CES 2017: Nvidia's 'GeForce Now' Cloud Service to Bring High-End PC Gaming to Mac

Tonight at its CES 2017 keynote event, Nvidia announced GeForce Now for Mac and PC, a cloud gaming service that allows low-end Mac and PC users to play high-end PC games. The service is similar to an identically-named service for Nvidia Shield users.

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Nvidia says that there are an estimated 1 billion PC users who have integrated GPUs that can't play games "to their full potential." GeForce Now allows those users to access a Pascal-powered PC in the cloud to play games to their full potential.

In addition to letting users with low-end computers play high-end games, the service will become one of the few ways Mac users can play the latest AAA PC games. According to The Verge, Nvidia showed off the service by playing Rise of the Tomb Raider on an iMac. Rise of the Tomb Raider is not yet available for macOS.

GeForce Now doesn't stream games from the cloud to a user's computer, similar to how Netflix streams movies to various devices, reports Engadget. GeForce Now is more like a high-end PC in the cloud that runs a user's games. Users will have to purchase their games from online distributors like Steam and Origin. Once they're purchased, they can use the power of GeForce's GRID servers to run them on their computers.

The service will cost $25 for every 20 hours of play. Nvidia says the service will start rolling out in March

Tags: Nvidia, CES 2017, geforce now

Top Rated Comments

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saudor

32 months ago

pascal drivers for the mac would be nice though

Rating: 15 Votes

konqerror

32 months ago

Explain why its outdated. I see some major changes since the 90s:
1. Users are dumber (everybody has to use a computer, not just a professional) while software and problems (security!) has increased exponentially in complexity. Centralized support has become much more efficient.

2. Communication has become much cheaper and bandwidth increased. You used to be stuck on 1200 bps paying $.50 (1985) a minute to get data across the country.

3. Timesharing makes sense economically. You don't play games 100% of the time, and you use the same programs as other people. You can share hardware. With rising energy costs, this is critical. With mobile computing you have the stagnation of battery technology and the end of Moore's law.

4. Hardware lifecycles are decreasing. NVidia puts out new products every 6 months whereas the Mac Plus sold for 4.5 years. Sharing hardware lets you have the latest products by spreading the cost among others.

Real-time communication by text was outdated by the 80s too when everybody got a telephone and threw away their Telex. What's this obsession with texting?

Rating: 12 Votes

motorazr

32 months ago

Huh.

Maybe I don't take enough to understand this... but seems costly for what it is... surprised they didn't come up with a weekly or monthly billing system ... ah well.

Rating: 11 Votes

garirry

32 months ago

Yay 5,000 ms latency!

Rating: 10 Votes

TylerAllen86

32 months ago

When a Mac user wants to game... they turn on the PlayStation!

Rating: 9 Votes

nortonandreev

32 months ago

"The service will cost $25 for every 20 hours of play." lol

Rating: 9 Votes

konqerror

32 months ago

$25 for 20 hours? You're better off just building a gaming PC....

Say you build a gaming computer. Costs $2500, lasts 3 years.

For the same amount of money, that buys you 2,000 hours of play. Over the 3 years, that's 1.8 hours per day, every day, or 12.8 hours per week. So it really depends on how much you actually play.

Rating: 9 Votes

zorinlynx

32 months ago

What's with this obsession with running our software on remote systems and using our computers as, basically, thin clients or terminals?

This model of computing became outdated in the 90s. Why are we going back to it?

I can't imagine games to be very playable on this setup due to latency, jitter, lost packets, and so on.

Rating: 8 Votes