At the end of the hour, you’ll need to wait in the queue again for a GeForce Now box to become available, a process that can take seconds or minutes depending on how busy things are. In the free tier, you have full access to the same library of games, at a lower quality, with an enforced playtime limit of one hour. However, a key detail of GeForce Now is that you can also use it entirely for free, if you’re willing to deal with a few restrictions. If you’re willing to take a step-down in quality, you can use the $10 “Priority” tier, which offers up to RTX 2080 level quality, but without the higher resolutions, frame rates, and a shorter cap on playtime (six hours versus eight). By comparison, Stadia Pro offered quality improvements like 4K - though without actually improving any underlying hardware - and free games to play, all for half of that price. That price is on top of the cost of any games you may want to play. That said, the necessary RTX 3080 tier for that top-notch quality comes at quite a cost, running $19.99 per month. 4K, HDR, and surround sound), you will likely find GeForce Now to be an excellent new destination for cloud gaming. Quality comes at a costīy and large, if the things you enjoyed most about Stadia were the quality of the stream itself, low input latency, and the extra features of Stadia Pro (e.g. The latency is low enough to be relatively unnoticeable (outside of competitive gaming situations where every millisecond counts) and the graphic enhancements of a high-end Nvidia GPU cannot be understated. Out of every cloud gaming service I’ve tried over the years, GeForce Now on the RTX 3080 tier is the only one to feel as consistently smooth to play as Stadia. I had previously played through Control via the free and Priority tiers of GeForce Now, but playing Cyberpunk 2077 on the highest tier feels quite close to a native experience, give or take any hiccups in my home network. More importantly, Nvidia has also managed to shave down input latency even further with the RTX 3080 tier subscription. In terms of sound, GeForce Now - on PC, Mac, and Android TV only for now - matches Stadia Pro’s 5.1 surround sound and even offers full 7.1 surround on the RTX 3080 tier. HDR is even available on some platforms, though the list of games that support it is more limited. If you’re on Mac or PC, GeForce Now’s highest tier can match Stadia’s 4K streaming, while also offering 120fps streaming across Mac, PC, ChromeOS, and Android. The RTX 3080 tier is able to run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p resolution, 60 frames per second (fps) with nearly maxed-out settings.ĭepending on what device you’re running on, you can crank things up even higher. Since you’re playing the full-fat PC versions of these games, the full set of graphics tweaks are available, but Nvidia generally has a recommended quality setting pre-filled for whichever subscription tier you’re on. Stadia (left) vs GeForce Now (right), 1440p I’ve spent much of my time with the service finally playing Cyberpunk 2077, and the difference in graphical quality, coming from the Stadia version, at times feels like night and day. With a “RTX 3080” tier subscription (provided to us by Nvidia for review purposes), GeForce Now offers the absolute best visual quality of any cloud gaming platform on the market today.Īs the name is meant to suggest, GeForce Now’s highest tier is powered by the high-end RTX 3080 graphics card, complete with full support for ray tracing graphics. Right off the bat, I feel it’s important to emphasize exactly what it is that Nvidia has gotten right with GeForce Now. Searching for Stadia is a short series intended to shine a spotlight on what made Google Stadia special in the wake of its upcoming shutdown and compare those traits against the ever-widening market of cloud gaming subscriptions. Nvidia GeForce Now is currently the only cloud gaming service to match the level of streaming quality and low latency of Google Stadia, even exceeding it in some areas.
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