NVIDIA Announces GeForce NOW Cloud-Based Game Streaming

Well, this is going to be quite the story to cover. NVIDIA has been busy outside of its typical graphic card launches. Announced at CES 2017, NVIDIA will begin rolling out its own cloud rendering gaming service called GeForce NOW, updating its SHIELD platform to integrate with modern 4K UHD and HDR services, and introducing a new home assistant integration platform called SPOT.

Let’s start with the surprising item first, GeForce NOW. The idea behind the platform is to allow anyone with pretty much any PC or MAC to connect to their own GeForce GTX 1060 or 1080 in the cloud, render games, and have it all streamed back to you on your own system.

The service integrates with your existing library of games from all major platforms, such as Steam, Battle.net, Origin, Uplay and GOG. Even some free-to-play games such as World of Tanks are included. These are your games and your saves and profiles, not some third-part game you are renting, and as such, it’s all synchronizes to the same account.

This is actually different from a number of previous attempts at cloud gaming, since GeForce NOW is purely a rendering service and not a game rental that does online rendering. When you register, you get 8 hours of free render time on a GTX 1060, or 4 hours on a GTX 1080 (for higher quality). At the end of the free trial, you can then pay $25 for 20 hours of play on the 1060, or 10 hours on the 1080. Early access will begin in March, but you can sign up now to get ahead.

Of course, with all that said, there is a singular question that you’ve been pondering all this time – you and everybody else, and it’s the one aspect to which there is no information; latency. Online rendering services have existed and pretty much all of them have fallen flat, all for the same reason; Internet access is notoriously flaky.

Don’t get us wrong, GeForce NOW has a better chance of success than the other platforms, simply from an integration aspect. You are using your own games and accounts, not renting them from NVIDIA. That in itself makes the service much more appealing. Add in the fact that even a Mac can load up these services, and there could be some very widespread adoption. Beyond that though, is where the magic will be at play, how to get around the latency issue to make games feel like they are running natively.

Each step in the process introduces a source of latency; the user input, the ISP, the server farm and routing, the GPU rendering the frame, encoding it to compress it so that it can be sent back to the user. It all adds up. We’re talking 50-100ms latency per frame at the very least.

If we had to guess, NVIDIA has probably spent a lot of time optimizing its render pipeline to make it as fast as possible, sacrificing some of the image quality in the process, just to get the draw time down to improve latency. The GPU will likely be rendering at the equivalent of 120 FPS or more, but only sending frames selectively. There may even be some predictive behavior involved by guessing what the user intends to do, rendering that action and only sending the result on confirmation. Lots of little tricks that we can only guess at for the time being.

This is one of those services we’ll approach with some scepticism, at least to begin with. If anyone can pull off cloud rendered games and make it succesful, it’s going to be NVIDIA.