GeForce Now will go live Thursday for gamers in North America, Europe, Eastern Europe and Western Russian Federation, as well as Japan and South Korea.
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However NVIDIA is still bringing brand-new games to the service as well, and as previously announced back in March this will be through their Buy & Play program.
Game streaming is quite challenging compared to traditional media streaming – in addition to low latency real-time encoding on the server side, we also need the client user input to have minimal lag while getting reflected on the server side. In short, Nvidia says the overall experience is a lot better now.
NVIDIA views streaming as an advantage over the consoles as they are able to constantly update the backend, as they have in upgrading to GeForce NOW from GRID and already are eclipsing the hardware on current generation consoles.
Fear could have a point. All games will run at up to a 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second.
NVIDIA has been a champion of game streaming for a number of years now.
Sony’s library is the largest of the three, with more than 400 games. The company said it will continue to add games to the mix and-like Netflix-take games out of rotation as well.
Details of NVIDIA‘s final launch of what until now shared the name NVIDIA GRID* have been revealed – titled instead GeForce Now.
This isn’t new to anyone who has followed Nvidia closely.
NVIDIA has been testing the service for months, but until recently it was called GRID. So, players won’t always be limited to streaming their games. That’s likely to make everyone think GeForce Now is just Grid renamed, but Fear said that’s incorrect.
The integrated 256 core Maxwell GPU is the same basic design as the latest graphics architecture used in the most powerful PC graphics cards of today, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. “It’s faster, better, more reliable and more robust”. Sometimes you might even be able to play before others may due to the lack of pre-loading. With GeForce Now, the model will be $8 ($7.99, to be more precise) for all.
And at just £149 for the standard Nvidia SHIELD, that’s a smart play.
Launching alongside the consoles, naturally, is Nvidia’s GeForce Now game-streaming service, touted as the Netflix for games.
There are now over 50 titles available for free as part of the membership. However we should also note that based on NVIDIA’s comments, it sounds like you must remain a subscriber in order to access the GeForce NOW service at all, so individual games picked up via Buy & Play would not be available if you discontinued your subscription. The games will typically be sold at a regular retail prices, but there’s an additional twist. And if you have 10 megabits a second, you can play with 720p resolution. Saved games across SHIELD devices running GeForce NOW, however, will be linked.
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Right now there’s not exactly a wealth of 4K content (you’re basically looking at Netflix and YouTube as well as your own content), but the Shield TV can of course stream HD content and music via a range of Android TV apps, including BBC iPlayer, Vevo, TuneIn and Plex.
