GeForce NOW: The Cloud Gaming Service for PC Gamers

by Phil Eisler

Two hundred million PC gamers can’t be wrong. They already know GeForce powers the best in keyboard and mouse gaming. GeForce NOW is no exception, bringing everything that PC gamers love into tomorrow’s cloud gaming world.

With a simple, click-to-play interface and an open ecosystem, PC games can be played anywhere, anytime on any Mac or PC. GeForce NOW is a gaming PC in the cloud for the 1 billion computers that aren’t game ready.

The service works by upgrading your local, underpowered or incompatible hardware — whether it’s a PC with integrated graphics or a Mac that doesn’t have access to all the latest games — into a state-of-the-art GeForce gaming PC in the cloud. It’s the first gaming rig that you never have to worry about upgrading, patching or updating.

GeForce NOW is an open platform, allowing users to “bring their own games” from the top stores. There are already more than 500 games supported on GeForce NOW, with more added every week.

We’ve spent the last decade building GeForce NOW to be the premier PC gaming experience in the cloud, optimizing every millisecond of the process and reducing latency to a point where it’s negligible for most players.

This starts with how we render and encode frames in our data centers, using the gold standard for PC gamers: Intel processors and NVIDIA GPUs and drivers. It continues to the local playing experience that feels like you’re sitting in front of a high-end gaming PC.

Our passion will always be PC gaming. We’re extending that to the cloud, so everyone can be a gamer and have the experiences we’ve come to love.

Powering the Next Generation of Gaming

At our GPU Technology Conference this week, we announced new RTX blade servers that are optimized to stream a high-performance PC gaming experience from cloud data centers, including GeForce NOW.

Built on the Turing GPU architecture, RTX Servers deliver next-generation gaming performance with cinematic-quality graphics enhanced by ray-tracing and AI capabilities. They provide GeForce RTX 2080 performance and can be scaled to support millions of PC gamers via server deployments around the world.

Virtual Reality is Now a Cloud Reality

GeForce NOW will also enable wireless VR and AR.

High-quality VR experiences require incredible computational horsepower. For truly immersive experiences, you need 4K rendering at 90-Hz refresh rates, something most modern devices are years away from achieving.

That’s where the new RTX Servers and GeForce NOW come in, rendering on our high-performance Turing GPUs to achieve this level of performance. We’re also working with 5G infrastructure and service providers, like AT&T and HTC, to enable wireless head-mounted displays powered by RTX Servers to make VR in the cloud a wireless reality.

Global Expansion Through GeForce NOW Alliance Partners

The best cloud gaming experience pairs high-performance graphics with high-speed, fixed-line and mobile broadband networks for low-latency and consistent quality of service. To achieve this, we formed the GeForce NOW Alliance program, expanding GeForce NOW through partnerships with global telecommunications providers.

In addition to the 15 existing GeForce NOW data centers in North America and western Europe, Softbank and LG Uplus will be among the first partners to deploy RTX cloud gaming servers in Japan and Korea, respectively, later this year.

As part of the GeForce NOW Alliance program, we’re also working with HTC on the recently announced 5G Hub, allowing users to stream high-fidelity PC games over 5G or Wi-Fi connections. The 5G Hub serves as a connection point to the fastest 5G networks in the world, serving as both a 5G hotspot and an in-home entertainment hub that can power gaming, mobile and business applications of all shapes and sizes.

Introducing the GeForce NOW SDK

Getting gamers playing fast and seamlessly across various stores and platforms is always a GeForce NOW priority.  That’s why we’ve created the GeForce NOW SDK. It’s a set of APIs, components and tools that optimize the end-user experience through single sign-on, instant play with reduced launch time and automatic cloud updates. And the SDK provides a rich set of metrics for publishers to track the performance of their games.

Developers can learn more in the NVIDIA Developer Zone.

Together with partners from around the globe, we’ll be able to scale GeForce NOW to serve millions of gamers, with the games they want to play.

The future of cloud gaming looks bright. With Google, Microsoft and other top tech companies joining the fold, gamers will have the freedom to choose where and how they game. And for those who choose to have the best PC gaming experience in the cloud, there’s GeForce NOW.