No need for an ultra-powerful PC to play AAA! I discovered this Fallout opus thanks to this NVIDIA service, and it works very well!

Play thousands Of games without downloading them via GeForce Now!

Cloud Gaming is a method of gaming that has never really appealed to me. Attached to my consoles and my gaming PC, the very idea of ​​not running a game locally put me off a little.

But for the experience, I used GeForce Now, NVIDIA’s Cloud Gaming service, and what I can say is that I was surprised!

NVIDIA has been offering this Cloud Gaming service for quite a while. Now, the technology is compatible with more than 1,500 games, from Assassin’s Creed Mirage to Baldur’s Gate 3, including Fortnite. The goal is above all to facilitate access to video games without having a competition machine at home.

For simplicity, If you have any of the compatible games on your Steam store, Epic Games Store, or Ubisoft Connect, they will automatically appear in your GeForce Now app once you log in and sync.

In my case, I tested GeForce Now via my computer, which was already powerful enough to run the games, but out of curiosity, I tried Cloud Gaming. You can also download and play your games via GeForce Now on a tablet (Android or iOS), or even a smartphone. Simply connect a Bluetooth controller and that’s it!

GeForce Now works via a subscription system.

• The first is simply free, but with advertising and only allows you to play 1 hour per session. Additionally, you will have to wait in queue if players have priority on the servers.

• The second subscription is called “Priority”, and as its name suggests, you will have priority on GeForce Now servers to access your video games without advertising, with Ray-Tracing, up to 1080p resolution (Full HD) , and for 6 hours per session. All for €10.99 per month, or €54.99 for 6 months.

• The Ultimate subscription allows your games to run on the equivalent of an RTX 4080, one of NVIDIA’s most powerful GPUs. 8-hour sessions, Resolution up to 4K and 120 images per second, the Ultimate subscription therefore costs a little more to access the service (€21.99 per month or €109 for 6 months).

GeForce Now subscriptions

In my case, I was able to try GeForce Now via the best subscription, just to see how the service fared against very resource-intensive games.

So, is it stable?

Nvidia prides itself on being THE most powerful and ultra stable Cloud Gaming service, is this true?

On the market we also find XCloud from Microsoft, but during my sessions in 2023 via this service, the video decompression was acting up and did not allow me to fully enjoy my games.

However, unlike traditional video streaming like on Twitch or Netflix, you need a good internet connection to enjoy GeForce Now with as little latency as possible. Besides, the connection will play a crucial role for the display of the game, since drops in bandwidth can lead to seeing small, rather unpleasant artifacts.

Far Cry Primal via GeForce Now

With a Free optical fiber connection of around 850 Mbps via an Ethernet cable connected to my PC, I lose almost no “packets”, that is to say information sent by NVIDIA servers. The quality therefore remains rather good, and sometimes even very close to a native rendering of the game, as if you were playing it locally on your machine.. Of course, if you have fun looking for the little beast, you can still see some flickers on small details in game, but you have to get close to the screen to notice it.

On Fallout 76, a very demanding game on PC, all while being constantly connected given that it is an MMORPG, I can enjoy the game in QHD resolution (2560x1440p) at around 80 FPS (even if I chose to cap them at 60 fps to favor stability).

Fallout 76 via GeForce Now

GeForce Now can automatically detect the most optimal servers based on your geolocation, but you can also select it manually via the application options. The same goes for the bandwidth allocated to the application, you can modify it via the settings.

The incredible advantage in my opinion for this Cloud Gaming service, apart from the display quality, remains the fact that you don’t need to download the game to enjoy it. Even with my 1.5 TB of SSD and 1 TB of HDD, I tend to quickly fill up my storage because of increasingly heavy AAA games… II was therefore able to avoid the 99 GB of Fallout 76 and go straight to the game just after a short loading time.