Wednesday, January 4th 2017
NVIDIA Announces the GeForce Now. $25 for 20 Hours of GTX 1060 Gaming
NVIDIA today announced the GeForce Now, a service that converts any PC or notebook, into a gaming PC. This works by making your games to render on remote GeForce "Pascal" GPU farms. On the user's side of things, GeForce Now works as an interface that presents popular DRM platforms such as Origin, and Steam, you purchase games on these platforms, and begin playing them in minutes, without having to download or install them. The games get rendered on remote servers, and your integrated graphics plays a video stream of the game. NVIDIA claims to have minimized the lag involved in making something like this work. You will be able to purchase the service by the "hours" played and in various "tiers" (visual detail). The service works on even Macs. Pricing starts at $25 for 20 hours of gaming, with fewer hours available at the same price for higher-performance instances.
Update Jan 6th: The $25 for 20 hours price is for a GTX 1060-class graphics card. For GTX 1080 performance, the same $25 will buy you only 10 hours of playtime.
Update Jan 6th: The $25 for 20 hours price is for a GTX 1060-class graphics card. For GTX 1080 performance, the same $25 will buy you only 10 hours of playtime.
40 Comments on NVIDIA Announces the GeForce Now. $25 for 20 Hours of GTX 1060 Gaming
people will easily pay a premium to keep their mobility while still being able to game.
How do my hours work though? Do you have a timer on the render or on the login? Managing inventory in an rpg just became really expensive. So does deciding on what game to play, managing logins between the services (Geforce Now + Steam, etc) steam updates? how would that work. Because I'm not paying 1.25$ an hour to watch a steam update loading screen. Speaking of, what about in-game loading screens? Am I paying for that?
flat rate monthly or no deal.
Even then I looked at what it would cost me. I game on average 15 hours a week and taking the 1060 tier pricing that would come to about $975 a year. I could buy a gaming PC for that much. If the games are cheaper to initially purchase then that would offset the yearly fee somewhat but that's unknown right now. I suppose Publishers would charge a little less if customers were merely renting their game but how much less?
I just don't see the incentive for the Publisher to involve themselves in this model at all so I'm just looking at the GPU Farm as an add on cost and for me that would be around $975 a year for the 1060 tier or $1,950 a year for the 1080 tier for my average 15 hours a week gaming.
Now, some additional food for thought: if I buy a game to play at home on my desktop, will I need an additional license to play through GeForce Now on my laptop when I'm on the move?
GTX 1060-Class graphics card = 720p
GTX 1080 performance = 1080p
UPDATE:
And starting with US only first, now that's dumb on so many level.
IMO they should have start in with North/Eastern European or East Asian countries like Japan, S. Korea, Hong Kong, where the infrastructure is ready and 200Mbps is mainstream for years, and 1Gbps getting cheap fast. I mean for people rocking 1440p monitors, or more, they don't want to pay those kind of money for lower res gaming.