The introduction of Nvidia’s GeForce Now to my Steam Deck was a game-changer

I cannot, however, deny that the Steam Deck is a near-perfect match for the company’s $20/month* GeForce Now. After fifteen years of covering cloud gaming, this is the first time I’ve ever wanted to play forever.

Describe GeForce Now.

For those who are unaware, Nvidia’s GeForce Now is a streaming service for games that uses the cloud to farm out the graphical processing power. To access your games and savegames from the cloud, you can connect your current Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox, and Battle . net accounts to a server farm located many miles away. This allows you to remotely control an RTX 4080-powered* gaming rig rather than a game that is running locally on your Steam Deck’s chip.

*Nvidia’s GeForce Now technically has two tiers: the “Performance” tier and the free tier. However, I advise you to disregard both. It made a difference for me whether I played a lot of games through a clean window or a dirty one, whether I played Indiana Jones and Alan Wake II with full ray tracing or not, and whether I could comfortably stretch to 4K.

My favorite way to play games is already on a handheld. Whenever and wherever the mood strikes, the Steam Deck is convenient and comfortable to use. However, my old desktop computer and my Deck haven’t kept up with the newest games. On my RTX 3060 Ti desktop, I have never seen Alan Wake II, Portal RTX, or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in all their ray-traced splendor. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur’s Gate 3 can appear as a fuzzy mess on a Deck.

With Nvidia’s recently released GeForce Now app for the Steam Deck, however, I can now play all of those games at near-max settings for hours on end while charging anywhere in my house. Additionally, the Steam Deck can produce 4K60 HDR and/or ray-traced graphics that rival the PS5 Pro when I connect it to my 4K TV.

Tom and I decided that the most recent major update to GeForce Now wasn’t quite as good as playing on a native pc\. when we tested it in 2023.

But it can feel like the best of both worlds on a Steam Deck, where I can sit across the room from a TV and not notice as many flaws, or play on a handheld screen with low resolution.

The difference between Expedition 33 running natively on my Steam Deck and the Deck with GeForce Now is shown here.

The fact that I could play GeForce Now for seven or eight hours while handheld devices like the Steam Deck only manage two hours at potato graphical settings may be the best feature. The cloud gaming service continuously used less than 7 watts from my Steam Deck OLED’s 49.2 watt-hour battery, which is just a little bit more than what the system uses when it is not in use.

And it’s easy to set up with the new native app—no more web browser and script workaround—just hold down the power button to switch to desktop mode, download the app, launch it, and use your phone to scan QR codes to connect your different accounts.

You’d better believe that there are some restrictions. There are many giant gaping gotchas, which I will describe as we proceed. But after almost two weeks of testing the service, I’m beginning to re-believe in cloud gaming.

Here’s the first major disclaimer: in order for the magic to work, you need a low-latency internet connection, a good Wi-Fi router or wired ethernet, and you need to be within range of Nvidia’s servers. You may be asking yourself, “How the hell am I playing a game where timing is so critical via remote control?”. For 4K, a download speed of 50Mbps should be adequate, but you can get by with less.

However, I am a best-case scenario for this tech because I have an AT&T Fiber connection and I live about 30 minutes from Nvidia’s servers in San Jose, California. Expedition 33 performed equally well for my colleagues with Xfinity and Spectrum cable internet in Portland and Brooklyn, but Nvidia now has over 35 data centers across the globe, including 14 different locations in the US.

Cameron Faulkner says he nailed the Sad Troubadour on his first attempt, saying, “The latency was negligible to the point that I wasn’t missing parries.”. We had to change our timing a little, Jay Peters and I discovered, but I ended up playing about half the game over GeForce Now and hardly ever turned around.

However, GeForce Now isn’t infallible, even with the best connections. I would at least momentarily lose my seemingly steady gaming session to a choppy mess once or twice a day.

My coworkers Antonio Di Benedetto and Erick Gomez noticed that lag might be a greater problem in otherwise stable twitch shooters, but I could easily overlook a few minutes of trouble in single-player games like Indiana Jones and Expedition 33. “I noticed a few lag spikes and hiccups that would definitely mess anyone up in a competitive shooter, but fortunately they weren’t at the worst times and they quickly went away,” Antonio tells me.

You also lose some of the portability of the Steam Deck. Although you can easily switch between big screen and small screen playback by plugging the Steam Deck into and unplugging it from a TV dock, you cannot simply put the Steam Deck to sleep without terminating the session and losing any unsaved progress. As opposed to, say, Chiaki. Furthermore, even though the native GeForce Now app supports 4K60, which is a significant improvement over 1440p, you might still have to squint at small text because the user interface isn’t scaled properly.

Additionally, GeForce Now does not yet have a 90Hz mode for the Deck OLED, even though it supports a smoother, lower resolution 1440p 120Hz mode on TVs and even other gaming handhelds. Instead, I tested at 60 Hz.

Speaking of portability, while I had four bars of Verizon 5G UWB service and a wired USB tether to my phone, my stream rapidly degraded into the mess you see below. Public Wi-Fi and most cellular connections are also inadequate for GeForce Now. I felt that the only place I could play was under a 5G tower, where I could get 1,200Mbps down and 30 millisecond ping times. This was the best cellular connection in my entire neighborhood.

Furthermore, as we’ve already covered, only the $20/month Ultimate tier demonstrates the full potential of cloud gaming. On the Performance tier (Epic spec, native resolution), Expedition 33 appeared noticeably worse than… Medium specs, 50% resolution with DLSS), and I found Indiana Jones to be “playable while handheld” instead of beautiful.

The largest restriction with GeForce Now, however, might be uncontrollable: you are required to bring your own games, with the exception of those for which Nvidia has specifically agreed to a distribution agreement.

I can now play 165 of my 457 Steam games, compared to 85 two years ago, demonstrating Nvidia’s progress. In total, the company offers more than 2,100 games from Epic, Battle Dot Net, Ubisoft, Xbox, and GOG. But since Nvidia doesn’t have any Sony games, I can’t play Helldivers 2, I can’t play GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2, I can’t play Elden Ring, I can’t play PUBG, I can’t play Schedule I or Football Manager, FIFA, NBA, or The Sims. The games that will be added to GeForce Now, when they will be added, and whether they will be removed are all unknown.

You should definitely try an $8 GeForce Now Ultimate day pass first, though, as it’s not for everyone. Additionally, there is still a lot of mental friction. I don’t anticipate the day when Nvidia makes any more changes to the agreement.