Nvidia has no interest in competing with the PS5 and Xbox Series X

Nvidia has no interest in competing with the PS5 and Xbox Series X with its GeForce Now service, feeling the future of streaming will be complimentary to consoles, not competitive.

Nvidia vice president and general manager of GeForce Now cloud gaming Phil Eisler told Trusted Reviews the company sees GeForce Now as a complimentary service, not replacement for traditional consoles and gaming rigs.

“They [consoles and gaming PCs] are complementary. Gamers already play games many ways: on PCs, Macs, TVs and Mobile devices. Cloud is becoming another way to play. Cloud enables more cross-platform play so that you can enjoy your PC games on your TV, or phone, for example,” he said.

“Local play on a gaming PC or console is still the highest performance option. However, cloud game-streaming offers a lot of convenience and is more affordable.”

Eisler said this is a key reason the firm has no interest pursuing exclusives for the platform.

“We built GeForce Now to be open, and we don’t want to compete with our publisher partners, so we’re not looking for exclusives. If there’s a game you want to play, we believe you should be able to play it on any device you own,” he said.

GeForce Now is a cloud streaming service designed to let you stream games you own on PC platforms, including the Steam and Epic stores, to mobile devices over the cloud. It works in a similar way to Google Stadia and Amazon’s forthcoming Luna service.

GeForce Now launched in beta last year, but suffered from early setbacks as a number of publishers opted to remove their wares. Eisler said the firm has since worked with publishers to make it as quick and easy as possible to opt in or out of GeForce Now.

“We worked with Valve to create a simple one-click system on Steam for publishers to opt-in for streaming their game on GeForce Now. The response is fantastic: hundreds of publishers opted in to bring more than 2000 games to GeForce Now,” he said.

“GeForce Now remains a great distribution option for publishers because we have zero platform fees, and since we use standard PC builds, no additional resources are required for porting, or for support.”

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He added that the firm is working hard to improve the quality of GeForce Now in the very near future. This includes the rollout of sharper resolutions and Ray Tracing, plus compatibility with new types of devices.

“We’re exploring 8K. But, because of current internet bandwidth constraints, we think that it’s too early to deploy. As we increase streaming resolutions, we’ll be able to impact visuals with HDR, RTX ray tracing and DLSS,” he told Trusted Reviews,” he said.

“We’re working hard to make GeForce Now available on all of your screens. Over the past couple of years we’ve added a new device type about every quarter: Mac, PC, Android TV, Android Mobile, Chrome browser and, now, iOS Safari browser. The browser clients are also really flexible and enable a lot of devices like Linux computers and ARM-based PCs and Macs. Stay tuned for more announcements in 2021.”

Ray Tracing is a graphical technology Nvidia brought to market with its first wave of RTX cards in 2018. It lets games render more realistic lighting effects. Highlights include more realistic shadows and reflection effects. The tech has been listed as a key selling point for the new PS5 and Xbox Series X/S games consoles.

Game streaming services, such as GeForce Now, high bandwidth requirements have been a key factor hindering their performance. As it stands GeForce Now still requires data speeds of at least 10 Mbps for basic 720p streaming. Eisler said the firm doesn’t plan to reduce the service’s minimum speed requirements.

“We don’t plan on decreasing this because of Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth, which states that Users’ bandwidth grows by 50% per year. Therefore, instead, we are working to take advantage of tomorrow’s higher bandwidth,” he said.

Data speeds are expected to rise sharply next year thanks to the continued rollout of 5G. 5G is a rapidly growing new networking technology designed to sit alongside 4G. It offers a number of key advantages including markedly faster giga-bit-per second data speeds that make services like GeForce Now possible on mobile connections.