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In just a few short years streaming media has become the best way to enjoy music, movies and TV shows, and it’s easy to see why. It’s simply a lot more convenient to pay a small subscription fee in order to stream content from an Internet service than to get a disc off a shelf and then put it into a machine.
Thanks to the ever-increasing bandwidth in our homes, the quality is usually as good as, if not better than, the quality you get from old-fashioned physical media. Netflix in particular has made it easier to enjoy entire series of your favorite TV shows without sorting through box sets, having to find the right disc and then having to remember which episode you watched the other night. Now NVIDIA is ready to give you the same experience in gaming with GeForce NOW.
If you’re a fan of big gaming series such as the award-winning Batman Arkham games, those amazing LEGO adventures, Red Faction or The Witcher series, you’ll be delighted to know that GeForce NOW makes it as easy to enjoy hundreds of hours of your favorite games as binge-watching the likes of Breaking Bad, House MD, and Fringe. No messing around with discs, downloads, installation and patches. Just pick a game and you’re ready to go.
There’s much more to streaming a game than streaming a movie. GeForce NOW can deliver games at up to 60 fps in 1080P, which means that it has to receive and process your controller input, render each frame – with all the quality settings ramped up to match your home network’s capabilities – on NVIDIA’s cloud gaming servers and then stream the action back across the Internet without you noticing any delay.
It’s quite the technological challenge, in other words, but the work’s finally paid off for NVIDIA. GeForce NOW is launching with more than 60 popular games ready for you to play instantly, and with something to suit your every gaming mood. You’ll find hits such as The Witcher 3, Batman: Arkham City, Borderlands, The LEGO Movie Videogame and Dead Rising 2, as well as genre games for every occasion.
Whether you’re into racing games, beat-em-ups, RPGs, adventures or even classic arcade-style action, you’ll find something in the GeForce NOW library to pick up and play, and there’s more on the way with upcoming titles including Mad Max, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and LEGO Jurassic World to be added soon. Check out the full list of GeForce NOW titles here.
To get in on the action NVIDIA recommends a minimum broadband speed of at least 10Mbps, and a SHIELD-Ready 5 GHz Wi-Fi router, to stream at 720p resolution and 60 fps (frames per second). A minimum connection speed of 25Mbps is required to stream at 1080p resolution and 60 fps.
And of course you’ll need an NVIDIA SHIELD to run it all on. The latest model in series, SHIELD Android TV, is a powerful set-top box that’s built for next-gen gaming. It’s also a fully-fledged home entertainment hub that can output 4K video and 7:1 surround sound, so you’ll be able to use it for streaming more than games. It’s a one stop solution for music, movies, TV and now high-end gaming, and it’s available now with prices starting at $199.
The first three months of GeForce NOW are available for new members to enjoy for free, and then just $7.99 a month afterwards. Head over to NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW site for more details and to get started on the path to instant, hassle-free gaming.
About the Author
Jim McCauley has been playing games for over 35 years and writing about them for the last 20. Starting at Future Publishing in 1995 he quickly advanced from Staff Writer to Features Editor on PC Format magazine before moving over to online, launching PC Gamer’s first website then working on Daily Radar UK, the forerunner to GamesRadar. He’s contributed to some of the leading titles in gaming, including Official Playstation Magazine, Edge and GamesMaster, and while recent years have seen him working for graphic design titles, his heart has never left gaming
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