If the visuals on your Xbox Series S or aging PC aren’t cutting it, you can upgrade to a powerful gaming rig in the cloud, with the latest RTX 4080 graphics card, for just £9.99 per month.
The new offer is available as part of the Geforce Now (GFN) Black Friday sale. As long as you’re not an existing paying member of the cloud-gaming service, you can grab either of the two premium tiers of Geforce Now for half their usual price for three months.
While the Performance plan is cheaper at £4.99 a month, we’d recommend going all out on Ultimate, now down to £9.99 per month versus £19.99 normally.
This way, you can stream most of the games you’ve amassed from Steam or the Epic Games Store on a setup that’s five times more powerful than an Xbox Series X (with an even faster latency).
We’re talking blisteringly fast performance that renders AAA games like Cyberpunk 2077 in stunning 4K at a buttery-smooth 120 frames per second.
You can also drop down to Full HD and play competitive titles such as Rocket League or Fortnite at a ridiculous 240 frames per second – provided you have a decent gaming screen that can handle those rates. There’s even support for ultrawide monitors.
Plus, with the ability to connect your Game Pass for PC or Ultimate account, you can access all the games from Xbox’s all-you-can-play service.
The timing couldn’t be better as Steam is currently running an autumn sale with savings on games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Warhammer 40,000, Space Marine 2 and Star Wars Outlaws. Meanwhile, Xbox is offering a two-week trial for Game Pass for PC for just £1.
But, even if you’re not already a PC or Xbox acolyte, chances are (if you’re reading this) you’ve considered buying a gaming PC or laptop. Like many would-be PC gamers, maybe you were put off by the massive upfront cost that comes with building your own system.
With Geforce Now, you don’t have to worry about any of that as your owned games (and some subscriptions) will be available to stream on your existing devices, be it a Mac, no-frills Chromebook, a dusty old PC or a smartphone. It’s a bit like getting a virtual PC for Christmas that you can play almost anywhere.
The only thing you do need to pay attention to is your internet connection. Seeing as you're remotely playing games on a PC server located in one of Nvidia’s multitudinous data centres, patchy WiFi won’t keep up. To get the most out of it, Nvidia says you’ll need at least 45Mbits/sec. Thus, fibre-to-the-cabinet connection or full-fibre broadband is your best bet.
If it’s still patchy, try hooking your router straight to your device with an ethernet cable. Unfortunately, Nvidia doesn’t offer any refunds, so make sure your internet is capable before taking the plunge. To that end, you could try the free tier, which comes with ads and lengthy queues, to see how it works before buying.
It’s these types of restrictions that have left a bad taste in the mouth for some GFN customers. Nvidia also received scorn by recently introducing a playtime limit of 100 hours per month. It already caps your daily session at eight hours, though that’s probably enough for anyone with a full-time job.
But, broadly speaking, the reviews have been mostly positive and, at this low price, it’s too good to ignore.
