I’ve been using GeForce Now on a regular basis for over a year now. Sometimes it’s a few times a week, other weeks it’s daily. I tend to go between GFN, Stadia and the few games I have installed locally.
In the past year, as a Founder, I’ve rarely had issues with GFN as a service. I can count on one hand the number of times I have been impacted negatively by latency, for example. For me, that’s also the most important thing: a cloud game must be playable to the extent that you forget you’re playing in the cloud.
As much as I like GFN, on occasion I do like to play locally too, although these sessions are getting rarer and rarer as the age of my laptop increases. Although I’ve been keeping my eyes open for the ideal replacement for my current machine, I’ve yet to find one that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Which brings me to the new RTX 3080 tier of GFN: is it worth $100 every six months to have a better experience? Doesn’t the limited library of GFN limit what you can do?
For some, the latter may indeed be true. GeForce Now in itself is really only worth your time if you own the games that are supported by GFN. For me, that’s not an issue. Before I even signed up as a six month subscriber to the Founder’s edition last year, I had accumulated quite a few games that were playable on GFN. But, I also knew that there were games available on GFN I couldn’t play locally, games I really wanted to experience.
Death Stranding was the straw the broke the camel’s back. The Epic Games store had a sale which dropped Death Stranding to less than $20 with a coupon I happened to have. It sealed the deal on the subscription to GFN for me. I’d finally be able to play a game I couldn’t play locally.
All together, at the time of writing, I have 91 games in my GFN library. This includes titles like Battlefield 1, Death Stranding, various Metro games, a bunch of Assassin’s Creed titles, The Witcher 3, No Man’s Sky, Control, Cities: Skyline, American Truck Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator, Snow Runner, The Long Dark, UBoat, Subnautica, Frostpunk and more. Some of them were giveaways through the Epic store, others purchased through deals on Steam or Origin (I rarely buy full price games). Many of them are older, some are newer.
In other words, I have plenty of reason to use GFN. My library contains more games than I can get through in a year and many that benefit from a bit beefier hardware.
Now, one consideration with RTX 3080 for me at the moment is location. I live in Alaska, which means that the closest servers to me are the US Northwest. My ping averages between 40ms and 45ms on any given day, regardless of time of day. For me, this is totally acceptable and I’m able to play any of the games I have without issue.
Currently, US NW does not support RTX 3080. NVIDIA’s FAQ’s point US NW users to US West but there seems to be some debate on Reddit whether US NW users will actually get onto West or not. Regardless, US West is further way and I can wait if I have to.
Naturally, I had to do a bit of testing. Currently, latency to US West is about 60ms for me. Sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. For some, this may be a deal-breaker. But, I don’t look at numbers. The important thing to me is: can I play the game? What’s the experience like?
So, I’ve tried a few different games. I’ve made some longer deliveries with American Truck Simulator. I’ve done a bit of high speed racing with Assetto Corsa. I’ve spent hours playing Battlefield 1 single and multiplayer. Not once was the extra 20ms an issue while playing. In fact, I did better in BF1 than I anticipated, considering I haven’t played it for years.
This tells me that if NVIDIA would be so kind and actually take my money at US West, I’d be perfectly happy.
In other words, for me, spending the extra $16/month is well worth it. I just need NVIDIA to convert that pre-order to an actual 3080 subscription.