First a couple of pictures…
Shadow of the Tomb Raider Cyberpunk 2077
Yep, that’s me playing AAA games, in rock solid 4K, HDR, 60 fps glory on my living room TV. And that’s all with no console or PC attached. Hm…
The secret is a combination of several pieces:
- An Nvidia Shield TV Pro
- A gigabit internet connection
- A GeForce NOW RTX 3080 subscription
Together, these allow me to stream games running on Nvidia servers directly to my TV, with max’ed out graphics and latency low enough to effortlessly pull off Tomb Raider style platforming. Wow!
The available games come from my Steam, Epic Games, and Ubisoft libraries, so I’m not paying for games, even if the cost of the Shield Pro + RTX 3080 subscription was non-trivial. (Note that it’s still less than a PS5 over two years of service, and who knows, by 2023 I might actually be able to buy a PS5 in Ottawa. 😛 )
Some caveats…
- My internet service is shared cable running on Rogers infrastructure, so if too many of my neighbours are watching Netflix, I imagine my experience will degrade. I haven’t seen this yet.
- There is a long standing and irritating bug in the GeForce NOW service that causes you to need to log in to Steam every time you start a new game. My understanding is this is something to do with where the servers are running, versus some geofencing that Steam does. Regardless, until they find a workaround, I recommend adding on a wireless keyboard to your setup, since typing a 20 character, upper/lower/numeric/specials password with a game controller sucks.
- Speaking of add on hardware, you will also need to get a game controller, since none is provided with the Shield TV Pro. I’m using an Xbox One wireless controller I already had over Bluetooth and it’s working just fine.
Overall, I’m extremely pleased with this setup. I’ve been missing the ability to play games in my living room since my son got my PS4. This is a great replacement.
To be clear, I’m sure the latency you’re getting when streaming games is significant. I doubt you could play competitive first person shooters successfully, for example. However, for the kinds of games I play — mostly RPGs and MMOs — I am not seeing *any* latency problems.
Here’s PCGamer’s take:
https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-geforce-now-rtx-3080-testing/
Now that I’ve switched to a 3Gig fibre-to-the-house connection, I’ve got even lower latency and better throughput. Running a game in this configuration just looks like it’s running locally.