During their CES opening keynote presentation, Nvidia made an announcement for one of their long running projects. Dubbed GeForce Now, the new cloud service delivers gaming as a service to the masses. This builds on Nvidia’s GRID technology which was first showcased with Kepler and expands it to directly serve the consumer. The big announcement is that the service is no longer limited to Shield devices but is expanded to PCs in general.
GeForce Now is basically like a cloud-based remote client with either a Windows 10 or Mac VM spun up with all of your games installed. Nvidia is even ensuring that all of the software like Steam and the games are all patched and up to date whenever you log in. Several performance tiers can be purchased all at $25 but with the number of hours that you get variable. The base tier costs $25 for 20 hours of gameplay. All users have to do is download the GeForce Now client to get things rolling.
Every since the rise of the cloud, having VMs with the graphics grunt bring gaming to laptops and weak desktops has been an idea floating around. With GeForce Now, Nvidia has claimed that they have solved the latency and bandwidth issues that have plagued this goal. It will be interesting to see what exactly Nvidia has done or will their system also fall prey to the internet. For those of you with Shield devices, Nvidia is offering the first month free and $7.99 per month after that. Unfortunately for those of you on PC, GeForce Now won’t arrive till March.
