The short version for those who haven't followed the latest in Cloud gaming. There "was" Google's Stadia which showed great promise but ran out of gas pretty quickly and shut down this past February when a major title(Cyberpunk 2077) had a failed launch and a critical developer(Typhoon Studios) collapsed. Then there is XBox Cloud Gaming(in beta). Now we have NVidia's Geforce-Now which holds out some hope.
The sales pitch here is that you get the benefit of a full 4K resolution RTX-3080 for just $200/yr. That seems like a good value proposition if you don't already have a decent gaming rig.
I tried out the free 1080i version on both chrome(in Beta) and the native windows client app. Here were my findings with ED Horizons.
Posting screengrab solely to capture their current offer as it appears as of this posting.
My Conclusions
I only tested ED Horizons. I am biased here. As a PC user with a GTX 1080 TI running on a 8 year old ASUS motherboard with an i5 4690K CPU and my second rig which is an i7 3770 on a 4K TV, I get very decent performance that even drives my HP Reverb G2. So this service would only hold marginal video enhancements over what I already have. However, what is a deal breaker for me is the lack of HOTAS support and access to the external game files such as the Log files. To me that is too much of a sacrifice. The architecture of Elite was made to be "Hackable" in a positive way. The Geforce-Now service would be a downgrade for me given that I'd have to give up most my external utilities that have become a basic part of my gaming style. So in conclusion, for now, although well executed so far, there are too many caveats for me to seriously consider this as an option. However, I was impressed with what they achieved out of the box as a first release.
I suppose that if you were into certain titles such as Tomb Rader and perhaps certain First Person Shooters and wanted a high end gaming rig graphical experience, then yes, this might be for you. But if you aren't an XBox player and already have a decent gaming rig, the value proposition diminishes quickly given the limitations of the current library and service. What would fix this is if they included a limited emulated virtual PC environment that at least would give access to driver support and the game files.
The sales pitch here is that you get the benefit of a full 4K resolution RTX-3080 for just $200/yr. That seems like a good value proposition if you don't already have a decent gaming rig.
I tried out the free 1080i version on both chrome(in Beta) and the native windows client app. Here were my findings with ED Horizons.
- It does exactly what it says it does. It performs a PC environment in 1080 at a full 60 FPS without compromises - "so far", but I couldn't put it through full testing because the lack of HOTAS support. In-Game Video settings were set to Ultra. Overall, the experience was smooth. MY connection was direct cable to my modem and latency tests showed I was well within their higher end for performance specs. However, I was at the upper edge of bandwidth and latency so my tests were no proof for 4K performance which I could not test in the free version.
- The support for input devices is poor. They do not support a HOTAS but on the PC client they do support controllers such as the XBox controller.
- There does not appear to be any local files stored so no hope of using external 3rd party ED Enhancements such as EDDI etc. that rely on access to the local files.
- I could not find any mention of VR support at this time.
- It uses the Steam or Epic Launchers to execute the game(I tested Steam) and your experience is identical to playing on the desktop. Your commander and ship appears exactly as if you had moved to another PC to launch your game.
- Supposedly this will allow games to run under any of Nvidias supported OS. So Mac and Android users can get ED on their environments although I did not test this.
- There are three tiers of service.
- Free version at 1080, 1 hour session max, which requires you to wait in a queue for an available server(20-30 minutes for me)
- Priority version (includes RTX) up to six hours of continuous game play limited to 1080P - $50/6mo or $8.99/mo
- RTX 3080 version - Preorder only as of today($99/6mo). supports only 1440 on a PC/Mac and will support 4K on their Shield TV streaming box(Hey... wasn't the whole point of this service was to eliminate an extra box?)
- There is a considerable number of supported titles but it certainly is far from a complete library. One thing missing are all the Microsoft titles, no doubt because Microsoft is a competitor in this realm.
Posting screengrab solely to capture their current offer as it appears as of this posting.
My Conclusions
I only tested ED Horizons. I am biased here. As a PC user with a GTX 1080 TI running on a 8 year old ASUS motherboard with an i5 4690K CPU and my second rig which is an i7 3770 on a 4K TV, I get very decent performance that even drives my HP Reverb G2. So this service would only hold marginal video enhancements over what I already have. However, what is a deal breaker for me is the lack of HOTAS support and access to the external game files such as the Log files. To me that is too much of a sacrifice. The architecture of Elite was made to be "Hackable" in a positive way. The Geforce-Now service would be a downgrade for me given that I'd have to give up most my external utilities that have become a basic part of my gaming style. So in conclusion, for now, although well executed so far, there are too many caveats for me to seriously consider this as an option. However, I was impressed with what they achieved out of the box as a first release.
I suppose that if you were into certain titles such as Tomb Rader and perhaps certain First Person Shooters and wanted a high end gaming rig graphical experience, then yes, this might be for you. But if you aren't an XBox player and already have a decent gaming rig, the value proposition diminishes quickly given the limitations of the current library and service. What would fix this is if they included a limited emulated virtual PC environment that at least would give access to driver support and the game files.
At the time, I only had a 50mb/s internet hookup but the lag, if any, was unnoticeable 90% of the time on WiFi via a Chrome browser, and never noticeable when using the Windows app on my PC with its Ethernet connection.
