You may know NVIDIA for its beefy GPUs and frame-generation technology, but if you struggle to afford them, or spend time playing games on a mobile device, you really ought to know about its streaming service, GeForce NOW.
Already, I can hear some groans coming at me. “Another” streaming service usually means starting with a clean slate of no games to play, no saved progress, and investing in an entirely new gaming ecosystem. GeForce NOW is built different though, because it collates all of your gaming libraries from the likes of Steam, Epic, and Xbox into one collection you can stream to pretty much any device you’d want to game on.
As someone who’s tested NVIDIA’s graphics cards first-hand, I can tell you that while its DLSS tech and clever Lovelace architecture is no short of revolutionary – it’s admittedly too expensive for a legion of gamers to afford. Moreover, if you don’t play on a PC or Laptop, that hardware won’t do you any favours. GeForce NOW extends a hand to gamers on a budget because you don’t need to afford beefy hardware to benefit from NVIDIA’s benefits – the subscription service brings it to you.
For mobile gamers, for example, this is huge. Where an aging phone might struggle to run the latest open-world RPGs, if it can connect to the internet, GeForce NOW can have it running like you’re playing on the highest-end gaming rig. Frame stutters, overheats, and crashes need never bug you again, because GeForce NOW leaves all of the processing and power demands to its side of the connection.
So just how affordable is this budget-performance? To begin with, you can actually use GeForce NOW for free, if you’d like. You won’t get the best frame rates, but you will be able to bundle your libraries together and start playing (as long as you don’t mind adverts). If you want a bit more of a DLSS bite, the summer sale NVIDIA is currently running means you’ll be able to grab RTX 4060 performance for £4.99 per month. The Ultimate tier is usually £19.99 per month, but it does get you RTX 4080, 4K performance for a monthly fee. A 50% discount brings that S-rank gaming experience down to £9.99.
You could think about lifetime costs versus just buying an NVIDIA 40 Series GPU, but given the price of current-gen PC components, it’ll still be a long time before you overlap those costs. Furthermore, PC gamers with an RTX 4080 can’t take it with them on the train? A GeForce NOW subscription lets you carry on your gaming session if you’re in the house playing on an aging PC, when you’re playing on your phone on a train, or when you’re using a streaming stick with your TV. It makes NVIDIA’s gaming power more versatile, and if you’re a mobile gamer, you gain access to hundreds of games, depending on the libraries you’re linking.
For one-month and six-month subscriptions, the summer sale NVIDIA is running makes this streaming service half-price until August 18. Those kinds of prices won’t just come around every season, so it’s worth jumping on a deal like that while it’s running.
