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[Dorfdad]

The intent of this thread isn’t to shit on pc gaming. I own an and 7950x3d and a 4090 as my main gaming pc. I also own next gen ps5 and switch. So please don’t use this thread to bash pc or consoles, but a serious discussion about what cloud gaming needs to make you consider it as your main platform?

I’m going to focus on GeForce Now as it’s the biggest and most accomplished Cloud gaming service currently available on any device.

I have a pro membership and I use it about 2-3 times a week to continue my games from stream on my apple laptop and iPads. For me it’s a value add on, but it’s getting closer and closer to being my main and I can see it happening within 2-3 years for me.

Now again you will need to have a decent internet and while some don’t have that due to geolocation the fact is a lot of us have good enough internet get the full benefits.

So with that out of the way on to the discussion.

Currently the only way to get the top tier 4k/120 is limited to PC’s and MAC’s with a capable hdmi or usbc connectors.

Nvidia own device only offer 4k/60 currently while android phones and tablets can offer 1440p/120 or 1080p/240.

TV’s need to be modernized to support hdmi2.1 with chipsets that allow decoding 4k/120 from their services as no tv currently supports GeForce now or other game streaming services. Nvidia needs to be more “aggressive” who they give their client to or have a GeForce now pro label that ensures you will get the best quality and frame rates on this tv.

For me this is the biggest hurdle and needs to be addressed for GeForce now to be a viable solution going forward. We need a new nvidia shield or the ability for devices to reach 4k/120 to support modern competitive gaming COD/ETC.

I believe that may happen once Switch 2 releases as a new shield would probably use the same chipset for a Shield 2.

Secondly I believe they need to work harder or make some kind of deal with publishers to get bigger titles onboard to grow. FF14, WOW, Hogwarts, GTA, FIFA, Madden, and many other mass AAA games need to be on the platform.

Thirdly and while it’s not my main concern I understand the need or want for this is mods. They need to support all steam workshop mods for their games in the service, but they also need to cultivate a mod solution that can be integrated into the platform.

And lastly I believe they need improve Dolby digital and HDR solutions.

If and I have great faith that most of these can be addressed within 1 year and with the costs of the new pcs parts, and GPU’s are getting out of hand.

Let’s for giggles say a pro membership is $35.00 a month going forward. 35x12=$420.00 a year

Using today’s costs of $1400 for a 4080 gpu alone you could have 3 years of service. I could argue that I could get 6-7 years easily for the cost of my system which will see free upgrades to gpu and cpu over this time.

Yeah it’s not 1:1 but for anyone except hard core gamers I believe it’s a very viable solution.

Again I’m not a bot or GeForce Now personal, I’m just an old gamer who started with the Atari back in the day and I have seen the industry grow up.

So what would it need to offer to you for Cloud Gaming become your main platform? What are your concerns, reasons for refusing to use it?

 

[Hohenheim]

I won't get into cloud gaming no matter how good it gets. The hardware part is just too much fun. Taking the hardware out of this hobby would be a downer.

 

[Dorfdad]

I won't get into cloud gaming no matter how good it gets. The hardware part is just too much fun. Taking the hardware out of this hobby would be a downer.

I understand that, but at some point which I have been building pc’s for 20 years it gets tiresome. I kinda put builders into a different box than gamers simple because I have been in both and know builders who spend more time tweaking pc’s than ever playing games. I personally have spent 2-3 hours a night tweaking settings trying to get 5more frames and never playing my games.

I’m now older and just want good looking / performing games without the hassle or graphical limitations console have.

Cloud is allowing me to enjoy pc gaming without the cost and maintenance required for most pc gamers.

 

[amigastar]

I'm not planning to use Cloud gaming but when i get to play all my GOG games in Cloud additionally i wouldn't mind going that option from time to time.

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

the moment cloud offers better visual quality and no noticeable cons of latency or compression is the moment I give up dedicated hardware

don't know if this is really possible though

 

[Dorfdad]

I'm not planning to use Cloud gaming but when i get to play all my GOG games in Cloud additionally i wouldn't mind going that option from time to time.

Good thoughts as UBISoft, Xbox, and blizzard clients are supported. Adding GOG’s would be a nice addition as well and CDRP seems open to GeForce now already so maybe that will happen.

 

[OverHeat]

 

[rodrigolfp]

Never. Local will always give more freedom and better IQ and latency.

 

[Dorfdad]

the moment cloud offers better visual quality and no noticeable cons of latency or compression is the moment I give up dedicated hardware

don't know if this is really possible though

I think it can get close I don’t know if it will ever replace that. But it can look better than checker boarding

 

[SScorpio]

I understand that, but at some point which I have been building pc’s for 20 years it gets tiresome. I kinda put builders into a different box than gamers simple because I have been in both and know builders who spend more time tweaking pc’s than ever playing games. I personally have spent 2-3 hours a night tweaking settings trying to get 5more frames and never playing my games.

What cloud provider are you using? Don't some just have default settings so there is no tweaking? If so why to just GeForce Experience to adjust the settings and just play?

I'm not planning to use Cloud gaming but when i get to play all my GOG games in Cloud additionally i wouldn't mind going that option from time to time.

GOG games are coming to Amazon Luna, we'll see what ends up being on there, but the Ubisoft games are most besides the really older legacy games.

 

[amigastar]

Good thoughts as UBISoft, Xbox, and blizzard clients are supported. Adding GOG’s would be a nice addition as well and CDRP seems open to GeForce now already so maybe that will happen.

Actually GOG teamed up with Amazon Luna to get your GOG games also in the cloud

More ways to play your GOG games with Amazon Luna

We’re teaming up with Amazon Luna cloud gaming service to give you even more ways of enjoying your titles.

www.gog.com

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

I don't game on PC, and I think the cloud will become much more prevalent in the near future, so if I stop buying physical consoles I figure stream gaming will be widely available via things like new TV's. My internet is outstanding.

 

[Dorfdad]

Actually GOG teamed up with Amazon Luna to get your GOG games also in the cloud

More ways to play your GOG games with Amazon Luna

We’re teaming up with Amazon Luna cloud gaming service to give you even more ways of enjoying your titles.

www.gog.com

Than that means it will come to GeForce now. Very cool addition for Amazon.

 

[64bitmodels]

My home didn't have internet for a while til yesterday cause of a missed bill and lack of cash. During that time my only entertainment were games I downloaded onto my PC and steam deck.

I want to see a cloud service that works with no internet, when I see that, I'll switch to cloud gaming full time.

 

[Diddy X]

If you tell me the experience is gonna be flawless I might give it a try.

 

[Dorfdad]

My home didn't have internet for a while til yesterday cause of a missed bill and lack of cash. During that time my only entertainment were games I downloaded onto my PC and steam deck.

I want to see a cloud service that works with no internet, when I see that, I'll switch to cloud gaming full time.

Hahaha pocket pool might be the only way to game like that!!

 

[RoboFu]

A 4090 to cloud gaming? X for doubt

 

[OverHeat]

My home didn't have internet for a while til yesterday cause of a missed bill and lack of cash. During that time my only entertainment were games I downloaded onto my PC and steam deck.

I want to see a cloud service that works with no internet, when I see that, I'll switch to cloud gaming full time.

Sorry to hear that…

 

[Dorfdad]

If you tell me the experience is gonna be flawless I might give it a try.

Not fair, have you never had a blue screen, or co sole crash? Happens to all of them cloud will be no different in fact it may actually be less often since they are professionally tuned

 

[HerjansEagleFeeder]

Let’s for giggles say a pro membership is $35.00 a month going forward. 35x12=$420.00 a year

Using today’s costs of $1400 for a 4080 gpu alone you could have 3 years of service. I could argue that I could get 6-7 years easily for the cost of my system which will see free upgrades to gpu and cpu over this time.

This is exactly the calculation I did in my mind a couple months back. I find GFN to be of excellent overall quality and reliability, and depending on how your personal equation (owning the hardware vs. streaming) looks like, it can get pretty difficult justifying building 3-5K PCs anymore. The funny thing is, either way Nvidia wins a customer in most cases. They could even raise the prices of their GPUs just to get more people jumping on the GFN train, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

You already name dropped all important aspects and remaining issues imho, which I why I can't really add anything substantial in this regard. Me personally, I'm not too huge into mods, and I also don't care that much for HDR and 120Hz. I mostly play single player games, so GFN looks really attractive to me already.

Oh by the way, my LG C2 OLED has a GeForce Now app, it works flawlessly, but I think it's limited to 60Hz but I could be wrong.

To me the biggest downside to GFN, which is why I'm still building my own PCs, is the limited library of games. I still don't understand why publishers even need to allow Nvidia to stream the games we already bought and can very well install and play on any other device otherwise.

 

[Bring Back Scalebound]

 

[poppabk]

Rock solid internet. I have streamed some Fortnite lego from Luna and it is good in a pinch to just be able to play some co-op with my daughter from my phone. It is generally pretty solid on that small a screen.

 

[bender]

 

[nikos]

First thing that came to mind.

 

[T4keD0wN]

Never? I dont care one bit about latency, but i barely use my pcs for gaming most of the time theyre turned on and geforce now, along with other cloud gaming services are only useful for games and even then its impossible to mod them or tweak .ini files to my knowledge which is mandatory requirement for me since depth of field, motion blur and other effects make me sick.

With that said i might consider cloud gaming if electricity prices keep on rising like they did in the last 4 years. It would probably save me a lot of money even now.

 

[ssringo]

Cloud gaming would need to be perfected before I even consider  trying it. Outages and latency issues that arent necessarily tied to their service are also a concern. I can always access my local games.

And that's ignoring the modding problem. I don't just use the obvious stuff from the workshop or Nexusmods. Some is stuff that I make for myself. Gotta upload that and have it implemented somehow. Couldn't imagine what they'd need to do to get something like Skyrim and it's bazillion mods available to configure and sent streaming out to everyone. Then expand that to damn near every game I play.

 

[Kacho]

I don't see this ever being a possibility. It would require zero latency and the ability to access all of my games with no exceptions.

 

[Last Hearth]

Also no MODs on cloud gaming.

 

[Mortisfacio]

I'd go for a lower end build only if the price and performance (this includes visual fidelity and latency) was the same or better. Additionally would need the cloud service + my ISP to be consistently stable (spectrum in my area had 5+ outages last year). I don't see my criteria being all met anytime soon, so I'll keep PC building.

 

[zeroluck]

Soon, they will upgrade to 5090, 6090 then 7090, eventually the most powerful GPU will be so expensive that they will be exclusive to the cloud.

 

[Fess]

I have a founders sub of GFN, used it a lot when I had a weak PC. About 1 frame of latency and 60fps on everything was nice. But I stopped using it when I bought Cyberpunk and had to wait in a queue to play even though the sub was supposed remove queues. Would never pay full price but the founders sub is cheap enough that I let it stay incase they add some crazy tech in the future I like to try. Using it as the main platform seems unlikely, I want file access for mods and again no queues.

 

[TropicanaTwista]

Not a PC gamer but as someone who has recently tried cloud gaming/remote play on my PS5 a good bit over the last 6 weeks I'm intrigued.

I never thought it would really be viable but was using my portal about 30 mins from my house to connect to my ps5 and have probably put in about 40ish hours and it worked nearly flawlessly the whole time. Only once did it have a somewhat slow connection and the picture became pixelated, but even that was only for about 2 mins. Even using cloud to stream some games on my ps5 same thing, it worked pretty much perfectly. I've also played some pretty timing important games like hifi rush and hot shots golf, where just the tiniest bit of latency could really screw you up and had no problems.

So yea, I could see this being 100% viable in a couple of years and something that I go to. I would hope that playing locally doesn't go away however. I'm sure the technology will continue to get better, but you're still always at the mercy of latency or some type of Internet issue that could screw you up big time. This is all coming from someone too who if you asked this question to like 6 months ago I would have laughed and said not interested at all.

Slight aside, I need Sony to allow cloud streaming on the portal. Not sure if that is something easy to add with a firmware update or whatever, but holy hell that would be dope.

 

[Dorfdad]

I don't see this ever being a possibility. It would require zero latency and the ability to access all of my games with no exceptions.

Why does it have to be zero latency consoles already have more latency than GeForce now.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Why does it have to be zero latency consoles already have more latency than GeForce now.

I guess that's why we play on PC and not on a console or GeForce now.

 

[64bitmodels]

Sorry to hear that…

It's a thing that happens to everyone, even if you're not broke, outages and natural disasters happen. Hard drives, SD Cards, flash drives, ssds, game discs and Switch cartridges... they're all more durable and trustworthy than an internet connection.

 

[Black_Stride]

I cant tell if this is a parody thread or not......it sounds like you are coming at it in earnest but then you also say:

• $1400 for a 4080 - The 4080 has never been 1400 dollars MSRP, hell the 4080 Super is 1000 dollars.
  The 4070Ti Super is like 800 dollars.
  And you dont even need to go that far to have a good 4K experience, the 4070 Super is 600 dollars.

• Competitive gaming like COD ie highly latency dependent through a streaming service has to be an oxymoron.
  Especially at 4K120......mate that actually sounds horrible, I can already imagine aiming at a target and him disappearing into a cloud of compression artefacts.
  That wouldnt even be the worst of it, the latency of the PC actually running the game + my distance to it + my device decoding the video would mean it doesnt actually matter what I was aiming at.....cuz im already dead.

I aint gonna lie though, if its some fun story driven game that doesnt require mongoose like reflexes i would actually be willing to go through a streaming service.
4K60 is enough as long as its not super compressed.
I just have a decent enough system that I would rather just play locally.

 

[Noxxera]

If i had money to spare and work etc I'd definitely invest in building my own PC. Cloud has it's flaws which is mainly the dependancy on internet connection being good at all times. And some other obscure things that's geting better and better every year on GFN. But yeah cloud will never replace a PC you have yourself that's powerful.

 

[hououinkyouma00]

I’ve had great experiences with GeForce Now and Chiaki so I’m not against it. With GFN I get great latency (surprisingly better on my MacBook then my gaming pc hooked up to Ethernet somehow) and most of the time I don’t notice any sort of compression.

I came less and less on PC as time goes by so I could see it being a good replacement sometime in the future.

 

[CLW]

I mean basically you are asking when will you pay $ to own NOTHING

 

[LazyParrot]

Why does it have to be zero latency consoles already have more latency than GeForce now.

Personally, I've tried both Stadia and GeForce Now and found shooters and other games with mouse control pretty annoying to play on both. Using a controller (assuming the game offers that option) made it bearable since those are sluggish AF anyway and mask the input lag, but MKB controls are one of the main reasons I play on PC to begin with, so that's not exactly an option for me.

 

[Chris_Rivera]

Cloud gaming is appealing when it’s the only affordable option. So maybe when world war 3 breaks we’ll give up on the better options

 

[rodrigolfp]

Why does it have to be zero latency consoles already have more latency than GeForce now.

Depending on the game GFN can have better IQ too. xD

I can already imagine aiming at a target and him disappearing into a cloud of compression artefacts.

The insane and pathetic aim assist will still be "glued" on the target. xD

 

[Sanepar]

I prefer to die than play on cloud, the day i can't turn on my local hw and play using it i'm done with games.

 

[Black_Stride]

The insane and pathetic aim assist will still be "glued" on the target. xD

Haven't played the latest CoD but does the M&KB on PC have aim assist now?

God damn, arent M&KB players eating easy these days then?

 

[rodrigolfp]

Haven't played the latest CoD but does the M&KB on PC have aim assist now?

God damn, arent M&KB players eating easy these days then?

M&KB no but controller yes.

 

[OverHeat]

M&KB no but controller yes.

Cronus zen caught caught lol

 

[Denton]

You will have to take my big ass PC case from my cold, dead, hands.

 

[Unknown?]

Not fair, have you never had a blue screen, or co sole crash? Happens to all of them cloud will be no different in fact it may actually be less often since they are professionally tuned

STOP using the stupid marketing term "cloud!" Call it what it is, somebody else's computer.

You may not need hardware but someone does.

 

[Fafalada]

So what would it need to offer to you for Cloud Gaming become your main platform? What are your concerns, reasons for refusing to use it?

The latency remains a sore point, even on GFNow, with all the compensation options enabled. On the plus side, I'll say that frame-pacing is a notch better than I'd expected, though all cloud services have been doing better there lately for me (even XCloud - as long as you don't use the App).
But aside for latency/general experience being a downgrade - every single one of these offers a highly restricted library - restrictions come in different flavours but ultimately it boils down to having like... single digit% of games on there (if that) and then you're either stuck subbing to many services or accepting you don't get to choose what to play anymore, some marketing team does it for you.
Aside for that - we're probably still decades away before this becomes useable on the go, so there's no chance of it being a main platform at all - but it can make a nice supplement.

Why does it have to be zero latency consoles already have more latency than GeForce now.

Zero added latency. And the baseline isn't console - it's the PC. Basically playing cloud-streaming games (on any of the major services, using 1GB connection and ideal network conditions) is comparable to turning off Game Mode on my TV.
Sure it's... useable ... sort of ... but why would I put myself through that as my primary choice?
Now - that's still a trade-off I could see making with latency tolerant games like Plague's Tale or Control - trading latency for higher visual quality - 23$/month for highest tier here is definitely a good deal more cost effective than throwing thousands of $ at new NVidia GPUs, but it's not applicable to everything.

 

[ByWatterson]

Once they get around to changing the laws of physics, I'll jump on board.