First Look: NVIDIA GeForce NOW on a Chromebook is Awesome By Chrome Unboxed

It's hard to believe, but it's already been six months since NVIDIA launched their game streaming platform GeForce now, and we covered it quite a bit whenever it first launched back in February, because, honestly, we were still buzzing about Stadia and game streaming and hopefully a way that we would see a lot of games come to Chromebooks and well. We know: what's happened with Stadia in the past seven eight months, and it's not delivered all the titles that a lot of people want and there's not a ton of people playing there and while GeForce now launched and was really cool on android and windows and macOS. It wasn't really great on Chromebooks, because there was no way to get us into the games that we wanted to play. But as of today, GeForce now is available in the Chrome browser on Chromebooks. Specifically, so we want to go in, go hands-on and show you how it all works before we hop into a game. This video is brought to you by NordVPN they're, the VPN of choice for millions of consumers, because they're awesome at what they do and that is keeping your browsing.

Safe and secure, whether you're at home or out, and about if you'd like to learn more about them and their services head over to chromeunbox. com forward, slash NordVPN, you can learn more and get started today. Alright, so all you have to do in order to play this is hey. You need a GeForce now account. So if you don't have that already head over to play.

geforcenow. com, that's actually the web portal, where you're going to go to play your games, but there's also a special offer up here, and you can get a discounted rate on the founders package that they have. You don't have to pay for that. But if you don't, I think you're really limited on the time that you can play. So it's like an hour at a time or something like that.

I don't know all the specifics of all that kind of stuff and I think they've changed it. Possibly in the last few months I stayed on the founders. It's five bucks a month uh since it launched- and so I just came here- logged in up here in the corner, once you're logged in just like on the application. In android or if you've used the application on Windows, all your stuff's right here and the interface is really nice. You click into a game.

It expands and tells you a little about the game and obviously, if it's ready, you can go and hit play. You can go up here and search for games so, for instance, portal uh yeah, I know got it so, for instance, portal. If I can type see portal 2, I don't have either one of those games in my library, but they're available via steam. It shows you right there. If you have a steam account, it'll prompt you to log in whenever you go to add that to your library, it's no different from the GeForce.

Now that has been there. None of this has changed from what's been occurring for the last six months. So if you're not familiar with that, we have other videos about that. There's plenty on the internet, about how GeForce now works and what's available and what's not available and all that kind of stuff. That's not what we're here to talk about what we want to show you is how well the web player works right from the web, so zero downloads no setup nothing needed here.

You just log in with your Chromebook, and I'm going to click play, and it's going to begin the launcher just like again like it would have done in the android app or anything else, and when this is done and up and running, we will cut back okay. So after it gets through all the loading I mean after all fortnight and a lot of these games, because these are all running basically on a PC in the cloud they're going to take a few minutes to load in, but once you're loaded in you can already see from the get go. If you can pick up on that mouse tracking, the mouse tracking is almost perfect. I mean everything just moves exactly in sync with it makes you feel like you're, just running this locally, which clearly you're not, but it doesn't feel any different from if you were running it locally. So just going to hop right into this solo match here and again, I'm not a professional fortnight player, if I'm anything, I'm a pub g player, but I'm a PUBG mobile player, so I'm a little rusty with the whole uh keyboard.

Trackpad thing: uh keyboard, mouse controls uh. So don't judge me for that. However, I would like to now that this is available, and I can play Fortnite this way. I play Fortnite on my iPad from time to time. Uh with my kids, you know I'd like to get better at it with a mouse and keyboard.

Now that I have a setup that I can kind of rely on to have it all the time I can flip this open jump into a match with my kids, but you can already see lighting effects. You can see if you can see my hand down here. I mean it's super responsive I mean it. It doesn't hesitate whatsoever again. It really gives off the feeling that you're running this thing locally, and it's really impressive to be honest with you.

How smooth this all works in a browser because I'll be honest, there's a lot of times. I want to play stuff in Stadia and I want to play it in the browser with the mouse and keyboard and the gameplay just lags, and there are issues and there's artifacts on the screen and for whatever reason I don't. I don't really know what's going on, but NVIDIA seems to have figured this out and really worked things out in their favor. To make this a great experience, I mean, as you can see it's just it's. Smooth frame rates are nice and high, there are no issues with input lag and again.

The overall experience just feels incredibly native for what's actually going on here. I will say we have fast internet here, so your mileage may vary when it comes to actually trying to run something like this on a lower connection. Speed. So keep that in mind, if you're getting into streaming gaming, I'm assuming that you kind of know that to begin with we're going to run some more tests as time goes by to figure out like what can we get away with on this? Can we use a LTE connection? Is it going to work over those types of connections and stuff, but ultimately, it's about over a good connection? How native does this whole thing feel, and I can tell you right now, very, very native- I mean this. This is just great and uh.

I do wish pub g would not have left NVIDIA's game servers and maybe one day they'll come back, but for right now, uh, it's going to be Fortnite for me uh, and I'm not going to embarrass myself by going and hunting out a bunch of people. I just we just wanted to show you how smooth and how responsive like look at the frame rates. If you can pick those up on video, I'm easily getting 60 frames here again, I think we're filming in 30 frames, but it should look nice and smooth. You saw just a tad bit of hiccup right there, that's about as bad as I've seen so far, and it usually lasts for maybe a second and a half something like that at most, but ultimately, everything stays smooth. It's very playable I've gotten into some pretty hairy gunfights already.

So, even when there's multiple people on screen, people shooting and stuff blowing up and going crazy, no real hiccups, no real issues with performance whatsoever. What I also want to show you is, if you like gaming with a controller instead, something like this or a PlayStation controller, we would assume even the Stadia controller would work if you've got a controller paired up we're going to turn this Xbox on, and I believe I'm paired up already yep there we go boom good to go. So all of these work menus work exactly like you'd expect, left and right triggers all that stuff works just like you'd expect and if you're like man, you know what I'm tired with that I'd like to go back here. This is still working as well, so kudos to NVIDIA. I think they probably pulled a lot of this stuff off of the work that has gone into making Stadia work in the browser and for what it's worth it feels a little like they look at me.

I got an elimination. It feels a little like they might have taken that work and improved on it, possibly because this is just super impressive to be running on a 400 Chromebook that I have sitting in front of me and ultimately, when I tried this out to begin with this morning, when it first launched, I was doing it on a sub 300 Chromebook, with a very entry-level small core intel processor in it. So what NVIDIA is doing here is very, very impressive. It's awesome that I can jump to a Bluetooth controller. If I want to, I can use mouse and keyboard if I want to, I could plug in keyboard and mouse.

If I wanted to extend the screen, I was doing it earlier on a larger display, it's very, very flexible, it's very, very smooth and very, very responsive and something I would say for five bucks a month. If you already own some games- or you want to play, games like Fortnite that are free to play, this is an awesome solution for a lot of people that have Chromebooks and want to play some games. But that's really all we wanted to show you we're going to spend a lot more time with this, get some better reviews and see what we can get away with, basically on what low-end Chromebooks and how low the latency can be on bad connections and all that kind of stuff and some other peripherals. That would work with all this stuff see if voice chat works this kind of things, but right now we just wanted to show you how cool this already is in its infancy. It's still technically in beta and just launched today, and it is super, super impressive, well done, NVIDIA.

I think this is going to be something a lot of you out. There are going to like to take advantage of and enjoy a lot, but guys, that's it for this one. If you like, this video, give us a thumbs up, go down there, hit that subscribe button and make sure also hit the notification bell if you'd like to be alerted when we make future videos just like this one. Until next time we'll see you.

Source : Chrome Unboxed