This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Nvidia Shield

For the past year, Nvidia'south GeForce Filigree service has provided Shield owners with the ability to stream games from remote servers. The service has now gone live as GeForce Now, an $8 per calendar month streaming service. Nvidia claims to offer a 1080p-quality service at 60 FPS at that $8 rate, with the first three months included free (the service launches on Oct 1 for N America, the EU, and Japan.

Right now, the service offers more than 50 titles, including the first three Batman Arkham titles, multiple Lego-themed games, Orcs Must Die (a personal favorite), Darksiders, and The Walking Dead. Multiple Grid titles are also bachelor, as is the original Borderlands and The Witcher two.

GFGames

Nvidia is talking a proficient game with its promises of speed and latency, just information technology'due south important to think that much of GeForce At present's performance volition depend on your ISP, not Nvidia itself. While Nvidia'southward PR talks upwardly the fact that it has "optimized every piece of the technology backside GeForce At present for gaming," it tin't optimize the quality of your Internet connexion or the consistency with which you receive content. In gild to maintain a 60 FPS frame rate, new frames need to be delivered extremely apace. Nvidia'southward previous latency slides take implied that GeForce Grid could lucifer console play, but that's going to depend on your Net connection.

gfgrid-latency-chart

One other note about Nvidia and the Shield ecosystem. If you purchase an Nvidia controller and plan to accept it back and forth across multiple devices, bear in heed that the controller requires GeForce Experience to be installed on a PC in order to function — and GeForce Experience doesn't piece of work with AMD or Intel GPUs. If yous need a controller that can play on multiple devices and yous aren't willing to buy 100% into the NV ecosystem (something that's increasingly hard to do, since an increasing number of laptops don't contain detached GPUs), you'll need to buy a second controller.

Nvidia has talked nigh wanting to become the Netflix of gaming, simply it's lock-ins like this that will make ubiquitous market domination difficult. Netflix is Netflix precisely because yous can stream it to practically every device manufactured in the by five years. TVs, consoles, PCs, smartphones — Netflix runs on all of them. Nvidia'due south GeForce At present service, in dissimilarity, runs but on Nvidia's Shield. Fifty-fifty the company'due south controllers are only compatible with PCs if you accept an Nvidia card installed — and, of course, Nvidia locks out customers from using GameWorks or PhysX on hybrid systems with an AMD GPU installed.

If Nvidia is serious near becoming a dominant force in game streaming that can compete with Sony's PlayStation Now, it's going to have to eventually open its ecosystem and begin alluring a wider range of customers. Still, GeForce Now is a start footstep, not an endgame — nosotros'll have to see if the visitor'south service tin can friction match its promised performance.