Nvidia GeForce Now streams your games from the cloud w/ free tier, Android app

Ben Schoon | Feb 4 2020 - 8:29 am PT

Cloud streaming is becoming a huge trend in gaming, and Nvidia has been cooking up its own service over the past couple of years. Today, Nvidia GeForce Now launches to the masses on multiple platforms. Here’s what you need to know.

Nvidia GeForce Now is a streaming service that’s similar to Google’s Stadia, but it takes a completely different approach to games. Instead of a new console in the cloud, GeForce Now uses your current game stores such as Steam and Epic Games to support hundreds of popular titles that you already own or are free to play.

GeForce Now, as its name implies, uses the same basic graphic cards you’d find in a high-end gaming PC, but in the cloud and streamed to your device. The cards used include the GTX 2080. What games can be played? For the most part, pretty much anything you could install on a PC. Popular titles include Fortnite, Dauntless, Rocket League, Cuphead, and dozens more. There are over 30 free-to-play games and hundreds of others with instant play.

If a game isn’t immediately supported on GeForce Now, you’ll be able to manually install it for single-session play. “Thousands” of games are supported this way, but it would be a bit of a hassle to install the game on Nvidia’s servers every time you want to play. Plus, everything is designed to run at 1080p 60fps.

Nvidia GeForce Now has been available in beta for several months at this point. During beta testing, over 300,000 users racked up 70 million hours of gameplay in 30 countries in North America and Europe.

Now, Nvidia’s service is launching to the public. With this launch, the service is offering a free tier that has a couple of restrictions. Gameplay in this tier is limited to just one hour at a time, but as many times as you’d like to play. During peak hours, users might also need to “wait in line” to get a session.

For $4.99/month, users can get in on the “Founders” version. This price point is guaranteed for a full year and comes with a gracious 90-day free trial. With this, Nvidia unlocks up to four hours of gameplay per session, no waiting for a session, and RTX is turned on as well. The price will go up after the first year, but Nvidia isn’t detailing by how much just yet.

Nvidia GeForce Now is available on Windows, Mac, Nvidia Shield TV, and on most Android devices. It’s also coming to Chrome OS and more Android TV devices soon.

You can sign up here.