You Don't Need a Graphics Card! By Linus Tech Tips

(upbeat rock music) - What in the Sam heck are you doing? Do you have any idea how impossible it is to get these things? (slams) I'm glad I got here in time Those gamers over there almost wasted their money paying scalper prices for a GPU instead of saving it with this easy trick. Yeah. Some of you probably know what's coming, due to the ongoing shortage of graphics cards. I am about to recommend something that you might not expect; using a cloud gaming service, temporarily until the world returns to sanity. But I would never consider steering you guys wrong. So before I settle on a recommendation, I'm just going to have to try all of them.

Just like you should try our sponsor, Glasswire, are you having poor quality video meetings? Use Glasswire and instantly see what apps are wasting your bandwidth during your meetings and block them. Get 25% off using offer code "Linus" at the link down below. (upbeat techy music) The thing is, normally the heavy lifting of gaming, AI enemy, and physics computations, 3d rendering, you know, that kind of stuff is handled by your PC. But every cloud gaming service has at least this in common. It pushes all of that work into a data center somewhere which feeds the final output in the form of a video to your machine over the internet.

So that's why the system requirements for all of the services that we're trying today are similar to the requirements for watching high definition video on YouTube or Netflix. Now you will be making some compromises, image quality won't be as good, kind of like how 4k YouTube doesn't look as good as 1080p on Blu-ray, and you can expect to experience some latency like how zoom calls always have a slight delay when people talk. But at anywhere from 10 to $15 a month you could afford about five years of cloud gaming service for the price of a scalper markup on an RTX 3070. Let's kick things off then with GeForce Now from our good friends over it at Nvidia. After the best little K on my hand the defenders licked their wounds and mourned their losses said Siri, who began to plan her revenge on the Google assistant and Alexa.

She worked her out one night, Gerald, excuse me and urged him to travel with her to the land, to the top of bald mountain. It's an old mountain lost it's hair when it's kids got all back-talking (chuckles) Man, that looks good, don't it. The advantages of GeForce Now are many, Nvidia has been working on this technology for a long time and they're deeply experienced when it comes to PC gaming. You also get Nvidia exclusive eye candy, like RTX real-time Ray tracing, hair works, et cetera, et cetera. And it's pretty, ain't it? (crickets) I feel like I'm in a morgue here.

Is it pretty or not? It's the Witcher 3. There's only one right answer, it's pretty. In a game like this, honestly, where there's already kind of a laggy field to the camera movements with the mouse. I hardly noticed the latency. Have you tried cloud gaming, David? - Uh hmm.

- Do you find there's a difference from one type of game to another? - Oh for sure. I will no play a competitive shooter. (chuckles) No, thank you. - Yep. - I'll do a story-based game.

Yeah, Witcher 3 would be fine. - Yep. - The stream compression on this one is too much for me though. - Well, remember too, we've got it blown up on an 88-inch TV. - Yeah, that's fair, that's fair.

- If you're on a 48, say for example, if you knew anyone who had a TV like that. I think it would look a lot more reasonable. And as good as GeForce Now is, it's not magic. It's limited to 1080p at 60 FPS. If you look closely, you will notice compression artifacts particularly when there's a lot of motion on screen.

And finally, for competitive games like this, the additional latency is going to make it pretty difficult to keep up with very good players. I got to say rocket league's visual style which is kind of clean, but then look like fine details in the grass and stuff does not lend itself well to this kind of video compression. (imitates laser sounds) Oh God, I suck at this game. - Because you're using a mouse and keyboard. - No, that's not why.

(laughs) I'm not going to make excuses. Wow. All right. I think that's quite enough for that. Other highlights include the complete access to in game controls and quality settings, the very low system requirements for your streaming device, compatibility with both Android and iOS, in addition to of course, Mac and PC, and their free trial which lets you decide for yourself if it's worth the price of admission.

With a catch, the free trial works for an hour at a time and you have to wait in line to use it. So you can see right now there's 24 gamers ahead of me. Also the hardware isn't as good with RTX on not being an option. If that's something that you wanted to experience for my part, ain't nobody got time to sit and wait for these other gamers. So let's see what Sony has to offer.

After all, while PC gaming does have its benefits. Playing Sony exclusive titles, like God of War or The Last of Us isn't one of them. I was initially surprised to see a lower price for Sony service, considering that it actually includes some games. So save your money and buy a water bottle on LTT store. com right? Maybe not.

The UI is so bad that it's hard to believe, it's even from the same company that makes the PlayStation 5. unless you are on a PlayStation using PS Now, there is literally no search function to find games. You just have to scroll through them. And some things just outright didn't work for us, like launching PUBG, let's actually give that a shot. Oh my God.

It has moved it. Did I go down too many? Play history, okay. At least it's in my play history. Thought I was going to have to find it again. What's funny about this is that it was supposed to just say something about not being able to get an update and not work at all.

And that's what we were expecting to show you. But this is good too. Oh Wow.69 joined... Oh I think it's just completely frozen. I mean, there are a few things about this experience we can appreciate, there's the glorious 720p medium details, the, oh, we've got just the right number of players in our game.

Nice. (laughs) PlayStation Now is not as fun. Okay. Let's try relaunching. Like does this thing even work? Are you just messing with me Closing your last game session? I knew, what game session? I never even got to play.

How is this so bad? Are they not a multi-billion dollar company? Uh, wait. I can't get this mouse cursor off the screen. Are you kidding me right now? I can't get it off the screen. I mean, I mean, controller compatibility is a plus, it supports DualShock three and four, and actually even like things like X-Box controllers. All though the service does tell you, Hey we recommend a dual shock three or four and actually has no support for the dual sense, The PlayStation five controller, for whatever reason.

I mean, in fairness I guess their devs have plenty of other stuff to work on. Okay. So wait, wait, hold on a second. So let's maximize now. I'm not going to worry about the mouse cursor.

Let's wait 18 more minutes for this game to launch. This is enough to sour me on cloud gaming as a whole, like, I'd be like this is crap honestly, though, the GeForce Now experience wasn't perfect either. Like I had to use my previous knowledge of kind of the bugginess of that platform from just using GeForce like in-home streaming to fix that issue where the game was like running but it was minimized. And so I saw like a steam window through my VM that would confuse an average user for sure. Huzzuh! We managed to get into a freaking game here.

- To be fair, the experience is a lot better on a PlayStation console. - Okay, that's valid. But remember the premise of today's video is you're a PC gamer who's stuck without a video card. You know, you want cross-platform compatibility I think. So, that's fine.

But guys, if it doesn't work on other platforms you don't get to market it as working on other platforms. Yeah. And making matters even worse, on a third person view style game like this, like I said with Witcher 3, I don't normally notice the kind of chugginginess, the lagginess of camera movements but here it is very, very noticeable. I mean, if there's no other way to play the game because you're not going to run out and buy an end of life, PlayStation four at this point. it's not like you can't experience it.

It's just really not the definitive version I would say.1080p up rendering, except that everyone's at 720 pmps now. - On PlayStation you can download the game. - Yeah. But like they should not have marketing materials in a service that are not applicable to it. - I agree.

(laughs) - If I was paying for this service, I'm paying for the service aren't I? You're paying for it right now? I'm glad because I would consider this to be entirely unacceptable. You're going to get me to reimburse it, aren't you? - I mean, sure. - Okay. So I'm paying for it and I'm pissed off. I mean it... I full screened the client and it still just refuses to remember that I would like to play my games full screen.

Look at those interlacing artifacts. Are they even trying at all? And it's doing this crap again or is it, is that the blanking issue? I can't even tell. Yeah, it is. Let's move on to, you know what? Okay, Stadia. Google might've given up on you but I haven't yet because at $9.99 a month, with modern games included with the service, and third-party controller support it has the potential to be pretty compelling. Whoa, Holy crap.

Look at the way they've applied their anti-aliasing. I don't think I've ever seen anything worse than that. That is a really crappy anti-aliasing method. I don't even think that's done through the game. That has to be something that Stadia is doing as part of their, just, you know rendering it a lower resolution than trying to upscale it kind of optimization.

Instead of proper anti-aliasing where it smooths the stair-step, it's like they're taking the stair-step and just like smearing Vaseline on it. (mouse clicking) Why am I not able to start? Hello? One of the key drawbacks of Stadia is that it requires a Chrome browser, but then again one of the advantages of Stadia is that it runs on basically anything with a Chrome browser even an iPhone or an old Google Chromebook. And unlike GeForce Now, it's got support for 4k streaming. But watch out because according to Stadia Game DB, most of the graphically demanding games are locked at 30 FPS if you crank them up to 4k. That is going to have a noticeable impact on the smoothness of your experience.

It's not nearly as bad as PS Now though. Like I don't feel that like movement, movement, you know like it's not so delayed. I'd definitely rather have a keyboard and mouse right now. Thanks Google. And another thing to watch out for with Stadia is multiplayer.

Stadia absolutely does have multiplayer support across its game library at least in games that support it. But in many cases, the players that you were matched against will also need to be gaming on Stadia. For some titles then, that means pretty slim pickings for matchmaking. Now a handful of developers have that in cross play support to the Stadia ports of their games. But according to this list on r/Stadia, it's still very much a work in progress.

It's totally like, boom, boom, boom, boom. Pow, pow, pow, pow! - Oh my God, is it a bot? (laughs) - No way. Oh my God! I just got to kill punching someone with a gun to death. You know, it feels not bad. It feels not bad.

Though, I wouldn't suggest doing much in the way of competitive gaming on Stadia. Cloud Gaming already is going to put you at a disadvantage. And from our experience, on a high quality internet connection, GeForce Now did deliver slightly lower latency. Although, that was yesterday and this is today. This is better than we had before.

Yeah. Not bad, not bad. Oh, nevermind guys. This game totally works with mouse and keyboard. It was just PUBG that was being stupid.

And the latency actually feels really good. So the worst thing we can say about the latency for Stadia then is that it can be a little inconsistent because we had some problems yesterday when we were doing the prep for this video. No, this is awesome. (chill music) The delay is unreal on this particular game. Now project Xcloud is $15 a month.

But there is some serious value here because you're not strictly subscribing to Xcloud. You're subscribing to game pass ultimate, which happens to include a fantastic library of games that you can play on your Xbox on your PC or as you can see here in the cloud. Hello? I can't control where I'm looking because the delay is so much. (laughs) Now here's the thing though, at least a few of you are probably screaming at your screens right now that cloud gaming extreme got Xcloud working on a PC and some of the problems we're having might be to do with the fact that we're using a non officially supported Android client. Well, you know what you guys are right.

The issue is that the workaround that cloud gaming extreme used has been resolved with a recent update. So unfortunately we won't be able to experience it on a PC until Microsoft launches it officially. On that subject, there are a couple of others cloud gaming contenders that are looming on the horizon. Amazon Luna is currently in early access and can stream games at 720p with a game list that looks pretty darn good. But we all know how Amazon's rival, Google's cloud gaming service launch went and how Amazon's game studio's going.

So all I can say about that one is good luck, daddy Bezos. And then there's the one that we've talked about before, Shadow. It's $11.99 a month, and offers high-end hardware with good performance in both games and even other applications. Like you can use it for video editing because it's pretty much just a remote desktop connection into a windows 10 instance that happens to be in their data center. But the thing with Shadow is that while we would love to recommend it based on our past experience, it's not yet available throughout most of the United States let alone the rest of the world.

And its future is a little uncertain right now, due to the bankruptcy filing of Blade Corp. , its parent company. Which makes the bottom line today pretty challenging, project Xcloud is extremely promising in the future. And it's great for Xbox gamers today. Pretty much a no-brainer, but it's really hard to recommend it for PC gamers without graphics cards until you can easily set it up on your gaming PC.

PlayStation Now, frankly kind of sucks for many of the same reasons. Like I can only really recommend subscribing for a month or two, getting your Philip PS exclusives then ditching it. And then GeForce Now offers the best overall experience thanks to its wide support for both games and devices. Because basically if it works on a PC, and the game developer hasn't blocked it, it should work on GeForce Now, but it's effectively the most expensive offering on the table. Once you factor in that you have to buy all of your own games.

As for Stadia, it's still Stadia. It's not the worst in any way, but it's also not the best in any way. And the problem is that it doesn't replace a gaming PC in the same way that X cloud or GeForce Now can at least try to. And on that subject, another benefit of GeForce now, at least for our audience, is that the library of games that you buy for it and then own can be painlessly ported with your saved files and everything to your gaming PC, once the shortage is resolved. So I think we're going to give the nod to team leather jacket for today, and say that we are excitedly anticipating both future cloud gaming developments from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, and maybe even Shadow.

And also looking forward to a world where we just don't have to care about those cloud gaming developments anymore because we can actually just buy graphics cards. You know what else I'm looking forward to? (snaps) Our sponsor today. Get the best prices and selection on computer hardware and everything else technology at any one of Micro Center's, 25 locations across the United States. Check out the Micro Center custom PC builder to spec out the best PC for your budget. They ensure all your parts are compatible, find if the stock is available at your nearest Micro Center location, and then you just add it to your cart and arrange for same day in store pickup.

For a fee, just check the box marked same day pro assembly and you can have Micro Center's expert technicians assemble your PC for you. If you want help deciding what parts to put in your custom gaming PC, just join the new online Micro Center community, it's a great place to discuss tech and connect with other enthusiasts. So go check out the link in the description to learn more about Micro Center and get a free pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones. It's valid in store only with no purchase necessary. (upbeat electric music) Well then, are any of you are going to go this route with the current market, how it is? Let us know in the comments if you sold your graphics card (chuckles) and you were left staring at an empty case.

Oh, by the way, speaking of cases. If you want something else to watch, check out our diamond play button PC they may not have a graphics card but it's ready for an upgrade in the future. It'll be perfect for this. Guys. Don't worry, that's a dummy GPU.

It doesn't work. I mean, it especially doesn't work now.

Source : Linus Tech Tips