The website account page keeps saying "Your order is still in progress. Try refreshing after a few minutes" (Even as I type this) but once I got the order confirmation email I just downloaded the local client and installed it.
First It needs C+P support. It's a pain in the arse to type randomly generated passwords into the remote game client but at least it seems to remember my login details so that might only be a pain in the arse once.
The local client doesn't seem to have the ability to scan my local machine for games nor query stream or battle.net for my games. I had to manually search for a game I was interested in playing.
Picked Overwatch cause I play that a fair bit after searching for a few other titles and came up blank. I normally get around 20ms lag playing locally but on their servers I was getting 50ms. Game client (GeForce Now Client) says I have a 8ms ping to their servers.
It might of just been my personal "feeling" about it but there was some input lag. In OW if you press melee your character will punch right away even if it takes 20ms for that response to hit the server, but ovb I had to wait for that action to leave my machine, get rendered and get sent back to me before I saw it here.
Played a round on the arcade and I felt off my normal game, but if I only played using the service I would prob get used to it.
Its a nice idea and if you only play single player games or not so competitive multiplayer games like OW I can see a use for it esp if you don't want a gaming rig but atm its not for me.
I don't really think cloud gaming has a market in my lifetime anyway (the economics seem desperately broken and there are multiple usability issues that are not plausibly overcome), but certainly Stadia looks an extremely bad proposition in comparison.
I feel like PC cafes solve the problem far more efficiently, and more elegantly (with additional side-benefits, like being able to upsell on food, and perhaps even creating social interaction) than cloud-gaming will for a very long time.
It's not clear to me why it never picked up in the US.
But you have to leave your home for a PC cafe, which I know I personally wouldn't want to do if I just want to relax on the couch and play games.
Probably the reason it never picked up in the US is that cities and towns sprawl so much in the US that PC cafes could never be just walking distance down the street from most peoples' homes.
I'd expect them to still appear in dense areas like .. cities .. and you can actually find them (and business seems to be good), but only really in chinatowns and other Asian districts.
And some places are trivially obviously viable, population-wise, like just outside of, or even within, universities (and especially University towns), but PC cafes are still absent, so walking distance doesn't really explain it.
It seems to be more of a cultural issue. It's clearly the best solution for the cash-strapped gamer today and especially so for the last 10 years. Perhaps it simply boils down to the much larger emphasis on console-gaming than PC gaming -- but if that's the case, then cloud-PC-gaming is just as fucked as PC-cafes.
Arcades existed and had their moment in the sun, but as the technology miniaturized and became cheaper, it just made a lot of sense to have in your own home.
This was also true in the asian territories, but PC Cafe's are still a major thing, so that might be part of the reason, but it's not terribly satisfactory.
Particularly since it doesn't fulfill all the same needs as arcades did -- you get the game, but you lose the social aspects, and you lose the ability to play games while outside (and more importantly, for short duration, and for cheap, at least on a per-play basis).
But perhaps general wealth is sufficient to explain the difference.
>I feel like PC cafes solve the problem far more efficiently
For your definition of efficient, maybe. As a strawman, for the father who wants to get in a few minutes of gaming now that the kids are asleep and can't or won't spend the money on a high-end gaming rig capable of playing modern day AAA games, Stadia is the answer. He can start a game in less time that it takes to drive to the nearest pc cafe. Assuming his wife will let him leave to do so. There's no comparison in terms of convenience or efficiency.
The target market isn't really twitch gamers sitting on super-high-end machines playing all hours of the night and naturally they're derisive of Stadia because it isn't meant for them. Stadia is meant for casual / semi-casual gamers who don't want to invest in up to date hardware but still want to play modern games.
If you want to understand why PC Cafes didn't take off I'd argue the reasons are similar to why Netflix, et al have killed the movie theatre industry in the US. At-home convenience is preferred to a communal experience particularly when costs come in to play.
Isn’t the better solution for that just improving game performance. If we can run Skyrim on refrigerators surely triple A companies can get out of their gross 200gb downloads and 16gb of ram usage for their games if properly incentivized...
You can’t really do anything about the asset size. If a character/building/whatever model takes about a megabyte, a thousand models will be a gigabyte. Yes, model sizes used to be smaller, but there was less detail.
As for RAM usage, any data sent to the GPU and back has to come from or land in the RAM. With increasing texture sizes, model detail, etc, all that data has to sit in RAM until it’s sent to the GPU for rendering. But you can’t discard it because you’ll need most of it for the next frame.
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Re: maps: I think FlightGear[0], a flight simulator, gets it right. You can download sections of the world’s terrain and save them to the folder, or you can use a feature (program that runs in the background) called terrasync[1] that downloads and caches the world terrain as needed (in 10°*10° chunks).
The biggest draw of GeForce Now over Stadia for me is that I can still play my existing Steam library and don't have to buy new copies of the same games. That, for me, is a dealbreaker.
Stadia is straight up unplayable on my wired internet connection.
GFN works fine. I've gone through Prey 2, The Witcher 3, We Happy Few, The Witness and a couple of other titles on NVidia's service.
It's pretty good to be honest, however, some caveats:
1. Note how all those titles are single player. I don't think competitive multiplayer games will properly catch on platforms like GFN/Stadia, mostly because of the input latency hindering you in a competitive game. I've tried DotA2 and the input delay is noticeable . That being said, I see people talking about Modern Warfare and other shooters on r/geforcenow, so at least _some people_ are playing these games, but, based on my experience, I have a strong prior that most people won't enjoy competitive games.
2. GFN really needs a better games search engine. My use case (which I imagine isn't that uncommon) is that I buy games on Steam specifically to play on GFN. However, there's no good flow to decide which game to play next.
So far, I've been using the full games list they used to display at https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce-now/games/ but now that's been replaced by a search bar! So the only possible flow now is to look a game up on steam, then manually check if it's supported by GFN. Now, most games are not supported by GFN, so I have to create a shortlist of games, then manually check each one and see if GFN supports it, then make a purchasing decision.
GFN needs a first class search engine, where I can search supported games by genre, year of release and maybe rating.
3. The UI/UX is super janky and confusing in terms of how steam starts up inside of GFN and how you have to install the game. It doesn't bother me that much, but it does feel consumer unfriendly. I was hoping they'd improve the UX before launch, but I guess not.
4. Had a weird bug this one time in The Witcher 3. There are 2 expansion packs you can buy for the game ('Blood and Wine' and 'Heart of Stone'). I do not own them. However, a while ago, I logged onto GFN, started up TW3 and saw a message congratulating me on having installed the expansion packs. I shrugged and resumed my most recent load and, fair enough, new abilities had been added in the game. I logged off after 2 hours of gameplay. The next time I logged on, the expansions were gone and my recent saved games were unplayale because they needed the expansion to load. Must have been some weird glitch where the expansions were still installed from a different player. Weird.
Stadia is dead on arrival due to its hard limit on Linux. I mean they want game developers all to use Vulkan on Stadia, a much better and superior graphics API, but still people got used to the inferior OpenGL/DirectX immediate mode thinking, Stadia need to give time the masses to adapt the better way of utilizing the GPU.
But I love to see how far Geforce Now could do. Maybe we could trigger a sandbox escalation and use that juicy GPU as a render station/encoding station, its just so cheap man.
I don't think it's dead, because a major hurdle for gaming on Linux is the hardware heterogeneity, and the fact that there isn't the same volume of potential customers on the end-user side.
However, Stadia brings a Linux platform with well-defined specs, which greatly reduce the amount of configuration to test, like a game console.
Many game developers are already used to a Linux/Unix/BSD-like environment if they develop for the PlayStation and the Switch, so I think they still stand a good chance.
On the topic of Nvidia, I'm glad they're jumping with some competition.
The website account page keeps saying "Your order is still in progress. Try refreshing after a few minutes" (Even as I type this) but once I got the order confirmation email I just downloaded the local client and installed it.
First It needs C+P support. It's a pain in the arse to type randomly generated passwords into the remote game client but at least it seems to remember my login details so that might only be a pain in the arse once.
The local client doesn't seem to have the ability to scan my local machine for games nor query stream or battle.net for my games. I had to manually search for a game I was interested in playing.
Picked Overwatch cause I play that a fair bit after searching for a few other titles and came up blank. I normally get around 20ms lag playing locally but on their servers I was getting 50ms. Game client (GeForce Now Client) says I have a 8ms ping to their servers.
It might of just been my personal "feeling" about it but there was some input lag. In OW if you press melee your character will punch right away even if it takes 20ms for that response to hit the server, but ovb I had to wait for that action to leave my machine, get rendered and get sent back to me before I saw it here.
Played a round on the arcade and I felt off my normal game, but if I only played using the service I would prob get used to it.
Its a nice idea and if you only play single player games or not so competitive multiplayer games like OW I can see a use for it esp if you don't want a gaming rig but atm its not for me.