It was after another round of endless waiting that I understood the biggest problem with cloud gaming. You see, I tried Xbox Cloud Gaming after it launched in India late last year and was excited about the ability to play any game at any time on any device.
So I grabbed my iPad Pro M4plugged in a controller and launched Xbox Cloud Gaming only to realize there was a 10-minute queue just to launch a game. It was frustrating to say the least, but I thought it was because I just started with the service. I made a mistake. If anything, that 10-minute wait was the shortest queue time I’ve seen in the half-dozen times I’ve tried Xbox Cloud Gaming over the past two months, and more often than not I had to wait 30 minutes or more just to start playing the game I wanted, defeating the instant hotspot.
Fortunately, NVIDIA’s GeForce Now is much more promising. I tested the service before it launched in 2019 and used it on and off for the past six years, mostly when traveling to a country where it was available. Now that NVIDIA is finally bringing GeForce Now to India, I don’t have to deal with a VPN or wait until I travel to use the service, and that in itself is a big deal.
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GeForce Now is what cloud gaming should be
NVIDIA gave a select group of journalists access to the Ultimate tier of GeForce Now before its launch, and I tested the service on my Android phones, including the Vivo X300 Pro, Vivo X300 Ultraand Pixel 10 Pro XLalong with Shield TV Pro and the red magic astra gaming tablet. After nearly a dozen hours of gaming on so many devices, I can say with some confidence that GeForce Now is the best cloud gaming implementation yet. The service simply works; You don’t need to mess with any configuration settings, or worry about latency or any other requirements – just grab a controller and you can start playing your favorite game.
What I also like about GeForce Now is that it lets you play games you already own, unlike Xbox Game Pass, which has a rotating library of titles. With GeForce Now, you’re basically renting a gaming rig located in a data center and using your own game libraries and titles.
I was able to easily link my Steam, Ubisoft, Xbox, Epic Games, and GOG accounts, and had over 300 games eligible to play on the service. On that note, GeForce Now has over 4,500 eligible titles in its library, so whether you’re looking for the latest major release like Crimson Desert or a classic like The Witcher, you’ll easily be able to play any game you want on the platform.
Starting a game is as easy as confirming that you are the owner, which is done by linking it to the digital store where you purchased the title. Once this is done, simply launch the game and play as you would locally. What was particularly notable is that the visual quality was on par with running the game natively on my gaming rig (which has an RTX 4090), and that’s because NVIDIA uses RTX 5080-powered servers in India, at least at the Ultimate tier.
The visual quality is as good as playing locally.
With the Ultimate tier, NVIDIA guarantees 4K at 120 fps and sub-30 millisecond latency when playing 5v5 titles at 1440p resolution (up to 240 fps) or 1080p at 360 fps. NVIDIA also touts something called Cinematic Quality Streaming, which increases the overall quality of the rendered video, delivering HDR images and outstanding color accuracy.
In fact, even with long gaming sessions, I didn’t see any noticeable latency or stuttering, no queue or wait time before a game loaded, nor any noticeable drop in fidelity. That alone makes GeForce Now better than Xbox Cloud Gaming, where I saw intermittent jitter and latency. Of course, there’s the fact that I’m essentially beta testing GeForce Now; has not debuted publicly in India, so the servers do not have any significant load. The real test for GeForce Now would be after a few months of availability, and that’s when I’ll put the cloud gaming platform to the test.
That said, I don’t foresee any problems with long queues or latency issues. While GeForce Now is making its debut in India, the service has been around for over half a decade and there are no issues using it in other countries.
GeForce Now doesn’t consume as much bandwidth as I thought
When it comes to bandwidth, NVIDIA suggests 65 Mbps to make the most of 4K and 5K resolutions, and 55 Mbps in most other situations. The minimum is 15 Mbps, which should be easily achievable even with mobile data. Latency is another factor, and a minimum of less than 80 milliseconds is needed. When I connected to the GeForce Now India server, I got a latency of 19 milliseconds, which is ideal. The server is located in Mumbai and I didn’t see any latency issues while connecting from my home in Hyderabad.
GeForce Now has a built-in tool that allows you to see your bandwidth and latency in real time relative to the nearest server, and the best part is that you can adapt the streaming quality based on your bandwidth. While Cinema mode uses 100Mbps at most, there’s a Balanced or Data Saver mode that only needs 12Mbps, while dropping the resolution to 1280p.
Generally, the platform modifies images on the fly on other devices based on your bandwidth, but you get granular control if you’re interested in maximizing what the service has to offer. On my phones and tablets, it was set to Balanced, but switching to Custom allowed me to get better image quality, going up to QHD.
It doesn’t cost as much as Xbox Game Pass, for now
NVIDIA is clearly being aggressive in India (at least at launch), and GeForce Now starts at ₹999 ($11) for three months of the Performance plan and ₹1,999 ($21) for 90 days of the Ultimate tier. It’s an incredible value considering the Ultimate plan costs $20 a month in the US, so you’re basically paying a third of the cost in India. To put this in context, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate costs ₹1,389 ($15) per month, so regardless of how you slice it, GeForce Now is a real bargain in India at launch, and that’s because the service is apparently in beta.
Look, I understand if you’re not sold on the idea of cloud gaming. As someone who has had a dedicated gaming machine for almost 20 years, the idea of playing my game library from anywhere is new to me. More than anything else, cloud gaming makes it easier than ever to play the games I want on whatever device I have on hand.
It’s that convenience that makes cloud gaming appealing, and if you’re just starting out as a gamer and don’t want to invest in a gaming machine right now, which is understandable with the state of RAM prices, GeForce Now is the ideal alternative. And having used the service in India, there’s no doubt that NVIDIA’s option is the way to go if you want to get started with cloud gaming in the country.
