In October of this year, the cloud-based gaming service GeForce Now began work in Russia. Actually, it was available before, but for registration it was necessary to get a key, which was far from every player. Now you can register and play. I already wrote about this service before, now let's find out a little more about it, plus compare it with two other cloud-based gaming services that are available in the Russian Federation - Loudplay and PlayKey.
By the way, I remind you that all three services make it possible to play at maximum speed in the latest masterpieces of the game world - you can do this even from an old laptop. Of course, not quite ancient, he still has to cope with the processing of the video stream, but certainly of low power.
GeForce Now
Let's start with the requirements for network connectivity and hardware.
For a comfortable game, you need a channel with a bandwidth of at least 15 Mbps. In this case, you can expect a video stream with a quality of 720p and 60 fps. If you want to play with a resolution of 1080p and 60 fps, then the throughput should be higher - better than 30 Mbit / s.
As for the PC, the requirements for Windows are as follows:
- Dual core X86 CPU with a frequency of 2.0GHz and higher.
- 4GB of RAM.
- GPU supporting DirectX 11 and above.
- NVIDIA GeForce 600 series or newer graphics card.
- AMD Radeon HD 3000 or newer video card.
- Intel HD Graphics 2000 series or newer graphics card.
So far, the only service data center is located in the Russian Federation, so residents of the capital and suburbs will receive the highest quality picture and minimum ping. The radius at which good results can be expected is several hundred kilometers, with a maximum of 1000.
And what about the prices?
Now they are already known. Not so much, but you can’t call it almost free, provided that you need to buy games. To play, you need an account on Steam, Uplay or Blizzard's Battle.net. If there are purchased games there, we attach them to the GFN without problems and play. Now the library has about 500 new games compatible with the service, the list is updated every week. Here is the complete list. There are, by the way, free games that GFN calls "popular," but finding something worthwhile among them is not so simple.
What is good is the availability of a two-week period of free testing. Those. if the service does not suit you because you are far from Moscow, there are lags, blurring of the image, etc. - the card can be untied without losing money and look for another alternative.
Check connection
Register an account, link a card, and play? No, you need to go through another step - checking the quality of your communication channel. During the check, GFN gives a list of possible problems, so that you can understand whether there will be lags or not. But even if the service shows complete incompatibility of the connection, you can skip the settings window and still try to play. Sometimes GFN says that the connection is full of seams, but the game still goes fine. So it’s better to check. If you try from Moscow with a normal connection, then we get this result.
By the way, you should not think that if you are from Moscow or the region, you will get a direct communication channel with the GFN data center. Not at all - there can be a lot of intermediate stages / servers. So before you start the game, it’s better to check all this out - at least with tracert on the command line or with the winmtr utility.
There are many comments on the net about GFN. For someone in Kaliningrad or St. Petersburg, everything works perfectly with the top settings and the latest games, while someone lives in Moscow and has a “soap” instead of a normal picture. So 14 days of a trial period is a great opportunity to check everything yourself. “Once in a while” - with regard to GFN, this saying is very relevant.
And yes, for cloud games, it’s best to connect via Ethernet, or through a 5 GHz wireless channel. Otherwise there will be lags and “soap”.
Picture quality
Since the last attempt to play on this service, only about two months have passed. There is not much difference, although the problems (blurring the picture, etc.) have nevertheless become slightly less. Here are the test results two months earlier.
Despite a good connection and Moscow servers, problems do happen. If something is wrong with the Internet, the system determines this and displays a yellow or red icon, which allows the player to understand that problems may now begin. And they appear - it is, first of all, about the distortion of the picture, as happens with all streams in case of violation of the quality of communication.
But there are no problems with the management - even if there is a warning about connection problems, there are no lags, the character listens to button presses on the controller instantly - as is the case with the game on the local PC.
Output. The quality of service has not changed much since the last test. The service is convenient, but there are still many problems - you need to fix it, "hold out" and modify it. One of the main drawbacks for Russian gamers is just one data center, which is located in Moscow. The farther from the capital - the (at least for now) the more difficult it is to play because of the “soap” and lags.
By the way, there was an interesting opinion on Habré that Geforce Now is a by-product of Nvidia, the company does not have enough resources to promote it in different countries. Therefore, she resorted to the help of partners - in Russia - Safmar, in Korea - LG U +, in Japan - SoftBank. If so, it is difficult to say whether the quality of the service will improve and if so, how quickly.
But besides GFN, there are two more Russian services - Loudplay and PlayKey. In a previous article, I dwelled on them in detail, so this time we will not parse them "by the bones", like a fresh GFN. By the way, the latter can be considered half Russian, since its infrastructure and deployment is handled by an Nvidia partner from the Russian Federation.
Loudplay
This service has servers in Moscow, the quality of the video stream is not bad, the bitrate is 3-20 Mbit / s, FPS is 30 and 60. Here is an example of a game, this is Witcher 3 with maximum settings.
There are several useful features for the gamer, including the ability to select a connection server, with a look at the characteristics of each of them.
But there are still more flaws than the GFN. Firstly, a rather complicated pricing system. The money of users here is converted into specialized credit units, which are called “loans”. The opportunity to play costs from 50 cents per minute, depending on the package. Plus, a paid option is to save games - this will cost the user 500 rubles per month. But here games are saved not for the entire cloud as a whole, but for a specific server. If you leave it, or if it is closed for some reason, game progress and all downloaded games of the user will be lost, and there will be no compensation.
For some gamers, the plus here is that LoudPlay makes it possible to play unlicensed games.
Playkey
Here I like the fact that the service adapts to the user using the configurator and a small questionnaire. This helps to personalize the process and the “inner kitchen” of the service.
Per-minute pricing - from 1 ruble per minute with the condition of buying the maximum package. Paid save games, etc. not here - no additional services, everything is included in the original package. The player profile, games and saves are hosted in the cloud and available for any of the servers.
The biggest plus is that the service has several servers in different cities of Russia - not only Moscow, but also Ufa and Perm. This makes it possible to connect without special lags and problems from a larger number of regions than in the case of the previous two services.
During testing, I didn’t have any special lags - sometimes the picture was blurry, but not like when playing on other services mentioned above. There are practically no artifacts, as in GFN. Well, the cursor does not lag behind the user's mouse movements - this has already been mentioned. The resolution of the video stream is up to 1920 * 1080. The site has the ability to select other parameters, including 1280 * 720.
As a general conclusion, we can say that GFN and PlayKey remained my favorites from the Russian Federation. So far, GFN has more glitches and problems than PlayKey. It is unclear whether NVIDIA will correct the bottlenecks mentioned above, but I would like it to be fixed. Otherwise, players may begin to leave for other services, not only those that are already working now, but also those that will appear in the future. An example is Google Stadia, which many are waiting for launch.