Cloud gaming: GeForce Now was better than my gaming PC this weekend

When the excellence of service meets the bugs of a gaming PC, it gives one more reason to use cloud gaming.

A gaming PC // Source: Resul Kaya for Unsplash

Why use cloud gaming when you are a gamer? To listen to the brands that offer this kind of service, it would be to play our favorite games on smartphones. I am more convinced by the idea that we will continue to play on a PC or on television. This weekend was further proof for me that cloud gaming is the future of video games.

My PC is running Dying Light 2, but crashes

Friday was the release of a long-awaited game on Dying Light 2. The latest title from the Polish studio Techland was particularly ambitious and it is currently a good hit in sales. The game thus occupies six places in the Steam Top 10 over the past week and has exceeded 274,000 concurrent players on Steam alone, a huge launch for a paid game.

Dying Light 2 // Source: Techland

I was one of them, well armed with a properly equipped gaming PC (AMD Ryzen 5800X, 32 GB of RAM, GeForce RTX 3080) and yet I quickly had to ignore my own PC. Indeed, as is often the case with this kind of productions, the game came out very “hotwith its share of bugs. In my case, impossible to join a co-op game (a bug that the editor tried to fix urgently this weekend) and a complete crash of the PC after a few minutes of play.

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GeForce Now to the rescue

Having already purchased the game on Steam, I turned to Nvidia’s GeForce Now service which added Dying Light 2 to its service upon release. We must remember the particular operation of GeForce Now. It is only a technical service of cloud gaming, without specific access to a catalog of games included in the price as Xbox Game Pass or Stadia can offer. GeForce Now provides access to games already purchased on Steam, or from Epic Games, GOG or Ubisoft. In this case, a simple connection with my Steam account and I was able to find my Dying Light 2 ready to be launched on Nvidia’s servers.

I subscribed to the GeForce RTX 3080 offer that we recently tested on Frandroid.

An experience similar to what my PC was supposed to offer

I could have written that GeForce Now was confused with what my gaming PC offered, but it was wrong. Nvidia’s offer in this case was better. Indeed, goodbye crashes and connection bugs, the game ran perfectly on the servers of the American giant. Result, I was able to spend my weekend on the game without worrying more about the bugs encountered on my PC.

On the technical side, impossible to perceive any latency or the slightest compression artifact. The game ran perfectly with the graphics options pushed to the maximum, including ray tracing, and without using DLSS. My fiber connection with Bouygues Telecom held up quite well to the shock of a GeForce Now pushed to the limit: 50 Mbit/s speeds and a stream in 2560 x 1440 pixels at 120 frames per second.


All was obviously not perfect. For example, I had to type in my Steam password (and Steam Guard code) the few times I launched the game, as is GeForce Now tradition. Also impossible to switch the game to English to enjoy the VO, since GeForce Now did not let me access the Steam settings. Last annoying detail, I had to configure the graphics settings of the game at each launch, with the key restarting the game. The game installation seems to reset on every launch by GeForce Now.

But really, I come out of this gaming weekend being once again amazed by the service offered by Nvidia. Of course, you need an excellent Internet connection, but you can now confuse a cloud gaming service with a game running locally on a high-end PC. Better, this service makes it possible to avoid the disadvantages of a launch of a game not completely square on the side of the bugs.

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Therefore, we can begin to ask the question of the interest of renewing a gaming PC in the years to come. For the moment, neither Nvidia nor the other services offer the entire catalog that would make me swap my machine for a more economical PC. If a game isn’t on GeForce Now, I’m fine with needing my gaming PC.

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