Nvidia GeForce Now Ultimate vs. New Graphics Card

[midian182]

Buying a graphics card is becoming very expensive, especially if you're aiming for a high-end GPU. But there may be another option, playing games on the cloud, but does that really work?

Permalink to review.

https://www.techspot.com/article/2603-geforce-now-vs-graphics-card/

 

[quiet]

Actually you really should consider the whole costs of owning a card when comparing to streaming. No 1 being the power consumption. A PC with a RTX3080 consumes about 320w more than the same PC running on IG. That 320w multiplied by 8 hours and 30 days is about 77kwh at the end of the month which at least in my country is about 15.5$ tax included. So that leaves only 4.5 bucks as the real cost which is also very quickly mitigated by the other very real cost which is depreciation. An 800$ 3080 will probably fetch you some 3-400$ in about 3-4 years from now when you decide to upgrade. That's another some 100$/year of depreciation. Taking all these into account streaming is in fact cheaper than owning a card so the only real debate here is in fact the quality of streaming vs the cost of owning.

 

[Nobina]

I think buying a GPU with a credit card and paying it off slowly would be a bit more expensive per month than GFNow subscription but it shouldn't be too hard and you get a regular GPU, all the benefits, none of the BS. That's what I would choose.

 

[Lounds]

This is the end goal, cloud everything. You will own nothing and you will be happy...

 

[PEnnn]

"GeForce Now is Nvidia's take on game streaming that lets users play the games they own from the cloud with all processing taking place on their hardware."

Well of course they "recommend" beefier, aka new and obscenely expensive, Nvidia GPUs for this pie in the sky!

Another scheme to push new victims to buy new Nvidia expensive cards and make money from this gimmicky platform in the process!

Those same games run very well on my old card, thank you very much, and nice try!!

 

[EdmondRC]

This is the end goal, cloud everything. You will own nothing and you will be happy...

This certainly makes me think about old Klaus every time I read about it. Nvidia would be so happy with this arrangement too. Making these data center GPUs and then renting them out. How many hours a day do you get access? 8 maybe for $20.00 a month. Most people will likely average less than 2 hours a day. I wonder how many subscriptions they average per GPU? My guess is they probably have anywhere from 5-10 subs per available GPU. Now couple that with the prices skyrocketing on these GPUs and it becomes pretty clear that the goal is to push more people to the cloud. Owning a gaming rig will become a luxury that most people will not be able to afford. For $240 a year though, you can have the priveldge of playing on one of Nvidia's own server gaming rigs with some additional lag and hopefully you have an ISP that provides unlimited bandwidth.

 

[NeoMorpheus]

I tried both nvidia (ewwww) and Stadia and Stadia was always more "smooth".

A shame that the main reason many didnt support Stadia was the fear that their purchases would be lost if Google decided to cancel the service yet they all got a refund.

If Google had said from the get go that their purchases would get refunded, many would had supported.

Forgot to add, remember that some publishers removed their games from GFN, so even owning them is not guarantee that you will be be able to play them. Sorry if I missed that from the article, only glanced over it.

 

[EdmondRC]

It looks like you could reasonably expect a resale value of around $200.00 for your RTX 2070 S on ebay. That's not great, but if you look at it like a discount toward a 3080, it is not bad. You'll probably get to keep about $170.00 after fees, so that is what I'll use for the math. You are going to apply that to a used 3080, 10 or 12 GB variant doesn't matter, just price. The best 'buy it now' I see on ebay is $520.00. So right now you could reasonably purchase a 3080 and sell your 2070 S and come out to $350 out of pocket. GeForce Now is going to cost your $240.00 per year and you have nothing to sell at the end of that. Let's say you hold on to your 3080 for 2 years, should be fine as it will still be in the ballpark of a 4070 when it is released since the 4070 ti is only about 20% faster, and then you sell it to upgrade to some 50 series card. In fact, the 3080 might still be significantly better than the 4070 is the rumored 5888 cuda-cores is accurate, that's a big drop from the 4070 Ti. So, you'll probably be able to recoup $150.00 or so even in two years minimum. So, two years of Geforce now $480.00, buying a used 3080 and selling your 2070 S and $350 out of pocket with the potential of $150.00 credit toward next purchase in 2 years... costs to upgrade for two years $200.00. Get the 3080.

 

[kira setsu]

Really need an article that shows all the things streaming doesn't let you do, I dont care how cheap it is, its a sham.

you'll be spending money on games you'll never own, games that rely on other things to work at all, games you cant mod or use trainers in, I know gamers get bent outta shape when talk of cheats comes up but they give games pretty much infinite replay value.

imo if youve been gaming on pc long enough then buying the hardware or saving up for something new shouldn't be an issue, if anything by the time you get a new card the games should be patched and fixed enough from their dismal launch states.

 

[CapNemo72]

Now, I would actually like to see someone do the test on (an old) crappy laptop, where you can not just upgrade GPU, but you have a good base for streaming.
Like kids' school laptops, so you do not need to buy them "gamer PC" for their Roblox and Fortnite adventures.
Does anyone have this experience?

 

[Julio Franco]

It looks like you could reasonably expect a resale value of around $200.00 for your RTX 2070 S on ebay. That's not great, but if you look at it like a discount toward a 3080, it is not bad. You'll probably get to keep about $170.00 after fees, so that is what I'll use for the math. You are going to apply that to a used 3080, 10 or 12 GB variant doesn't matter, just price. The best 'buy it now' I see on ebay is $520.00. So right now you could reasonably purchase a 3080 and sell your 2070 S and come out to $350 out of pocket. GeForce Now is going to cost your $240.00 per year and you have nothing to sell at the end of that. Let's say you hold on to your 3080 for 2 years (should be fine as it will still be in the ballpark of a 4070 when it is released since the 4070 ti is only about 20% faster) and then you sell it to upgrade to some 50 series card. You'll probably be able to recoup $150.00 or so even in two years minimum. So, two years of Geforce now $480.00, buying a used 3080 and selling your 2070 S and $350 out of pocket with the potential of $150.00 credit toward next purchase in 2 years... costs to upgrade for two years $200.00. Get the 3080.

I like your math exercise and tend to agree with it all, but I appreciate Rob's take on the quality of the gameplay through GeForce Now, for those thinking about it, there are pros/cons to consider and possibly use cases where it may be worth it and many others where it's a hard pass.

 

[DSirius]

Great idea to test GeForce now, and giving us very good article, keep posting.

 

[Hobotz]

Now, I would actually like to see someone do the test on (an old) crappy laptop, where you can not just upgrade GPU, but you have a good base for streaming.
Like kids' school laptops, so you do not need to buy them "gamer PC" for their Roblox and Fortnite adventures.
Does anyone have this experience?

In 2020, during lockdown, this was me. An Acer laptop, 16 gb ram, I-3 (iirc) cpu and... Intel HD-graphics 5200. I can't complain, I love that thing, but for gaming it's always 2-d/indies and lowest graphics for everything else, not that I cared as long as they actually ran at least at stable 30 fps.
So I got a fiber optic internet connection (can't remember the speed, 100 maybe 200 mbps), and 6 months geforce now at founder's edition price (before they killed that).
It was great. I had a bunch of games I had never played because I couldn't run them. Control, in particular, looked and played great at the highest settings. Plague Tale: Innocence, too.
It runs the games you own*, so there's no Stadia fiasco.
*: it doesn't run EVERY game you own, some games are supported, some aren't, but they try to stay on top of that with the latest releases and stuff.

 

[Spudnation]

Actually you really should consider the whole costs of owning a card when comparing to streaming. No 1 being the power consumption. A PC with a RTX3080 consumes about 320w more than the same PC running on IG. That 320w multiplied by 8 hours and 30 days is about 77kwh at the end of the month which at least in my country is about 15.5$ tax included. So that leaves only 4.5 bucks as the real cost which is also very quickly mitigated by the other very real cost which is depreciation. An 800$ 3080 will probably fetch you some 3-400$ in about 3-4 years from now when you decide to upgrade. That's another some 100$/year of depreciation. Taking all these into account streaming is in fact cheaper than owning a card so the only real debate here is in fact the quality of streaming vs the cost of owning.

This is such an important piece that a lot of gamers don't consider. Electricity costs are expensive and faster high end GPUs and CPUs use a lot of electricity. A new smart TV connected via Ethernet uses about a quarter of what a gaming rig consumes.

 

[Gastec]

This is the end goal, cloud everything. You will own nothing and you will be happy...

More likely "You will own nothing and you will pretend to be happy!"

 

[opckieran]

It’d be cool to see Stable Diffusion support.

 

[JrFoz]

Actually you really should consider the whole costs of owning a card when comparing to streaming. No 1 being the power consumption. A PC with a RTX3080 consumes about 320w more than the same PC running on IG. That 320w multiplied by 8 hours and 30 days is about 77kwh at the end of the month which at least in my country is about 15.5$ tax included. So that leaves only 4.5 bucks as the real cost which is also very quickly mitigated by the other very real cost which is depreciation. An 800$ 3080 will probably fetch you some 3-400$ in about 3-4 years from now when you decide to upgrade. That's another some 100$/year of depreciation. Taking all these into account streaming is in fact cheaper than owning a card so the only real debate here is in fact the quality of streaming vs the cost of owning.

Sorry, but 8 hours a day all month? That is not a reasonable figure for all but a very select few. Also, latency is a big deal. If you play a competitive shooter or anything like it, it is not great. Lastly, the game selection is very limiting for a lot of people. I see the point of this service, but it has way more pitfalls beyond monetary considerations.

 

[JrFoz]

This is such an important piece that a lot of gamers don't consider. Electricity costs are expensive and faster high end GPUs and CPUs use a lot of electricity. A new smart TV connected via Ethernet uses about a quarter of what a gaming rig consumes.

While you are correct on the reduced power draw, that figure is far from typical. Most people are not gaming 8 hours a day.

 

[passwordistaco]

Actually you really should consider the whole costs of owning a card when comparing to streaming. No 1 being the power consumption. A PC with a RTX3080 consumes about 320w more than the same PC running on IG. That 320w multiplied by 8 hours and 30 days is about 77kwh at the end of the month which at least in my country is about 15.5$ tax included. So that leaves only 4.5 bucks as the real cost which is also very quickly mitigated by the other very real cost which is depreciation. An 800$ 3080 will probably fetch you some 3-400$ in about 3-4 years from now when you decide to upgrade. That's another some 100$/year of depreciation. Taking all these into account streaming is in fact cheaper than owning a card so the only real debate here is in fact the quality of streaming vs the cost of owning.

Jesus, I wish I had 8 hours per day for gaming. But then I wouldn't have the money for a GPU.

 

[RSpence1115]

Really need an article that shows all the things streaming doesn't let you do, I dont care how cheap it is, its a sham.

you'll be spending money on games you'll never own, games that rely on other things to work at all, games you cant mod or use trainers in, I know gamers get bent outta shape when talk of cheats comes up but they give games pretty much infinite replay value.

imo if youve been gaming on pc long enough then buying the hardware or saving up for something new shouldn't be an issue, if anything by the time you get a new card the games should be patched and fixed enough from their dismal launch states.

On the "games you don't own" point, on Geforce Now you have to buy the games on Steam, Ubisoft etc, so you can still go play them on a regular PC and still own them if the service ends or you stop paying.

Xbox streaming does come with Game Pass, yes, but you can also play games you bought for your Xbox via streaming too.

 

[JrFoz]

Jesus, I wish I had 8 hours per day for gaming. But then I wouldn't have the money for a GPU.

Agreed. We are not mining here… Gaming should use way less power than he is figuring.

 

[WhiteLeaff]

Let your internet crash or get unstable and you'll know which one is better.

 

[ZackL04]

FPS limitations are dude to threadripper cpu

Not a bad alternative to someone who has good internet and wants to get into pc gaming any way they can. You can even get this on TV’s

 

[mcnabney]

Or just buy a console.

No $2000 PC required.

 

[ddferrari]

I think this is a move in the right direction for anyone who can't (or doesn't want to) spring for an expensive GPU. I'll take local hardware every day, but it's not an option for many gamers.

Let's hope this service remains viable for cloud gamers!