With a new slew of streaming services out there for PC video games I felt it was time to look at the offerings.

  • Geforce Now
  • Google Stream
  • Playstation Now

Each of these have their unique offerings and some much newer than others. 

What’s the same?

All 3 of these services compute the game on their servers and not the local PC. Due to this, the computer can be years old or just inexpensive that just has the bare minimum. The minimum specs are linked below.

 

The Test Machine:

  • Win 10
  • 6GB RAM
  • Intel HD 4000
  • i3-3217U 1.8GHz

Google Stream

Very new service and who knows how far this will go, but we will look at the current offering and make some logical projections going forward. This service is only free right now as it is just being tested. One benefit of being a tester is a $60 game to play without having to put in the $60 for it (each person is allowed to play Assassins Creed Odyssey till January at no cost), so as of now I feel up a leg. Free is great unless the experience is not, so lets take a look at how it runs and how it is all setup. 

Google Stream requires no installation of software which is unique in the listing here. The other streaming services do require this. Though that doesn’t bother me, it is worth making a mention of.  This plays through your browser page and needed a touch of getting used to but ended up being just fine.

Pros:

  • Surprisingly good graphics and a smooth frame rate
  • No software to install 
  • Very easy to use even on multiple computers
  • Fantastic capabilities and I for one an excited to see where it goes from here
  • Quickly reverted from controller to mouse and keyboard with no lag

Cons:

  • Unable to change the PC volume in game
  • Lack of information on what you are playing on and how it works 

Geforce Now

This service has come over some changes over time. Originally this was a pay per hour service. For me it was only for the wealthy that was traveling on business and wanted to play games every once in a while. Even for truckers or people who rarely play It seemed like the cost was not quite justified over the course of a year or so. 

Later in 2017 Nvidia decided to try things out in a free service with the same name. This service is free for now though as the Google service above there is absolutely a chance that they will start charging.  As long as it is a reasonable monthly cost or a low per hour cost I think this could be great. 

So how was the software and abilities. This requires you to buy your own game (which is perfectly reasonable) and connect to your steam account. The connection was easy, logging in and out was very easy it really was a simple process. Not everything is available to play but Nvidia does have a list of the supported games in their application. Inside of the games I saw more lag on games than I did with Google Stream though it was not enough to frustrate me into not using it just needed to let it buffer out and get me back to normal. This wasn’t a constant, so I feel that even if it was a paid service I wouldn’t have felt burned by the company.

Pros:

  • Easy application installation and login process
  • Great list of supported games
  • Swapping between Steam accounts was easy
  • Smooth game play for the most part

Cons:

  • Not tournament quality game play, I wouldn’t join a pro-league with it but also wouldn’t expect to
  • No method to be able to suggest games to be installed on their servers to work in the future

PlayStation Now

PlayStation now is a subscription based platform for $20 a Month or $45 for 3 months. So what do you get from your subscription? Access to play more than 650 games all with the monthly cost. These can stream on your PC or PlayStation to have some added versatility. For someone who plays a lot of games it can justify the price.  If you finish new games in less than 3 months, your a potential win for this service. Not only can you play that new $60 title, after the normal 30-40 hours to finish the game you generally have come out ahead. 

I was able to install and play the system with little to no problems though after subscribing it didn’t have a spot to download on the same page, kinda odd. While playing I was able to run Fraps99 to get the frame rate. The Frame rate for every game I tested was 30 which was the cap. Now even though it stayed at 30 most of the time what it doesn’t show is how terrible the game looked and the quality of those frames. I first tested GOW 3 remastered, and it was absolutely unplayable. Just a complete train wreck of terrible blocks that was not worth the price of free admission. Next up I tried an older game to see how it would fair, the original Twisted Metal. It was playable although it was not nearly as good as playing it on an original PlayStation. It still had many instances (twice every minute or so) where it would have very bad resolution.  I ran a speed test to ensure I wasn’t just having bandwidth issues and got 56 Mbps, which is more than the recommended 5-12Mbps than they require.

Pros:

  • Reasonable price
  • 650 games available

Cons:

  • Catastrophic
  • Worst experience of a streaming service 
  • States that it works with non-PlayStation controllers, but many games did not register the buttons properly

These have a lot of differences to them, so it is tough to compare directly. Id like to see how much the services evolve over time but here are my final thoughts. 

The Nvidia offers the most complete service. It operates well, and has a good library of games to play through the service. Though it is free right now I feel like this could easily be a paid service. At $20 a month you could have a high end rig to play on while running around with your $200 laptop; this seems pretty worth it to me. The google service was quick and has a lot of potential so time will tell if this will work as a similar function to Nvidia’s offering.