CES 2018 | NVIDIA GeForce NOW brings modern AAA gaming to el cheapo PCs

Ever wished your 10 year old PC or notebook can play PUBG at 1080p at max settings, that too at 60 fps? Wishful thinking, much? Well, not exactly. NVIDIA is opening up the GeForce NOW game streaming service to Windows PCs and macOS machines as a free beta starting today. The service connects to popular game stores and users can directly stream and play games on their computers. All the heavy-duty processing is done by supercomputers in NVIDIA's datacenters scattered around the world.

NVIDIA has also partnered with Ubisoft to bring the Uplay PC Games catalog for GeForce NOW users. The service is currently streaming a selection of Ubisoft's top game franchises such as Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. NVIDIA is touting that the cloud based processing can allow streaming of 1080p graphics at up to 120 fps. NVIDIA showed off some numbers for popular games streamed using the service and the numbers are pretty insane, considering the amount of number crunching the supercomputers in NVIDIA's datacenters would be doing for handling many such simultaneous requests. 

Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic Games, was quoted as saying, "It’s really fun to be able to play Paragon and Fortnite using NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW service. The games stream very smoothly, even on my Macbook Air, giving you the feeling you’re playing natively. Well done, NVIDIA!”

Since the platform is cloud based, the client requirements are minimal even for the latest AAA titles such as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), Arma 3, Garry's Mod, Fortnite etc. Gamers need not worry about patches or driver updates as they will be automatically done on the server side. Cloud saves allow gamers to carry on their progress irrespective of the device they game on. The service itself will also be receiving regular updates including capacity augmentation with additional datacenters. NVIDIA said that their 10th datacenter has opened recently in Amsterdam. 

GeForce NOW is available in public beta for Windows and macOS computers in North America and Europe. The app has been localized in French and German with local language support for many top titles. The demand of the service is undeniably huge, therefore, gamers need to get on to a waitlist before they get an invite to try out the service. The enrollment for the waitlist can be done here.

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