In October this year, the GeForce Now cloud gaming service launched in Russia. Actually, it was available before, but for registration it was necessary to get a key, which not every player got. Now you can register and play. I already wrote about this service before, now let's learn a little more about it, plus compare it with two other cloud gaming services that are available in the Russian Federation - Loudplay and PlayKey.
By the way, let me remind you that all three services make it possible to play at maximum speed in the latest masterpieces of the gaming world - you can do this even from an old laptop. Of course, not quite ancient, it still has to cope with the processing of a video stream, but definitely low-power.
GeForce Now
Let's start with the network connection and hardware requirements.
For a comfortable game, you need a channel with a bandwidth of at least 15 Mbps. In this case, you can expect a video stream with 720p quality and 60 fps. If you want to play at 1080p and 60 fps, then the bandwidth should be higher - more than 30 Mbps is better.
As for the PC, the requirements for Windows are as follows:
- Dual core X86 CPU 2.0GHz or higher.
- 4GB of RAM.
- GPU that supports DirectX 11 and above.
- NVIDIA GeForce 600 series or newer graphics card.
- AMD Radeon HD 3000 or newer video card.
- Intel HD Graphics 2000 series or newer graphics card.
So far, the only data center of the service is located in the Russian Federation, so residents of the capital and suburbs will receive the highest quality picture and the lowest ping. The radius at which good results can be expected is several hundred kilometers, a maximum of 1000.
And what about the prices?
Now they are already known. Not so much, but the service cannot be called almost free, provided that you need to buy games. You need a Steam, Uplay or Blizzard's Battle.net account to play. If there are purchased games there, we tie them to GFN without any problems and play. Now the library has about 500 new games compatible with the service, the list is updated every week. Here is the complete list. There are, by the way, free games that GFN calls “popular”, but finding something worthwhile among them is not so easy.
What is good is the availability of a two-week free trial period. Those. if the service does not suit you because you are far from Moscow, there are lags, blurring of the image, etc. - you can untie the card without losing money and look for another alternative.
Checking the connection
Register an account, link a card, and play? No, you need to go through one more stage - checking the quality of your communication channel. During the check, GFN gives a list of possible problems, so it will be possible to understand whether there will be lags or not. But even if the service shows a complete incompatibility of the connection, you can skip the settings window and still try to play. Sometimes GFN says that the connection is completely seamed, but the game still goes well. So it's better to check. If we try from Moscow with a normal connection, we get this result.
By the way, do not think that if you are from Moscow or the region, you will receive a direct communication channel with the GFN data center. Not at all - there can be a lot of intermediate stages / servers. So before you start the game, it's better to check all this - at least using tracert on the command line or the winmtr utility.
There are a lot of comments on the net about GFN. For someone in Kaliningrad or St. Petersburg, everything works perfectly with top settings and the latest games, while someone lives in Moscow and has “soap” instead of a normal picture. So the 14-day trial period is a great opportunity to test everything yourself. “One at a time” – this saying is very relevant in relation to GFN.
And yes, for cloud gaming it is best to connect via Ethernet, or via a 5 GHz wireless channel. Otherwise, there will be lags and "soap".
Picture quality
Since the last attempt to play on this service, only about two months have passed. There is not much difference, although the problems (blurring of the picture, etc.) have become a little less. Here are the test results from two months earlier.
Despite a good connection and Moscow servers, problems happen. If something is wrong with the Internet, the system detects this and displays a yellow or red icon that lets the player know that problems may begin now. And they appear - we are talking, first of all, about the distortion of the picture, as happens with all streams when the quality of communication is violated.
But there are no problems with control - even if there is a warning about connection problems, there are no lags, the character obeys the button presses on the controller instantly - as is the case with the game on a local PC.
Output. The quality of the service hasn't changed much since the last test. The service is convenient, but there are still many problems - it needs to be corrected, “reached out” and finalized. One of the main drawbacks for Russian gamers is that there is only one data center, which is located in Moscow. The farther from the capital - the more difficult it is (at least for now) to play because of the "soap" and lags.
On Habré, by the way that Geforce Now is a by-product of Nvidia, for which the company does not have enough resources to promote it in different countries. Therefore, she resorted to the help of partners - in Russia - Safmar, in Korea - LG U +, in Japan - SoftBank. If so, it is difficult to say whether the quality of the service will improve and, if so, how quickly.
But besides GFN, there are two more Russian services - Loudplay and PlayKey. In the last article, I dwelled on them in detail, so this time we will not disassemble them “by the bones”, like fresh GFN. By the way, the latter can be considered half Russian, since Nvidia's partner from the Russian Federation is engaged in its infrastructure and deployment.
loud play
This service has servers in Moscow, the quality of the video stream is not bad, the bitrate is 3-20 Mbps, FPS is 30 and 60. Here is an example of a game, this is Witcher 3 with maximum settings.
There are several useful features for the gamer here, including the ability to select a connection server, with a view of the characteristics of each of them.
But there are still more disadvantages than GFN. First, a rather complicated pricing system. Users' money is converted here into specialized credit units, which are called "loans". The opportunity to play costs from 50 kopecks per minute, depending on the package. Plus, a paid option is to save games - this will cost the user 500 rubles per month. But games are saved not for the entire cloud as a whole, but for a specific server. If you leave it, or if it is closed for some reason, the game progress and all downloaded games of the user will be lost, and there will be no compensation.
For some gamers, the upside here is that LoudPlay allows you to play unlicensed games.
Playkey
Here I like the fact that the service adapts to the user with the help of a configurator and a small questionnaire. This helps to personalize the process and the “inner kitchen” of the service.
Pricing is per minute, starting at 1 ruble per minute with the purchase of the maximum package. There are no paid game saves or other additional services; everything is included in the initial package. Player profiles, games, and saves are stored in the cloud and are accessible to anyone. servers.
The biggest plus is that the service has several servers in different cities of Russia - not only Moscow, but also Ufa and Perm. This makes it possible to connect without any special lags and problems from a larger number of regions than in the case of the previous two services.
During testing, I did not have any special lags - sometimes the picture was a little blurry, but not in the same way as when playing on other services mentioned above. There are practically no artifacts, as in GFN. Well, the cursor does not lag behind the user's mouse movements - this has already been mentioned earlier. Video stream resolution is up to 1920*1080. The site has a choice of other parameters, including 1280*720.
As a general conclusion I can say that GFN and PlayKey have remained my favorites from Russia. So far, GFN has more glitches and problems than PlayKey. It is not clear whether NVIDIA will fix the bottlenecks mentioned above, but I would like to see it fixed. Otherwise, players may start to leave for other services, not only those that are already working now, but also those that will appear in the future. An example is Google Stadia, the launch of which many are waiting for.
Source: habr.com
