For someone who spends his life covering the latest technology, I can be surprisingly old-fashioned. I’ve lost the love of multiplayer gaming, I don’t care one bit about esports, and I like my games to run on whatever powerful hardware sits on my desk, thank you very much. None of this cloud gaming nonsense is for me.
However, watching Black Myth: Wukong at Gamescom 2024 via streaming on a GeForce Now-equipped MacBook made me realise something. I re-evaluated my principles, so to speak. This is a game that gave our Tyler’s mighty RTX 4090 a run for its money, and while you can certainly tweak the settings to get a smooth experience (our Nick has put together an excellent guide to help you do that), it can take quite a bit of tweaking to get the most out of it.
When playing on the highest settings at a seamless 80 fps + with no noticeable latency –on a MacBookof all things – suddenly made me realise how much sense cloud streaming services make for a game like this. Simply put, the experience looked brilliant. Perfect, even. 4ms or less latency. Excellent graphics delivered via a connected ultrawide display. A very demanding game presented in a way that makes it look trivially easy to run on a standard laptop.
And while I’ve long been instinctively cautious about cloud-based gaming, I found myself wondering if I’d lost touch.
I thought about my equipment at home. Of course, I could launch the game on my RX 7800 XT, play around with the settings, and keep breaking free from the magic on the screen by keeping an eye on the framerate counter.
Or I could log into Geforce Now on a supported device and just press play. And, you know, I could actually focus on gaming instead of constantly wondering if my hardware is up to the task or if I’m just one setting change away from a smooth gaming experience.
My demo was done over trade show internet, which is notoriously unreliable. Speaking to the folks at the Nvidia booth, I was shown that the game was using between 50 and 70 Mbps on average, and was told that aside from a brief spike in latency at one point, it ran perfectly smoothly all day.
However, it was running on a GeForce Now Ultimate account, which gives you access to the power of an RTX 4080 equivalent via one of Nvidia’s enterprise GPU-equipped machines. This is the most expensive tier at $20 per month.
While I only got to spend a few minutes with Black Myth: Wukong before moving on to the rest of the great stuff Nvidia had to offer, the experience still left a lasting impression. Aside from the on-screen overlay showing me real-time data, if you told me this was running on a powerful PC under the desk, I would have believed it.
And it is. If I’m stuck with older hardware that would likely struggle with such a demanding game, GeForce Now could be the difference between playing the latest hot thing with smooth frame rates or settling for a choppy mess. Or, of course, just not playing the game at all.
I’ll be testing GeForce Now more thoroughly when I’m back in the UK, as my hotel internet is frankly not up to the task. It’s not magic, after all, and you need a decent connection speed to get the right effect. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen Nvidia’s cloud streaming service in action, and I can’t shake the feeling that it really does look like the future.
I assume that, like most of you, I love my precious PC hardware. I like powerful components that run the game right next to me because that’s where part of the magic of the experience lies, at least for me. But what I was shown was so damn convenient, so seamless, at that point, that it gave me pause.
If you have the connections, why not outsource the costs elsewhere? Instead of saving every penny for one-time purchases and spending a lot of money on expensive CPUs and GPUs that will need to be upgraded at some point, why not pay for your hardware usage in small increments?
When developers talk about the future of thin clients, streaming and gaming in the cloud, they get wide-eyed, more than the hardware benefits. A future of gaming that isn’t limited by the size or amount of assets. Games that model the entire Earth in some form will be streamed seamlessly to our eyes.
And while these methods aren’t necessarily the same as GeForce Now (in the example above, rendering still happens on your local machine), an internet connection is still required to deliver your games in real time. And of course, that comes with limitations. Cloud providers can and will change prices at their whim. You’re also tied to the hardware they provide, and if the service goes down (like with Google Stadia), you’re just out of luck. Not to mention if you have an unreliable internet connection or can’t get good speeds in your area.
Cloud streaming may not necessarily be the solution I or you want. After all, we love our personal hardware and there are significant downsides to relying on a connection for gaming. But if it’s the solution we get, it’s going to be very difficult to fault the quality of the results.
