# Game Streaming (Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, NVIDIA GeForce NOW, PlayStation Now, Microsoft xCloud, etc)



## User 189

I'm sure we're all familiar with streaming movies or television shows, but some companies are now entering the world of game streaming. In general, game streaming has received a lot of mixed reception. There has been a lot of suspicion around Google Stadia due to Google's tendency to quickly kill off its services, but other game streaming services have been received well.

Regardless, I'm excited to see what the future holds.


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## Huntn

When I think streaming it would be on a low cost PC or Mac to make up for the lack of horse power on your end that would cost $10/month.  I’m not too excited about that as I have an adequate PC at home, and my impression is you’d have less liberty at home with mods, but I’m interested in following this.


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## DT

Bumping this as I'm thinking about a 6 month sub to the new 3080 service from GeForce NOW, i.e. this:






It would be for the little G, her "client" machine is a 13" MBP M1 (16GB RAM)


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## Huntn

DT said:


> Bumping this as I'm thinking about a 6 month sub to the new 3080 service from GeForce NOW, i.e. this:
> 
> View attachment 10485
> 
> 
> It would be for the little G, her "client" machine is a 13" MBP M1 (16GB RAM)



Obvious I need to know more about this or refresh my memory.  Where is the game located, on your computer or in the cloud? As I seem to recall it’s in the cloud, along with a GPU, and your computer is reduced to being a game input device.


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## DT

Here's my understanding of sourcing games:

You buy them through other channels, like Steam, Epic Games (there's a couple of others).  And you own those games, outright, you can download them, run them locally on compatible hardware, whatever, that's totally independent from GFN (GeForce NOW).

GFN is a flat rate subscription, the 3080 "premium" being $99 for 6-months.  There's no additional costs for games on the GNF side, you simply link your Steam (or whichever) accounts to your GNF account to access compatible games.

That last part being the limitation, GFN can only play games that they offer, which isn't the whole Steam, Epic, etc., catalog.  So you might link your Steam account with 30 games, but can only play 10 of those through GFN (and obv. all of them on your local machine if applicable).

So if I own, for example, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (through Steam), I can setup a GFN subscription, and play that game as much as I want for $16.67 / month.


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## DT

I started the convo with @Renzatic originally, but he said it was cool to reply to his post here ...



Renzatic said:


> That doesn't sound too bad then. As long as your games aren't exclusively tied to the streaming service, I'd say go for it.
> 
> Though do you really need the 3080 tier? The Priority tier seems to be the better option, since 1080p 60FPS is less likely to overwhelm your bandwidth, and is perfectly fine for everything except competitive gaming.




Yeah, I don't know, it's not so much about the resolution as the whole experience, I was thinking much better rendering detail (from the server side), better provisioning of machines, etc.  Maybe not.


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## Renzatic

I'd say the Priority tier is more than good enough. 1080p 60FPS on a 13" is plenty. It's highly unlikely she'll notice the difference between it and the 1440p 60-120FPS option unless she has her face plastered against the screen, and is an ultra competitive pro gamer type.

Though you also need to consider image compression in with the mix. What detail is lost between the server and your computer? Will 1440p help resolve a clearer image, or will the compression make the difference between it and 1080p moot?


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## DT

I will also a 25" display available, it's just an HD/1080 display anyway.


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## Renzatic

DT said:


> I will also a 25" display available, it's just an HD/1080 display anyway.




You do get some free antialiasing if you render at 1440p, and downscale it. Whether you'll get that same benefit with a streaming service is the big question here.

Do they give you a free trial to try out the different tiers with? Your best bet would be to get some hands-on time with it, see whether the extra resolution and framerate is worth the extra cost.

Oh, and another thing. The M1 Pro only has a refresh rate of 60hz, right? What about the 25"?


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## DT

FWIW, this originally started when she talked about a gaming PC, which I think for her is more about the idea than the actual having.  But at any rate, I shopped some machines, found some decent deals, initially I was at kind of a silly price point - kept shopping, found at least one killer deal.

I did look into building one, components are kind of in a weird (i.e., expensive ...) place with chip shortages,  I was thinking a case she liked plus pick up things here and there, obviously that's not a quick Xmas sort of thing.

...but something wasn't sitting right with me.

It really came down to the wife and I deciding we didn't need another another piece of gaming hardware for that price __and__ I'd rather not having another Winders™ machine in the house.  Hell, at the moment, I'm planning to even jettison the VM I use for development work and go M-something based in the next 6 months 

Anyway, this seems like a great, reasonably priced, zero hardware commitment way to check things out.


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## DT

Renzatic said:


> You do get some free antialiasing if you render at 1440p, and downscale it. Whether you'll get that same benefit with a streaming service is the big question here.
> 
> Do they give you a free trial to try out the different tiers with? Your best bet would be to get some hands-on time with it, see whether the extra resolution and framerate is worth the extra cost.
> 
> Oh, and another thing. The M1 Pro only has a refresh rate of 60hz, right? What about the 25"?





It's an older Asus, VS-248, here's some info:









						ASUS VS248H-P Review 2022: Budget TN Monitor
					

The ASUS VS248H-P is the name of a 24-inch monitor with TN panel and 1080p resolution. What's most interesting about this monitor is the affordable price tag.




					www.144hzmonitors.com
				




Pretty solid still.  I'm running two Dell U2815D which are 1440/QHD, superb displays, they will eventually go to her, when I replace them with 4K, but that's not until I get my M-machine   And I have no idea when that will be, er, so I guess that Asus is it for now.  And it's a 24" (I was thinking of my displays that are 25")


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## DT

Yeah, honestly the resolution, the refresh rate, the lower bandwidth requirements (we do have a stout local network and a solid 140 Mbps externally with low latency, so I wasn't that worried about that part ...) and since this is sort of an "experiment", maybe that mid-tier is a better choice.

Unless there's anything else compelling about the upper tier, even the play time isn't a big difference (both are too long ... )


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## Renzatic

You could just buy a Steam Deck. That's what I'm gonna do.


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## DT

Renzatic said:


> You could just buy a Steam Deck. That's what I'm gonna do.




I thought about that, this is sort for an extra fun thing for now / for XMas, maybe if she's totally into it.  Honestly, she mostly digs the heavily anime influenced games like Persona, Genshin Impact, which are all PS4/PS5 which is why I think this is just about a cool case ...


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## Renzatic

DT said:


> Unless there's anything else compelling about the upper tier, even the play time isn't a big difference (both are too long ... )




The monitor above is just a 60hz display, and I can't find any info about the refresh rate for the 13" Pro, so I'm gonna assume it's the same, since Apple would be crowing on about it if it were higher.

So that at least is out of consideration for you. The only advantage between the two tiers that you'll be able to notice is the resolution, which probably won't be that big of a deal.


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## DT

Hahaha, I'm cutting pasting from this thread into a chat with the wife


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## Renzatic

DT said:


> I thought about that, this is sort for an extra fun thing for now / for XMas, maybe if she's totally into it.  Honestly, she mostly digs the heavily anime influenced games like Persona, Genshin Impact, which are all PS4/PS5 which is why I think this is just about a cool case ...




The Steam Deck would be perfect for games like that. The only problem is that you can't get it for Xmas.


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## Huntn

So the game is running from your computer, the data is sent to the streaming service for graphic processing,  then back to your computer? That could be a lot of bandwidth. When I heard of streaming services before, they hosted the game itself, it played on their servers and you basically streamed the output to your monitor which you controlled with your input devices. . For that case there could be some substantial limitations, such as I am using 2 Razer  devices that have their own programs controlling keystroke input,


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## DT

It's not this:



Huntn said:


> So the game is running from your computer, the data is sent to the streaming service for graphic processing,  then back to your computer?




It's like you discuss here:



Huntn said:


> When I heard of streaming services before, they hosted the game itself, it played on their servers and you basically streamed the output to your monitor which you controlled with your input devices. .




Maybe you misinterpreted my comments about buying games, I was clarifying that you own the game like you normally would - the GFN servers simply validate your ownership and run the game instance remotely.  That's basically the limitation of which games you can play through GFN.


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## User.45

DT said:


> Bumping this as I'm thinking about a 6 month sub to the new 3080 service from GeForce NOW, i.e. this:
> 
> View attachment 10485
> 
> 
> It would be for the little G, her "client" machine is a 13" MBP M1 (16GB RAM)



Hmmm 
I’d try on my LG tv if it could do 4k 120Hz. I do wonder how bad the latency would be. My network’s ping is 9ms on it’s own…


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## DT

Wow.  It works really well!

Per @Renzatic I went with the mid-tier option for 6-months.  I've been collecting Epic games, I've got both their service and Steam linked.  As I mentioned, the limitation is they don't have every game, but they have quite a few, at least 1/2 of my several freebies over the last couple of weeks.

I fired it up on my Intel based '18 Mini, it's an i7, we've got a fast connection and while this machine works great for my use (coding, general computing, 2D photo management/editing),  the GPU in this model is semi-craptacular.

Second Extinction, just the first game I loaded, runs amazingly good, like a solid mid-tier GPU based Winders machine.  I'll try a few more games over the weekend - tonight there's a serious Mario Party Allstars throwdown planned


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