Nvidia told me that its game selection criteria will always be based on popularity. If you game to the beat of your own drummer, you're out of luck Of course, this is one of the problems with any streaming service, but how true that is depends on what kind of uptime and capacity guarantees Nvidia makes. I just wanted to pop in to take a screenshot and was greeted by this message. It's less of a "gaming PC on demand" than a time share. And it means you can't pause the game, go away for awhile and pick up where you left off. Occasional gamers may put up with having to track gaming time, but if you're hitting the max every other day, that's a major pain. You can avoid it by relaunching periodically, such as after every checkpoint, though that's annoying and sometimes infeasible. It's unclear if the four-hour limit will remain past the beta period, but I'm sure there will be some kind of time limitation, so hopefully Nvidia will fix the experience. All that does is give you enough time to resign yourself to losing your progress. In games that only allow checkpoint saves, though, it's unacceptable to bounce people out at a random point even with a five-minute warning. (Probably a bug it's supposed to provide a five-minute warning.) Yes, Nvidia suggests that you simply log out and log back in, but that didn't stop it from summarily and without warning tossing me out of Doom and closing the VM session. You have four hours per session and not a second more. You also need to reinstall every time you launch, though given how fast it is it's not really a pain. That means unless it syncs via Steam Cloud you have no way to save progress. Because of the ephemeral and sandboxed nature of virtual machines, you can't save anything locally. You can play any Steam gameīy launching into Steam, you can play anything in your Library you're not limited to Nvidia's selection. ![]() It includes early access and pre-early access of some gamesĪs long as they're high profile, you'll find some as-yet-unfinished games on Steam, such as the perennially early-access Factorio and Rimworld, as well as the PUBG Test server. If you want 60fps, you'll also need either a gaming laptop (their built-in screens support higher refresh rates) or an external monitor connected via DisplayPort. However, no matter how high the server-side frame rates, it's still streaming to you at either 60fps or 30fps, depending upon your monitor and connection type (HDMI or DisplayPort).Īnd you still need to buy a game-quality keyboard and mouse, and a wired controller comes recommended. When I ran into trouble, switching to wired made all the difference. Some detail may come in blurry at first and then progressively render more sharply, though this happens more on menus and cutscenes than during gameplay. Across any network, gaming ranges from really good with just a little stutter to a perennial "connecting." message to no response at all, though it depends on the game. ![]() One persistent issue I've had is random audio dropout. Yes, I'm looking at you Bioshock Infinite. I did experience some glitchiness or lag occasionally, but it tended to be in games that are glitchy or laggy in general. It also sounds expensive when you compare it to other streaming services, like Netflix, whose 4K streaming plan costs half that, including content. ![]() That does sound really expensive, especially when you compare it to the price of a console or an $800 gaming desktop. That works out to 325 hours a year, or 16.3 20-hour gameplay chunks at a total of $410 for the year, not including the game. There's understandably been pushback in the forums on the 25-for-20 figure from beta testers, which seem to consist of people who game a lot or want to but can't afford the hardware.įor instance, SteamSpy estimates (really roughly) that on average, people play PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) for about 12.5 hours every two weeks. But the announced pricing and policies will likely only appeal to intermittent gamers or Mac owners who have few alternatives for playing Windows-based games.
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