A few weeks ago, we published a post about the state of Mac gaming, analyzing why macOS gaming has been so anemic. Because Macs are so different from their Windows counterparts, and because the market is so small in comparison, few developers have felt pressure to bring their games to the platform. The lack of robust tools and development support for Mac gaming has also reduced releases, leaving Mac gamers to look longingly over the fence at Windows’ gaming ecosystem.
There’s a new kid in town that might change things, however: GeForce Now. This game streaming platform from graphics card manufacturer Nvidia makes it possible to stream a set of Windows-only games from Nvidia’s powerhouse server farms to your local Mac. Thanks to some serious tech, you don’t even need a particularly powerful computer. If you can stream Netflix, you can stream games, with minimal lag and fairly impressive graphical performance.
How does GeForce Now work?
To launch a game, click on its icon in the NVIDIA Game app. Look for the game with GEFORCE NOW’s label. It will look and feel like you are launching the game as if it were on your device, when, in fact, GeForce NOW is launching it remotely on a gaming rig in the cloud and streaming it back to your SHIELD.
GeForce Now is basically a virtualization engine, allowing you to run a games-only instance of Windows on your macOS device. The hardware is based entirely in Nvidia’s server farm, and none of your local hardware is used to render games. Games are not installed on your local drive, and your graphics hardware is not used to render images. You get the benefit of a powerful 1080-class GPU, which renders nearly any GeForce Now-compatible game in excellent fidelity.
Only certain games are compatible with GeForce Now, but the list is growing. It includes titles from Blizzard and Steam, including big hits like Overwatch, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, Fallout 4, Witcher 3 and CS:GO. You play games out of your own game libraries, so you’ll need to log in to Steam and Battle.net through GeForce Now in order to play games from those platforms. Of course, that means you’ll also need to purchase the games you play. The games are not included in the Geforce Now subscription.
Launching a new game creates a new virtual machine instance on the GeForce servers, which you use to interact with the game. You can also take advantage of cloud storage of saved games, with Steam Cloud saves syncing with GeForce Now. The hardware powering that virtual machine handles all the game rendering, saving your (potentially pitiful) local hardware the work. Games are transparently and instantly installed on the GeForce servers, so you don’t need to download files to your Mac. You receive a video stream on your Mac, which is played back through the GeForce Now client. Your mouse and keyboard inputs are sent back over the wire to be processed by Nvidia’s servers. That sounds like it would be disastrous for quick reaction gameplay, but it proved to be acceptably smooth.
What about lag?
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Play is surprisingly lag free, with very little input lag and an excellent ping on all the multiplayer games we tested (CS:GO, Overwatch and PUBG). Thanks to a distribution of seven server farms throughout the United States, our ping stayed at an exceptional 20ms, with about 40ms roundtrip time on the busiest Northeastern US server. Despite low pin, mouse movement felt subtly “off” at times. While this has improved significantly since earlier versions, there’s still some rubberiness to the controls and rare spikes of input lag. It’s hard not to blame with on streaming, but it’s something you likely wouldn’t notice if you weren’t looking for it, and something PCs are hardly immune from.
Frame rate proved to be excellent, with the hardware pinning playback at 60 frames per seconds in all the games we cared to try. This is to be expected, with the graphical power behind the setup.
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What are the downsides?
When compared to gaming on a local Windows machine, there are some downsides. Play isn’t as smooth, and its hard to tell if movement and lag spikes are a normal part of online play or caused by streaming issues. While there’s a good collection of servers available in the US, gamers in other regions are out of luck for the time being.
In testing, we also found that some games don’t look great on a Retina screen. Because games are streamed in HD resolution, that needs to be stretched to cover the entirety of a MacBook Pro’s Retina screen. While the graphics rendering quality is still excellent, the aliasing proved to be surprisingly distracting. It’s especially noticeable in games like Overwatch, with tightly-edited visuals that seem to exaggerate aliasing issues. Less polished games like PUBG suffer from a similar issue, but it was far harder to notice without making serious inspection of on-screen text. Changing resolution in games that support that has no noticeable impact on this issue. Considering the rendering resources required to put together polygons at Retina resolution, it’s likely to stay this way for now. Even a locally-available 1080 Ti can’t reliably render a full MacBook Pro’s worth of pixels at a rock-solid frame rate in every game.
Some weird bugs also cropped up, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary for beta software. The dev team is responsive to feedback in forums, and problems get addressed and fixed quickly. We also found out that the 2017 MacBook Pro’s keyboard is a poor substitute for the mechanical keyboard we normally play with.
Conclusion: an excellent option
We can unabashedly say that this fulfilling one of our long-time dreams to see gaming grow on the Mac. Even in its current form, GeForce Now is an awesome platform. Better still, the Mac service is free while it’s in beta. It’s a fairly impressive technical accomplishment, with amazingly little variation from purely local play. The coolness of playing real games on my MacBook Pro is something that’s left me a little starstruck. No pricing information has been formally announced, but we can probably expect a monthly fee between $10 and $25 per month when the service is formally launched. Will it be worth that much when it launches? We’ll have to judge it on its merits then, but for free ninety-nine, it’s amazing.
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If you want to check it out, go for it! Just make sure to get a decent mouse first. Gaming on a trackpad is nightmarish.
You might also want to check out these other posts:
Get More Done on Your Mac With a Gaming Mouse
What Happened to Mac Gaming?
Mac Gaming: How Apple is Catching Up
How To Add Macros To Geforce Now Games Mac Download
I'm currently using Geforce Now service and the experience has been great but there is something missing which is custom item filters. Is GGG planning on adding support for custom item filters when playing trough GFN? Last bumped on Jun 11, 2020, 1:35:28 PM | Posted by bogossogob on May 29, 2018, 9:19:03 PM |
Why would they? If i understand it you are using a cloud to game, so they(Geforce Now) have the game running through the cloud it would be up to them to instal the filters and even if they did they wouldn't be customizable by you. GGG have no input into this. Ancestral Bond. It's a thing that does stuff. -Vipermagi He who controls the pants controls the galaxy. - Rick & Morty S3E1 | Posted by lagwin1980 on May 30, 2018, 12:57:59 PM |
Why would they? Because it can become another source of income? Pretty sure if they talk to each other, they might find a way to provide custom filters support. They can even achieve that without requiring NVidia intervention by supporting item filter through URL fetching or similar approach. As this kind of Game streaming as a service become possible, they should leverage them to reach additional players. | Posted by bogossogob on May 30, 2018, 10:51:41 PM |
Last edited by drakgoku on Jun 18, 2018, 6:50:51 AM | Posted by drakgoku on Jun 18, 2018, 6:50:40 AM |
' It was quite pointless to point out there, cause obviously he came here from that topic in the first place. Although i also think that this topic here is quite pointless... But not because it's useless, but because the reason for this are - GeForce NOW being jerks, GGG don't need to clean other people mess. In general case, system that GGG implemented works fine, and don't need to be replaced. But if GGG really will implement that, i would be really happy. Cause waiting for those jerks in Nvidia to actually do their work is the dead cause. Just not gonna happen. Last edited by Med1umentor on Jun 18, 2018, 10:24:10 PM | Posted by Med1umentor on Jun 18, 2018, 10:15:21 PM |
If GGG would implemented this within the game, by allowing to provide an URL to fetch, it would work for both GFN and regular players. Like that everyone could just point to their favorite loot filter at some master branch and it would be updated automatically. | Posted by bogossogob on Jun 18, 2018, 10:52:37 PM |
Sorry for the bump but I feel this issue is important and would love to see it resolved. For those of us on Mac and those with less than stellar hardware to run PoE (although it isn't *that* demanding*) we have to resort to using GeForce Now, which I actually think is a fantastic service. However as already mentioned people who use GeForce Now are unable to install LootFilters due to, unstandably, restrictions on modifying the game settings on nVidia's servers. If GGG could come up with some form of work around such as using a URL system to install LootFilters, a bit like the skins in Minecraft if I remember correctly? or some sort of communication between GGG and nVidia to assist us users who would like to install a LootFilter. Even if it is on a case by case basis as I don't think there is that many of us who do as it is a fairly niche market. But even if it is a niche market it is a market non-the-less. I have a spent more than my fair share of money on PoE. At least £1000. So the market is defiantly there for GGG to assist. Would love to get some feedback from GGG. | Posted by FullMetalMonkey on Sep 3, 2018, 2:44:36 PM |
+1 for that. Haven't played for a while cause of not having gaming pc anymore. Now i have Geforce Now and would gladly come back to game if there was option to have proper lootfilter working. | Posted by tacodisco on Sep 4, 2018, 4:32:10 PM |
Anyone struggling with that problem i suggest you check out https://shadow.tech/ Subscribed to that one, got my Shadow yday, playing Delve now. Less lag and stutter than Geforce now and i have full access to Windows/File system to modify whatever i want and run Item Macros etc. P.S 10$ off with ANDG4UJB | Posted by tacodisco on Sep 7, 2018, 1:14:15 PM |
Glad I'm not the only one struggling, I hope that GGG can come up with a solution for this. While Game streaming is still for a niche, it has a lot of potential of being a good income in the future. While I'm not expecting feedback from GGG, it would be nice for GGG do chime in. Last edited by bogossogob on Sep 8, 2018, 10:05:19 PM | Posted by bogossogob on Sep 8, 2018, 9:35:41 PM |