I Betrayed My Gaming PC for the Cloud

Can streaming finally deliver a “next gen” experience?

Assassin’s Creed Shadows GeForce Now screenshot captured by the author. I can’t get enough of its excellent strand-based hair.

What if instead of trying to buy a new GPU in the madness that is the current market, you could just rent one sitting in a giant building in the next town over?

I know that might sound a little dystopian depending on your point of view, but that’s the weird reality of Nvidia’s GeForce Now game streaming platform. The service isn’t that new, but it has received tons of updates over the years. You might know it as that thing that younger folks use to stream Fortnite to their phones for free, or as a janky platform with too much latency to be of much use — but both of those are slightly outdated opinions.

The other day I realized that subscribing to its 4080-powered Ultimate tier was probably the only way I’d be getting my hands on a new-ish Nvidia GPU any time soon. Four years ago I bought an all-AMD-powered PC, and it has aged such that these days it’s more famous for being the subject of an online rant I posted about it last year than actually running modern video games.

AMD’s current tech stack is finally making inroads against Nvidia’s long-held dominance over AI-adjacent gaming image technologies thanks to a collaboration with Sony, but any of their hardware released before this year is going to age like a sad…