Nvidia renames, formally launches new GeForce Now game streaming service

For the past year, Nvidia’s GeForce Grid 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 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 October 1 for North 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 available, as is the original Borderlands and The Witcher 2.

Nvidia is talking a good game with its promises of speed and latency, but it’s important to remember that much of GeForce Now’s performance will depend on your ISP, not Nvidia itself. While Nvidia’s PR talks up the fact that it has “optimized every piece of the technology behind GeForce NOW for gaming,” it can’t optimize the quality of your Internet connection or the consistency with which you receive content. In order to maintain a 60 FPS frame rate, new frames need to be delivered extremely quickly. Nvidia’s previous latency slides have implied that GeForce Grid could match console play, but that’s going to depend on your Internet connection.

One other note about Nvidia and the Shield ecosystem. If you buy an Nvidia controller and plan to take it back and forth across multiple devices, bear in mind that the controller requires GeForce Experience to be installed on a PC in order to function — and GeForce Experience doesn’t work with AMD or Intel GPUs. If you need a controller that can play on multiple devices and you 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 discrete GPUs), you’ll need to buy a second controller.
Nvidia has talked about wanting to become the Netflix of gaming, but it’s lock-ins like this that will make ubiquitous market domination difficult. Netflix is Netflix precisely because you can stream it to practically every device manufactured in the past five years. TVs, consoles, PCs, smartphones — Netflix runs on all of them. Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, in contrast, runs only on Nvidia’s Shield. Even the company’s controllers are only compatible with PCs if you have 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 about 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 attracting a wider range of customers. Still, GeForce Now is a first step, not an endgame — we’ll have to see if the company’s service can match its promised performance.