Last night NVIDIA held their 2017 CES press event to quite the fanfare. While we were erroneously expecting another GPU release, we received some interesting new announcements instead. GeForce Now game streaming, previously a service for their SHIELD devices, has been unveiled for the PC and Mac. This means that those with specifications that may not be capable of playing games very well can rent a gaming-capable VM from NVIDIA to enjoy gaming.
$25 gets you 20 hours with GeForce Now
What’s more, this new version of GeForce Now lets you use your own Steam account so you can play games you already own, having only to pay strictly for the service itself. It extends the usefulness of their service, by letting you essentially take your library with you, however extensive it may or may not be.
The service is being targeted mostly at those individuals who are curious about PC gaming but simply don’t have the hardware to run modern games. With enough bandwidth, the hardware will cease to be an issues. It also could be useful for those traveling that wish to use high-speed internet connections elsewhere, say a family members house, to take a small gaming break with only a small laptop on hand.
GeForce Now will make use of the same GRID, multi-user GPU hardware they’ve been using for the SHIELD only service. You’ll be limited to 1080P for bandwidth reasons, though you’re nearly guaranteed 60FPS for most modern games. This isn’t the only virtualized game streaming service, with Leap Computing (not to be confused with Leap Motion) are planning on allowing you to essentially rent a gaming-efficient desktop space in the near future, giving you a PC in the cloud. Nonetheless, cloud gaming of this sort seems to be slowly catching on.