 They said gaming in the cloud couldn't be done. They said the latency would be too high. They said we'll always game on our own local hardware. They were... What in the world could that be? The MasterCase 5 by Cooler Master gives you the freedom to truly make your mid-tower PC case your own with a variety of modular parts and accessories. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. Alright, so as I alluded to in my entirely spoiler-free, aka completely useless, intro, the subject of today's video is GeForce Now, Nvidia's new product that could be described as a way to play games over the internet, which... no, actually that's not gonna work. Because it's not multiplayer gaming, we've had that for decades. So let's call it something else. Let's call it game streaming, which... Yeah, I know, that sounds an awful lot like what they do on Twitch TV. Alright, fine. I will use the C word, cloud. GeForce Now is a cloud-based gaming service that uses Nvidia's grid technology in one of their data centers in North America, Europe, and APAC to take input from your keyboard and mouse or controller, send it to an instance of your game running on a virtual machine, render out the game frames at 30 or 60 FPS per second, depending on the title, compress them on the fly, and beam them to your supported device over the internet, with the objective being to do this at a reasonable price, while delivering the utmost in image quality, and with little enough latency, that is the delay between pressing a button and seeing an action on screen, that it doesn't feel like trying to op in Counter-Strike by yelling at your neighbor to move the mouse and press buttons for you. So let's address the first point first. Is the price reasonable? At $799, Nvidia is clearly borrowing an established price point in the streamed content industry, so the real question becomes one of whether they are delivering enough value for that price point compared to a service like Netflix. Here I have a few criticisms. Game variety, as can be expected of a new service, is okay for casual users, but a bit of a low point if you're a pretty avid gamer that wants to make this service your go-to when you pick up a controller and settle down on the couch. While there are a couple of exceptions, the list of games included with your membership fee is mostly a metric butt-ton of LEGO games and older AAA titles like the Batman series and Walking Dead Season 1, with newer games like Witcher 3 requiring an add-on purchase in order to be streamed. That means I actually had to buy Metro Last Light at full Steam retail price for my performance testing, more on that later, even though I own that game on Steam already. The good news is that if you're playing new games versus ones that you already own, most game purchases on GeForce Now come with a Steam or GOG key that you can activate on those services for local play if you want, but there are still two issues here. One, it would be nice if I could bind my Steam account to my GeForce Now account and be allowed to use the service to stream titles I already own, and two, this one is a much bigger deal IMO. I shouldn't be paying full sticker price for games on a service where I not only have to pay monthly to be a member, but I also have to buy a specialized piece of streaming hardware from Nvidia, a Shield Portable, tablet, or Android TV, for a couple hundred bucks in the first place. Let's move on to objective number two, image quality. Here, Nvidia gets full marks, and this isn't anything surprising to me since I've been such a huge fan of Game Stream since it launched that I haven't even considered a non-NVIDIA graphics card for my personal rig in over two years, but the power of Nvidia Grid on the other side means running games at 60 FPS steady at 1080p is a non-issue, and Nvidia's real-time H.264 encoding continues to deliver good enough image quality that on a handheld device or from the couch, you will be hard-pressed to find any issues with it, aside from the same blockiness or color banding that you'll find in low-contrast scenes in pretty much any internet-streamed content, which ties in pretty nicely with performance. Game launch times were nice and snappy, especially after the first time you launched them, and as long as my internet connection was stable, I noticed very few hitches or hiccups in the game animation. But while you might be pleasantly surprised to see the same graphics quality menus that you would find if you were running the game locally, including anti-aliasing sliders, improved texture quality, etc., turning any of these dials past default will result in stuttery playback, and the default suggested settings will reapply every time you launch a game. This is pretty disappointing, but the good news is that these settings are still going to spank what you'll get out of a modern-generation console, and there's definitely room, then, for Nvidia to add more power per user as time goes on. Which is fine and good, Linus, but I've been watching this video for five minutes, and none of us were worried that a building full of GTX titans couldn't run toy box turbos. What about the latency? Yes, the Achilles heel of gaming over the internet, whether we're talking about some jackass on dial-up teleporting all over the place, or, in this case, the actual delay between executing a command on your controller and seeing the results on screen, too much of which can result in a visually pleasing, but downright unplayable gaming experience, since you could end up turning left when you mean to turn right, and vice versa. So for my testing methodology, I chose Metro Last Lite because it's available on all the platforms I wanted to test, it delivered consistent results, and it only takes about two minutes to get from the very beginning of the game menu to a point where you can actually fire a gun, a necessary component of my testing. In the opening attack sequence, I used a BenQ RL2460 monitor with a Makey Makey hanging in front of it. I would execute five left mouse clicks, which illuminates an LED on the PCB of the Makey Makey nearly instantaneously, then, using a high-speed camera, in this case, the 240fps slow-motion recording mode on the iPhone 6S, I can measure how many frames there are between the LED flashing and the muzzle flashes from the gun, with each frame representing about 4 milliseconds. Some of these results are not surprising at all. Gaming on a local machine is much more responsive an experience than encoding frames, beaming them somewhere, and decoding them on the other side. So, if you're a super competitive gamer who is concerned about the couple of milliseconds of latency that a wireless mouse adds, none of this is going to matter to you, run your games directly on your PC. But, it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be, and if local game stream was already good enough for you, then GeForce Now probably isn't going to break the experience for you, since it added the 25 milliseconds reported by the network analysis tool, about a frame and two-thirds on our Office internet connection. With that said, I don't know how much I can trust that tool right now. My Office connection, a business-grade gigabit symmetric dedicated fiber line with a service level agreement, and my residential connection, a 100-down 5-up DOCSIS 3.0 affair, tested almost identically using the built-in tool. The actual performance though of the fiber connection crushed my home cable connection, like to the point where I could definitely recommend GeForce Now if you're on fiber, or located a little closer to one of the data centers than I am here in Southwest Canada, but could not for any but the most casual gamers at one-fifth of a second of delay, probably closer to a quarter of a second if you're on a TV. With data caps being yet another consideration, giving you're looking at similar bit rates to Netflix, but you're more likely to game for 6.3 hours in a day than watch a movie for that long. That is to say, unless you've already got your tickets for The Force Awakens, and you feel the need to binge watch all the previous Star Wars movies to prepare. Speaking of things on the internet, Squarespace websites. Squarespace is the website to go to to build your own website using awesome tools and a simple interface. If you know, coding websites manually ain't really your thing. They've got 24-7 tech support, and their plans start at just $8 a month with a free domain thrown in if you buy Squarespace for the year. All of their templates feature responsive design, so your website scales to look great on any device. Commerce is included with every website with a free online store, and you'll find a template that's just right for you, regardless of what kind of a page you want to build. A blog, a portfolio, information about your business site that we are hopefully updating our soon with photos of all of our team members and all that kind of cool stuff. Check it out over at squarespace.com and use offer code LINUS to save 10% on your first purchase. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon. Shop on, shop at, shop at. Amazon, instructions are out there. Or by buying a cool t-shirt like this one, or even with a direct monthly contribution through our community forums so you can get a cool little contributor badge. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So click that little button in the top right corner to check out Luke's video where he determines what is the ideal spacing of graphics cards if you still run a local gaming machine and you want to actually have a graphics card in it and stuff.