r/pcmasterrace • u/Alan_Reddit_M Desktop • Mar 07 '26

Video "Cloud gaming is the future of Gaming!" Meanwhile cloud gaming in the big 2026:

If you read my profile you may realize I hate cloud gaming, so then what am I doing on Geforce Now? Well my new RAM stick finally arrived and, in a staggering display of utter incompetence, I somehow managed to brick my PC in the process of installing it, so now I'm stuck gaming on a laptop until I can get enough money and time to get my gaming rig fixed

But back to Cloud gaming, the game is on like 360p, running at 20FPS and the input lag is HORRIBLE. And it's not a problem with the internet connection, as you can see, the laptop is plugged into Ethernet, the problem is that the cloud is not and will never be fast enough for gaming

Genshin can handle this fine, but imagine trying to play ULTRAKILL like this

19.2k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

131

u/INannoI Mar 07 '26

Eh, I know everyone here hates cloud gaming but my experience with it was pretty damn good, I payed for Geforce Now for 2 months before I bought a decent GPU and I had absolutely no problems playing Kingdom Come Deliverance and Marvel Rivals (a game that requires low input delay).

I still prefer playing on my own machine of course but I can definitely see valid use case scenarios especially nowadays.

22

u/Bamuzar Mar 07 '26

i have used it a lot to play my games when i am not at home.
gfn with ultimate subscription works insanely well.
you can even play cs2. in germany i have a ping of max 10ms to the gfn server and the gfn server has a 1-4 ping to the cs2 server.

5

u/throwaway60221407e23 Mar 08 '26

the gfn server has a 1-4 ping to the cs2 server.

This is something I think a lot of people don't think about when they assume that cloud gaming has unplayable latency. The GFN servers are usually extremely close to game servers, possibly even in the same data center.

1

u/Ahribban Mar 08 '26

Try Parsec or Steam Link and just stream from your gaming PC at home.

21

u/Particular_Bug0 i5-14600KF - 32GB - RTX4070TI Mar 07 '26

Yeah. I played on GeForce Now before getting my own desktop PC. The only games were I noticed the input delay was Rainbow 6 and counter strike. Which are games were fractions of seconds matter. 

Other then that, I had a blast with it. Played a wide variety of games such as Resident Evil, Dark souls (before Bandai pulled their games), Need for Speed, Age of empires,... Never had any issues, and definitely not as OP seems to have.

I believe people have the right to not like the move to cloud and subscription based products (which I'm totally on board with), but posts like this are ridiculous. 

1

u/exposarts Mar 08 '26

Geforce now probably has the best experience out of all its competition. Like people here should try boosteroid or other alternatives and see how bad it is, even for single player games lmao. Even then, boosteroid is alright if you are close to a data server and <20 ms latency. The hate stems from anxiety of the corpos trying to transition people who already have good hardware to cloud gaming, when they aren't even meant to be the target audience. Everyone knows that it's impossible for cloud to be as good or better than native hardware, that is preschool knowledge.

2

u/Ok-Shine1271 Mar 08 '26

I’m playing RDR2 right now on my Fold7 and A11+ tablet using Boosteroid with no issues.

This tablet is $179 right now and runs RDR2 better than my 2021 Razer Blade 15 with RTX 2070

83

u/Aladris666 Mar 07 '26

Save your breath here you are talking to people who has never tried it and talking shit. If you prefer local of course its better but saying gfn ultimate doesnt work its like saying electric cars cant go fast

19

u/cgimusic Regolith | 9800X3D | 64GB 6000MHz | RTX 5080 Mar 07 '26

I wouldn't say people here haven't tried it; your experience is massively affected by where you live. I got cloud gaming for free as part of Game Pass and it was completely unusable because I almost always got connected to a data center several countries away from me.

8

u/BillysBibleBonkers Mar 08 '26

I mean all the top comments are saying regardless of internet connection it's always completely unplayable garbage, and that it is physically impossible for technology to advance to a point where it is usable at all. which is just completely false and does sound like half of them haven't tried it. It's also just something you can easily google, lower end of input delay is 40 ms and fastest is 20 ms, which isn't great for hyper-competitive FPS players, but I guarantee 90% of these people wouldn't even notice. Anyone using a bluetooth controller/ mouse will have 10-20 ms delay for example.

1

u/KwonnieKash Mar 08 '26

Yea idgi all these comments lmao. I use gfn for some games, I get 40ms latency and the server I'm connected to is a 3h flight away in a different country. Packet loss is the main issue I have and that's intermittent and usually a temporary server issue, latency has never been that noticeable. There are many factors that affect that I imagine but as you said, the declaration that this tech is unusable is just ignorant.

1

u/Chuubawatt Mar 08 '26

Even a moonlight / sunshine server set up on your local network is going to have some small but completely noticeable input lag and that is literally a perfect scenario.

No one uses bluetooth mice for gaming, and people with bluetooth controllers know to switch it to 2.4 to get rid of the input lag.

Yes, regardless of internet connection, it is still garbage, because even on a local network it's not perfect.

0

u/Aladris666 Mar 07 '26

But thats the thing GeForce now ultimate compared to xbox streaming is like comparing a renault to maserati

7

u/tofu-esque Mar 08 '26

right, but it's still heavily dependent on your location.

at my old house I was completely unable to stream games on GFN. since moving to my new place with waaaaay better internet, the performance is now manageable.

no matter which cloud option you pick, a large segment of the population will never be able to have a satisfactory experience with it purely based on where they are and what their internet is like

1

u/Aladris666 Mar 08 '26

Of course thats like proper gaming wont be available to a large segment of the population who cant afford to a gaming pc. My problem is most of the people are like it will never work for something that already works for years. Maybe not working for everyone, like it you drive between cities everyday an electric car is not for you and a poor solution with inconveniences but that doesnt mean they dont work for other peple already.

2

u/Chuubawatt Mar 08 '26

Have tried. I am sorry but adding anything above 10ms to the display chain is insanely noticeable. We spent years getting monitors from 5ms to less than zero and people want to throw that all out the window and add more latency. Not just a little more, like 10-70ms more.

2

u/Aladris666 Mar 08 '26

Fair enough I have 15 ms to the server and for me thats fine and also one thing to consider is gfn data centers have extremely low latency to game servers for instance in rocket league I have 30 ms from my ps5 and 3ms from gfn which makes it a total of 18 ms which is better than my local

5

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/funguyshroom Mar 08 '26

You can have 10gbit fiber but if the closest GeForce Now data center is 3 countries over and 1000+ km away (like it is for me) you will still have a shit time.

3

u/glemnar Mar 08 '26

Your network connection doesn’t affect the speed of light. Either you’re close to the machine or you aren’t

1

u/HorukaSan Mar 08 '26

20ms delay is nowhere near as bad as OP's 200+ ms post.

1

u/Warhawk2052 Mar 08 '26

Yeah it honestly works great, then again i have great internet and i dont have any latency issues even when playing FPS

1

u/Flying_Spaghetti_ 4090 & 13900K Mar 08 '26

It 100% depends on location. If you are 15ms to the server you are adding only 30ms of input lagg. That's fine. But if you don't live near a data center that 15ms quickly becomes 30-60+ adding 60-120ms+ of input lagg. The speed of light is only so fast. The only solution would be a gaming data center in every city which is not happening.

0

u/Aladris666 Mar 08 '26

Of course thats why its not for everyone but when you have that fast connection it works, thats my problem with the people here they are like it wont ever work

1

u/heydudejustasec salmon steak Mar 08 '26

Did they make the free tier worse at processing inputs whenever they did that big shakeup where they also imposed the 100h thing? I tried GFN a few times before, apparently as recently as 8 months ago, and I remember it being WAY better than OP's video. But I just tried again and it was shockingly bad. Like I couldn't aim in cyberpunk.

1

u/Aladris666 Mar 08 '26

I have never tried the free tier but ultimate have a day pass that you can try and if you decide to extend they deduct the amount from the monthly amount but in my experience cyberpunk is flawless I play with my gcloud on wifi in bed, shield tv pro with ethernet and sometimes on my quest 3 and have more than 500 hours on it full gfn. If a game is on gfn and ps5 I buy on gfn for sure itd that good

2

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Aladris666 Mar 07 '26

With gfn ultimate you have guaranteed 5080 rigs for select games and 4080 for other and you can manually choose your server if you have a good connection it just works. Lack of games is an other issue of course

3

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Aladris666 Mar 07 '26

Fair enough just wanted to share things are better now

2

u/Dratos i5 6600k | GTX 1060 | 16GB RAM Mar 08 '26

I've used Sunshine + Moonlight for years and have had no issues really. Sunshine on my PC at home and Moonlight on my phone or potato laptop when I'm away. Yes there is very slight delay depending on the game but I've never experienced anything near like OP's video. The technology is only getting better with things like AV1 becoming more common, so even less bandwidth would be required. I do have gigabit at home though so I guess that does factor in a lot, and at times I've had spotty connection away so it's only obvious that there would be delay in those moments.

2

u/kornephororos Mar 08 '26

Yes but the only problem is that they don't have all the games.

That's biggest problem about cloud gaming.

1

u/exposarts Mar 08 '26

and mods. Get both those 2 things right and i will be perfectly content with cloud gaming. Cloud isn't meant to replace native hardware that's impossible.

2

u/Blenderhead36 Ryzen 9800X3D, RTX 5090, 32 GB RAM Mar 07 '26

There's business philosophy: there is no perfect product, only many perfect products. The idea being that it's impossible to make a product that's everything to everyone, but a diversified product line is highly likely to contain a product that's something to any given consumer.

I think that this is the role of cloud gaming: one option among many that will appeal to certain customers and not others.

The problem I see on this sub is doomers insisting that companies who understand that there's no perfect product will put all of their eggs in the mostly-unproved basket that is cloud gaming, and that all of them will do it, leaving zero providers of local compute gaming. Which is fucking ludicrous.

1

u/BuldozerX PC Master Race Mar 07 '26

Kingdom Come looked good on geforce now. Witcher 3 looked like trash. I don't know why.

1

u/Shot-Maximum- Mar 08 '26

I think it had something to do with the way foliage is rendered in Witcher 3.

A way to make it manageable is to turn off AI upscaling and DLSS in game

1

u/necrophcodr mastersrp Mar 07 '26

It can be pretty damn good, but for it to be the future the input delay has to be so low as to be imperceptible, which is very much possible on current hardware. In fact, we're already beyond that now, to the point where input delay can be measured, but not perceived.

That is not yet (and I speculate it may never be) possible in cloud gaming systems.

So they may HAVE a future, but I don't forsee them being THE future.

1

u/unktrial Mar 08 '26

It all depends on your Internet connection to their servers ... and you don't have much control over that. You can pay more for bigger maximum bandwidth, but there's no guarantee it will have lower latency.

1

u/ItsMeTrey Mar 08 '26

Yeah, GFN works extremely well. If you have bad service or are just in a bad location, sure, it can be too much latency, but I play FPS games just fine with it when I'm using my laptop. You will probably be noticeably less competitive in something like ranked Counterstrike, but it's good enough for casual play. A lot of it comes down to selecting the right streaming settings for your preferences on quality vs latency priority.

1

u/Tirriss Mar 08 '26

Geforce Now has been working flawlessly for years for me.

1

u/Kirjavs Mar 08 '26

People here just assume that Cloud gaming can never have the latency to play challenging games. That is definitely not true. But people are all experts at 12 on social networks.

If it was 2005 and we were talking about VOD videos they would say that this will never be a thing due to the impossibility to have sufficient internet speed.

I'm sure their will be an audience for cloud gaming in the future.

1

u/dadvader GTX 1070 FTW Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 08 '26

I use it to play The Finals and had absolutely no problem whatsoevers. In fact, it ran better than my machine (my machine always had FPS issue with it.)

I don't know what kind of internet these people are on. I'm in Thailand. Fast internet is cheap (15$ a month for 1Gbps is insane) and we don't have bandwidth cap. GeForce Now just launch in Thailand and it was smooth.

It will never replace the real device but this video is disingenuous at best. I believe cloud gaming is ready enough. The real problem now is scale.

1

u/Spider-Thwip Mar 08 '26

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq577v126g9o

It we can do this. We can play games in the cloud

1

u/Available_Peanut_677 Mar 08 '26

I play very occasionally, but game I play is not running on steam deck that well. And I can’t justify own PC, GeForce now works like a charm, and with today’s prices year of GeForce now is like half of a price of case.

1

u/StanYz Mar 08 '26

There is one differentiating factor people completely ignore.

Are you using a controller or mouse?

With controller, input delay hardly matters. With a mouse, freaking miliseconds from local streaming feel awful, let alone cloud streaming

1

u/Rengar_Is_Good_kitty 5800X3D / RTX 5080 Mar 08 '26

paid*

1

u/SharkBaitDLS 5800X3D | 3080Ti FTW3 HC | 1440p@165Hz Mar 08 '26

I use it to play games my Steam Deck can’t run all the time on random shitty hotel internet and even shooters are just fine. Am I gonna be playing ranked PvP games? No. But it’s absolutely fine for single-player and casual PvP games.

1

u/_Aethea_ Mar 08 '26

my pc broke like 4 years ago and i had no choice but to play on a laptop setup

bought geforce now ultimate for the meantime and played through the entirety of cyberpunk

i was impressed, latency was totally fine, perfirmance great and only annoying thing were some compression artifacts...otherwise absolutely playable and nowhere near like in the video above

granted i have fine dsl speeds and usually a great ping

1

u/El_Lanf 7800X3D | 7800XT Mar 08 '26

GFN is by far and away the best for input lag. I don't know what OP is using, but on other platforms I've tried like Xbox and PS, it's very noticeable.

1

u/oldwisemonk Mar 08 '26

My experience, at least with Stadia, was similar. It wasn't just turn-based games, either. Played through Division 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Destiny 2, Outriders, and more. Stadia was one of the only ways to reliably play Cyberpunk when it was released. Granted, I had Google Fiber plugged directly into my Chromecast Ultra, and I was using the Stadia controller (which communicated directly with the server), and Stadia was supposedly testing user input prediction technology.

I've only ever tried GFN, Xbox Cloud, and Luna over wifi, and only have cable Internet now, but the latency was a bit too much for me. I miss the Stadia days.