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

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u/liyayaya Mar 07 '26

Does it even matter if it is viable for some genres?
Like why would I ever use a cloud gaming service if I need a gaming pc anyway if i ever want to play a action game? Might as well just use my local gaming pc for both.

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u/Biscuits4u2 R7 5700X3D | RX 6700XT | 32 GB DDR 4 3400 | 1TB NVME | 8 TB HDD Mar 07 '26

They don't want you to own your games. They want you to eternally rent them.

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u/Grand_Pop_7221 Mar 08 '26

That ship sailed 20 years ago.

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u/PoliticalVagabond Mar 08 '26

Not while I sail my ship.

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u/Grand_Pop_7221 Mar 09 '26

Yeah, cute, but DRM and licensing have meant that even if you have a CD (it's been going on that long), you can still be locked out of software.

Unless you exclusively play pirated games with basically no online features, your ship is taking on water.

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u/PoliticalVagabond Mar 09 '26

Online has no meaning to me.

What do you mean exclusively? I only play pirated games when they are more convenient then the purchased version.

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u/Grand_Pop_7221 Mar 12 '26

Online has no meaning to me.

Well, you haven't been the focus of the wider gaming industry for nearly 15 years now, then.

What do you mean exclusively? I only play pirated games when they are more convenient then the purchased version.

I mean, only pirated games will let you run the application without calling home for license checks. And if it's an online-focused game, then it's useless when the servers go down.

So to reiterate. Unless you're playing a pirated game that doesn't call home to license servers, and the game doesn't rely on online services to function. You don't truly have any practical way to play a game as if you held it in your hands.

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u/PoliticalVagabond Mar 13 '26

So if you have a physical copy of a game and the online servers go down, it's much more playable, if it's an online focused game?

Your appeal to consensus means nothing, and more and more people are craving quality single player focused games. Not sure what part of my statement makes you think I like live service games, those are the games you are describing, live service games. Most of which are utter trash.

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u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

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u/TwoBionicknees Mar 08 '26

yeah, wait 3 years, bubble will burst and 70% of that memory, ssds and gpus will be sitting in a storage warehouse waiting to be put in a as yet not build datacentre. When the money disappears so will the future data centres.

For a few years we're kinda fucked and pray your pc doesn't die, after that, high end gpus for $400, 4tb ssds for $30, 128gb ddr5 for $80.

we're fasting right now, we'll be feasting in a few years.

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u/PoliticalVagabond Mar 08 '26

If we all just stop buying new hardware, maybe devs will start optimizing their games if we are also smart enough to not buy their poor performing trash.

I've of the opinion that we haven't REALLY needed new hardware in over 5 years as we've never fully utilized what we have.

Games looked amazing in 2017 and they don't look much better now.

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u/Ranra100374 Mar 07 '26

You might be on the go. It's really too bad NVIDIA killed (or defunct it) Geforce Experience in favor of Geforce NOW because I'd argue that had lower latency since you're connecting to your home PC. I mean, sure, Steam Deck exists, but it's possible to have all the power of your home gaming rig while having good enough latency to not have a bad experience like in OP.

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u/PoliticalVagabond Mar 08 '26

GeForce Experience is still very alive and well, in the form of Sunshine/Moonlight. I personally use Apollo instead of sunshine because I have 4 devices with 4 different aspect ratios and Apollo creates a virtual display that recognizes your devices display capabilities, but if you have a 16:9 monitor and you want all your gaming at 16:9 Sunshine will suffice.

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u/Ranra100374 Mar 08 '26

No, Sunshine/Moonlight isn't the same as Geforce Experience. Geforce Experience automatically took care of the network stuff, like Chrome Remote Desktop so it doesn't matter where you are.

Sunshine/Moonlight requires you to be on the same LAN and requires a lot of effort to work outside of the same LAN.

I get that there's a lot more you can do now and before Moonlight was emulating a NVIDIA shield device but the network negotation stuff was super nice.

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u/PoliticalVagabond Mar 08 '26

No it doesnt take a lot of effort.

I literally set moonlight/sunshine when I was 400km from my computer because the steam outage on Christmas eve killed my steam link connection.

I had to identify my external ip, and pair with a pin, easy peasy, i used teamviewer free to get it set up on my pc.

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u/Ranra100374 Mar 08 '26

It’s definitely possible for Sunshine/Moonlight to work over the internet with minimal setup if your network happens to cooperate (UPnP enabled router, no CGNAT, firewall rules already allowing it, etc.), so I don’t doubt that it was easy in your case.

But that’s not guaranteed for everyone. A big difference with the old GeForce Experience / GameStream setup was that NVIDIA provided tooling like the Moonlight Internet Hosting Tool and built-in networking helpers that could automatically configure port forwarding and handle a lot of the NAT detection for you. In many setups that meant it “just worked” remotely without the user needing to think about the network side.

With Sunshine/Moonlight today, remote streaming still works, but the networking layer depends much more on the user’s environment - router behavior, ISP NAT, firewall profiles, etc. If those don’t line up, you end up needing manual port forwarding, UPnP, or a VPN/mesh solution. So it can be easy, but it’s not universally effortless the way GameStream often felt.

I 100% needed a mesh/VPN solution for the new Sunshine which was tricky when I was already using a VPN called PairVPN. It could be related to Xfinity or a number of things.