I’ve never been much of a PC gamer (even less so a Mac gamer), and while I play on a variety of other platforms, I simply haven’t been all that interested in building and using my own custom desktop PC.
The only desktop I do have is an M2 Mac mini, a machine built more for productivity than gaming. But then, while I was browsing the internet on that very machine, I had a gaming brainwave: And it’s all thanks to one of my favorite handheld gaming systems.
I bought a Steam Deck a couple of years ago, which became my first (and to date, only) experience with PC games. What the system became most used for, however, was game streaming. With a very fast fiber connection, streaming games from my consoles to my Steam Deck was an absolute joy. There’s little to no input delay or lag, and streaming the likes of Ghost of Tsushima feels like I’m playing natively on my Deck with graphics the handheld could only dream of. It’s almost uncanny.
Streaming the games from my Xbox and PlayStation to my Steam Deck left me wanting more. More games, more experiences, more graphical oomph. Enter GeForce Now, Nvidia’s game streaming service that allows you to play your favorite PC games streamed to your Steam Deck (or similar device), all played on one of Nvidia’s mega machines in a data center somewhere. Unreal UHD graphics and monster frame rates on my portable Steam machine, all playable over the internet. And then it hit me: Why not use the service on my Mac mini instead, and experience the best PC gaming has to offer from a $500 base model Mac?
High-end PC gaming on low-end hardware
I’ll address the elephant in the room straight away: GeForce Now’s Ultimate tier isn’t cheap. It’ll set you back $20 a month, essentially meaning you’re subscribing to a computer with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4080 for $240 a year. That might seem pricey but in comparison to how much one of Nvidia’s top-tier graphics cards costs, it ends up being a pretty good deal..
There’s another elephant in the room, too, for a one-two pachyderm combo — without fast fiber, streaming games over the internet sucks. If you’ve got a good router, as I do, and super fast broadband download speeds (mine sit around the 1Gb/s mark) you’ll have no issues at all. But if your internet isn’t high-speed then the experiences I’m about to share may not be possible.
Over the last few months I’ve been enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty DLC with maxed-out Ray Tracing and Path Tracing, and it’s completely ridiculous. Now I've never played a game on a high-end PC, so seeing Cyberpunk 2077 rendered with an ultra-powerful RTX 4080 GPU compared to my paltry PlayStation 5 was a huge eye-opener. The shadows looked real, the textures uncanny, and the lighting was next level, unlike anything I’ve seen before.
In my line of work, I get to try a lot of cutting-edge technologies, but very few impress me in the way GeForce Now’s Ultimate tier has. Cyberpunk looks insane and it runs flawlessly at 60fps in the highest fidelity my eyes have ever seen. At times I need to pinch myself to remember that the best gaming experience I’ve ever had is streaming over the internet to my $500 Mac mini.
Native gaming on Mac leaves a lot to be desired, but GeForce Now makes it feel in line with the best gaming experiences you can buy right now. No, you can’t play every game via GeForce Now, but with a library of over 1500 titles and the ability to log in to Xbox Game Pass, the streaming service will scratch the itch for anyone who wants to play games without buying a gaming PC or a games console.
While the subscription cost might put some off, there’s a free tier and a slightly cheaper premium tier that grants you access to Nvidia’s gaming servers. If you think about how much a gaming rig would cost, the ability to rent some of the best graphics cards Nvidia has to offer without investing in a PC is not a bad deal at all. Not only can you cancel at any time, but when new generations of graphic cards come out, Nvidia upgrades the tiers to reflect the new hardware. My M2 Mac mini isn’t fancy, heck it’s literally the cheapest Mac Apple sells, but thanks to GeForce Now I can use it for most of my gaming needs as well as all the work tasks I throw at it.
