A year ago, NVIDIA's GeForce Now game-streaming service
let me play The Witcher 3, a notoriously demanding PC-only title, on a MacBook Air. This year, NVIDIA finally unveiled the Windows version of the service, and it was even more impressive. I
was able to play Rainbow Six: Siege and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on underpowered PCs that sell for $200 to $300. If NVIDIA's Mac demo was a revelation, playing high-end PC games on discount hardware felt like a miracle. Now, after testing the GeForce Now beta release on PCs for a week, I'm even more intrigued by the possibilities of game streaming.
To put it simply, the service lets you remotely tap into the power of an expensive gaming rig from any
computer. It runs on remote servers powered by NVIDIA's GTX 1080Ti GPUs. While the company isn't divulging further specifications, you can bet they're also stuffed with more than enough RAM and CPU horsepower. (NVIDIA claimed they were the equivalent of a $1,500 gaming PC a year ago.) When you launch GeForce Now, you're actually watching a video streaming to your PC. But since there's very little latency between what you're seeing and your keyboard and mouse inputs, it feels as if the games are running right on your computer.
You don't need a very powerful PC to run the GeForce Now client. At the minimum, NVIDIA recommends using a 3.1GHz Core i3 processor and 4GB RAM, along with either Intel HD 2000, GeForce 600 series or Radeon HD 3000 graphics. Those are all specs you'll find in PCs four to six years old. But of course, solid internet access is a must. You'll need speeds of at least 25Mbps, but NVIDIA advises a 50Mbps connection for the best experience. You'll also have to make sure your computer has a reliable link to your router -- which means you'll either need to use an Ethernet cable or a 5GHz Wi-Fi network
.
) and use the free tier of GFN for an hour of gaming at a time. Heck, I could even just play games on my Chromebook
