 For the foreseeable future, the way to get the best image quality and the lowest latency is going to be to game on a machine, be it a console or a PC that is physically in the same room as yourself. But if for whatever reason you won't or can't get access to a physical gaming machine, cloud computing promises to bring the power of the Enterprise Data Center onto a screen the size of your TV, your computer, or even your phone. But with so many services out there claiming to do basically the same thing, which one delivers the best experience? To answer that question, we brought a filthy casual and a seasoned casual who could probably also stand to take a shower. What are you saying? I'm saying that I'm a little bit more sensitive to latency than you. And I'm filthy? You know what this is? Remote control. For what? The shield. Nvidia Shield, because that's the only way that you can use GeForce Now on a TV. We're going to start with GeForce Now because I think it's the simplest. OK. You have games that you own and you want to play them elsewhere. Perfect. And you don't have a computer. You may not have a gaming computer, but you need to have a computer. OK. You just pay Nvidia for the privilege of being able to play anywhere or you don't pay. There's a free tier. And if you do pay, it's only five bucks a month. OK. We're using an Nvidia Shield with an Xbox One controller. But what's cool about GeForce Now is the compatibility is pretty broad. So I could use any other supported Bluetooth controller like a Shield One or a PlayStation One. And they've got apps for PC, Mac and Android. Not iOS at this time due to Apple's restrictive game app licensing. Everything. Everything. So I'll open up Nvidia Games. And so here's my library. Yeah, it's weird that there's no GeForce Now app, but here we are. It basically works by making you a gaming rig on their servers that you access from the cloud. So it doesn't matter if your game comes from Steam or you play. You install it to that virtual gaming rig and then you play it here. This is cool. So if I didn't know, I would think that I'm just looking at Steam Big Picture right now. Now, there is a caveat when it comes to game compatibility. And that's if the publisher or the developer has specifically blacklisted the game from running on GeForce Now, it won't work. As for why they're doing this, the justification. I saw a really interesting article from a smaller dev that was saying, well, we need to maintain control over how people are licensing and using our games. It's like, yeah, but GeForce Now is the closest thing to just a gaming rig that happens to be somewhere else that you bought a game and are playing on. So I think that justification is pretty weak and they're just trying to milk more money from gamers. The thing that's frustrating is there's no definitive list of what games are available for GeForce Now. So your mileage may vary. Destiny 2, though, is available. Wow, that installed really fast. I guess they've just got some funky data sentry. Yep, all the files are going now, boys. Cash, cash, cash. Oh, that's funny. Look, we've got little minimized Destiny 2 and Steam things. It's just it is just like gaming on a PC. Wow, this is some A plus console porting right here. Okay. Well, we can't change our resolution. Is this not a 4K TV? That's a 4K TV. It's that GeForce Now doesn't do anything above 1080 at 60. During the beta, they had after 120 and I think it was even unlocked for a while. But since the launch, 60 Hz is as fast as it goes, unless you're gaming at 720, in which case you can get 120 Hz. Yeah, we're not doing that. Okay, so let's walk around a bit. This is very 1080p. It doesn't even look especially anti-aliased. So they're not giving us a ton of GPU resources. Image quality wise, though, from TV distance, I'm not seeing any blocking or artifacts or anything that would stand out to me and say, hey, this is being streamed over your internet connection. Looks pretty darn good. We do have really badass internet. That's a fair point. You know when I noticed the latency though, is not when I just look around like this. But if I'm moving in a circle, I can tell my circle-ness is a touch behind. I would go as far as to say that 90 to 95% of people wouldn't even notice it though. And I don't notice the delay as much when I start to turn as I do when I stop to turn. It's almost like it snaps to stop. When you stop to turn. Yeah, see watch. So if I turn, like when I stop, it's like, that might just be this game though I haven't played this game. We can try another one. We had a little bit of trouble pairing a second controller via Bluetooth for some reason, but just plugging a second one in via USB with no drivers and no setup whatsoever has us local multiplayer gaming. So that's pretty cool. I just blew you up. It's so obvious I've never played this. It's weird to me how it just mixes in your Game Stream games, which are on that PC over there and your GeForce Now games, which are on a PC somewhere. If you have a good enough upload and you're not traveling too far, I don't see any compelling reason why GeForce Now would be any better than just using Game Stream after gaming rig. I mean, that's a pretty compelling use case for these services to me is for someone who only owns like a laptop like an LG Gram or something like this. So they could buy PC games, but they don't have the horses to run them. No. This is a way to have those. Okay, tell me this, would you get the paid version for five bucks a month or stick with free? So what's the difference? Well, with free you have only one hour session length, then it kicks you out. That's horrible. That would suck. That could still happen with the paid version, but your session length is six hours. I think six hours is a very reasonable length of time to be gaming at once. But after six hours when you get kicked out, you can just join another session. And because you're a paid person, you get put at the front of the queue for getting a virtual. Right. So if you're a free player, you might not even be able to log in at a given time. Plus you're not going to have RTX on. Overall, feels and looks pretty darn good. My poor team. I'm sorry team. Do you think it's fair to call GeForce Now the PC gamers streaming service? There's no exclusives. You're just playing PC games on a PC somewhere else. Definitely. But what service would be for the opposite person? Stadia. You don't own a computer or any games. You sign up and you buy every game you want to play. Do I have to use this controller? That's a loaded question. If you're playing on your TV, you have to use this controller. If you're playing on your phone or browser, you can use other controllers. But right now you can only buy Stadia by buying the bundle that comes with the controller. Okay, so you have to own one, but you don't have to use it. But that could be changing soon because they're coming out with a free tier. So we're on the pro tier. Wow, I can already tell the frame rate is chugging just in the menu here. Look at that. That's 30 FPS, isn't it? So we had to buy Destiny 2 for this? With the bundle that it came with, Destiny was included. Okay, cool. There actually is a handful of free games. You can see that frame rate, right? Yeah, you can see it. That was grody. But HDR immediately kicked in. The frustrating thing for me as a PC gamer who's accustomed to owning my games with a personal license as opposed to a per device license is that then I could potentially end up buying games twice. Well, that's why Stadia is so good for people who don't have any games. I see. But then would you really recommend using a service where you don't have any games and then when you buy a bunch of games, you still don't have any games? Hey, at least you can play them on your phone and in your browser and on your TV. Okay. And when you're playing on a TV, you just... Ew. Well, that looks way worse. But is that just because the game is HDR and they did a bad job? I don't even think so. I kind of doubt that. Let's give it a sec to see if it kind of wakes up a little bit here. It's the blacks that look the most different to me. They're absolutely crushed. There's no detail left in them. This is like a simulated iris where you're looking at something dark, so you get more detail and it blows out what's behind it. And then you look at something bright and you lose all the detail and what's right in front of you. So I'll try not to blame too much of that on Stadia specifically at this time. One thing I can blame on Stadia is that it looks like they're taking a pretty aggressive approach to anti-aliasing that is making everything look a little soft. On GeForce Now, you could really see a lot of stair-stepping and things like these trees and the grass and the flowers. And here, the grass just looks like it's smudged. I'm getting the same snapping when I stop looking. It kind of feels a little weird. If I had to guess, I'd say the latency is very similar to GeForce Now or perhaps a touch higher. Higher as in... Worse. It's the continuous inputs where I feel the jelliness quite a bit more when I'm moving the crosshair around and trying to track something as opposed to when I jump or when I turn. Yeah, it's counterintuitive. I would have thought that those snappier movements would make it more apparent. One thing to know is when you do buy games on Stadia, sometimes they're more expensive than other places you can buy that same game like Amazon or the Steam Store. Well, that is the problem with closed ecosystems. Like, it's just like on the Switch. A lot of the time, it's more expensive to buy the same game for Nintendo Switch. I definitely like GeForce Now's game licensing schema better as a consumer, but I can see why developers would be super into this one. Yeah, no kidding. There's also no exclusives on GeForce Now, but they do plan to have exclusives on Stadia. Am I going to care about them? Give them time. Hey, if Google doesn't cut this program like they do all their other ones, maybe they'll end up being good someday. Okay, I'm gonna be Ryu. Pick the other guy. Oh, uh... I don't know. This bird guy. Brrp! Well, I figure out what the controls are. Oh, oh, oh. You have a sword. Why would you kick him? What's he doing now? Uh, okay. Sure, why not? Fairy fire. That's my sword. You can... Wow! You can lose your sword. Well, that sucks. That's crazy. Time to mash. Pick it up. Pick that damn sword up. I don't know how to. Maybe ask the Google Assistant. Pick up my sword. No, I want to win. Conclusion. Game looks pretty good, though. No complaints there. And whatever issues we were having with the menu before, the games are definitely running at 60 FPS. Okay. Is there anything else we need to say about Stadia? It's like kind of dumb, actually. Oh, the game library. That's why you wouldn't play it. There's only like 40 games. We didn't even get that far, and I already figured out why I wouldn't use it. Ouch. Next up. Get into the console realm. All right. So we could use either of those other services, but instead we're going to use Project Xcloud. Preview. Preview. Preview. This is not launched. And for that reason, it kind of seems like the best. Right, because the expectations are just lower. Hey, Stadia seemed pretty awesome, too, before it actually launched. Yeah, and GeForce now seemed awesome before the developers ripped all the games because it became a paid service. All right, so obviously I'm going to want a controller for this. So is this PlayStation controller already paired? Yeah. Okay, cool. Note that it's a PlayStation controller. Oh. Okay, why? Just to show that you can. Oh, I see. You can play Halo with a DualShock. Okay, so we should do that immediately then. So for now, it's... The slowest rocket ship ever. Sorry, I'll let you finish. I was going to say it's on Android only. Oh, actually, technically it is on iOS, but through test flight. So it's only one game. Master Chief Collection. And it's limited because test flight has a maximum of like 10,000 users. But if you can get invited to this Xbox preview thing, you can just play Xbox games for free. You don't have to own them. You don't even have to have an Xbox. Wow. You just get to play Halo and other games on your phone. Dun-dun-dun-dun. Dun-dun-dun-dun. Dun-dun-dun-dun. Dun-dun-dun-dun. We're on a different part of the song. Wow, it's kind of Eeny-weeny, I-Stray-No-Vision when you're playing these games on a phone that really are not designed to be played on a phone. All right, let's do this. Coming in hot. All right, how's the smoothness here? A little bit of... Oh, I saw a little bit of tearing there, a little bit of stutter. Oh, wow, and a little bit of blocking. I can even tell on the phone. And this is 60 FPS, but I've definitely seen some jerkiness. With that said, like the other gaming services, I'm not noticing like a huge latency problem. I mean, I'm not winning these fights, but as a casual controller player, that's not the difference maker for me. And this is over Wi-Fi too. Oh, that's another thing to consider is we're on Wi-Fi. So I can't even entirely blame Project Xcloud for it. So controller compatibility seems like a plus. What about platform compatibility? I noticed we're not on the TV right now. Well, you're playing the preview, so they're starting with Android. Another thing we don't know is how this is going to integrate with Xbox Game Pass. What we know for sure is that it won't be like Nvidia's service where they're at the mercy of game developers that they have no control over to determine what's going to be on the platform and what's not. That's right. At the very least, they have their already existing library of 100 or 200 games from Xbox Studios stuff. How do I throw a grenade? A left trigger. Oh, no, good heavens no. And I blew up my ally. Why did we use a PC specifically for PlayStation now? Because it's only PlayStation and PC. There's no mobile element to it. Oh, I see. And is this subscription based? It looks like there's a lot of games in here. It's a subscription. This actually has the biggest library of games, over 800 games. Wow. From PlayStation 2, 3, and 4. That's freaking awesome. Oh, this is the oldest service. It came out like in 2014 or something. It's almost overwhelming to have this many options, although obviously I mean that like in a good way. Sitting this close to it already puts PlayStation now at a bit of a disadvantage. Well, if you want to play it on your TV, then just play PlayStation. That's fair. That's cool. So they're not going to fix the game for you by changing the button labels, but at least they give you a warning. You're a Sub-Zero man, aren't you? It's one of the characters I recognize because I haven't played a Mortal Kombat game since I was a kid. Yeah, but you should still know all of them from childhood. I don't know Kenshi. Kenshi came a little later. I don't know Aaron Black. He's a newer. I don't know Ermac. I don't know Kotal Kahn. He's newer. Reptiles old. I don't know. Raiden's old, obviously. You know, the 720p-only-ness of it actually doesn't look that horrible. What if you were on a brighter map? Do you think that would make a difference? I kind of doubt it because you're sitting this close, you're going to see a lot of the blockiness anyway. And they really don't look that different from each other. The maps? Blockiness and low resolution. Oh, I see. No latency complaints. Once again, all the services have performed pretty darn well, at least on our internet. To be clear, I'm not saying 720p is ideal. It definitely is blurrier. I'm just saying it's not that different from if it was blurry because of low bitrate video streaming. Oh, no. OK, button mashing time. Yes. Mr. Freeze. Oh, shoot. Oh, shoot. Oh, Mr. Lightning. No. Come on. All I need is one more button mashing sequence that works. Oh, and I'm dead. Aw. So what do you think? Do you think it's hard to choose which service to use? Or do you think it's pretty clear? You're an Xbox user, get xCloud. For PlayStation user, PS Now. No, I think it's pretty clear, but not for that reason. I would just choose it based on the games that I want to play because at the end of the day, isn't that what this is about? They're all using similar-ish technology to accomplish a similar thing. As far as regional differences go, you know, like whose data center is closer to you, the only way that you're going to know for sure how that works out for you is to just try them. But for us, all of them are basically equal as far as that goes. So it's going to just come down to what games I want to play. For now, PlayStation Now is looking like the big winner in that regard with all those titles and all-you-can-eat style. But cost-wise, it's higher than something like GeForce Now, which might be great if you already have a large library of games where the developers haven't decided to put restrictive licensing terms in place to prevent Nvidia from allowing them to work. And who knows how awesome xCloud is going to be when it's fully implemented sometime. Does PlayStation Now have a browser version? No. Okay, well, that's kind of a bummer. Does it have a Mac client? Mmm, I... No, I don't think so. So there's your answer then. Whatever games you want to play and whether there's a working client for whatever platform you have available to you. So thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoyed this video, maybe check out the video I did on GeForce Now back when it was beta, like two or three years ago, comparing latency on a local machine, on the local network with a wire, on the local network with wireless, and with GeForce Now from a remote server. It's pretty interesting.