as I could play them on laptop, desktop etc, and it
| was easy to try games without bothering with downloading and
| local storage. It was sufficiently excellent experience that even
| once I got an upgraded gaming computer, I still kept the basic
| foundation paid package due to sheer convenience. It's just great
| to try and play games with low frequency without installation /
| configuration / troubleshooting hassle.
|
| I have also found it _consistently_ less glitchy over last year
| to stream a game from cloud to my media computers via geforce
| now, than from my next room gaming rig via steam link... Which
| speaks more bad things of steam link itself, but also I think at
| least some good things of geforce now.
|
| Note that I have Ethernet for my laptop and desktop. I can not
| speak to latency via wireless - my assumption would be
| "frustrating" so I didn't even test.
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(page generated 2022-08-24 23:00 UTC)