GeForce NOW on Steam Deck really can be a game-changer

Now that NVIDIA GeForce NOW actually has an official dedicated app for the Steam Deck, I've taken it for a spin and came away impressed. Disclosure: NVIDIA gave me access to the Ultimate subscription.

It's no secret I'm a fan of Cloud Gaming, after covering plenty of Google Stadia (R.I.P) previously before Google shut it down. The tech was great and it worked well, but Google's business plan sucked. GeForce NOW on the other hand has the best of all worlds. You can play games on various devices, and those games are actually yours from various other stores. So if NVIDIA ever shut it, you haven't lost those games.

One of the major benefits of course is how you can run games that the Steam Deck struggles with. You'll get to see better visuals and better performance from pretty much anything that's available on GeForce NOW. That's just icing on the cake though, as GeForce NOW is a fantastic choice for games that have anti-cheat that blocks Linux platforms, so it also opens up a whole lot of extra possibilities there too filling a nice gap.

Until this new dedicated app arrived, I had only really used GeForce NOW in passing. Whenever it was needed for work, like how in March 2022 I reported on it being easier to get it running on Steam Deck via the browser. And a bit of occasional gaming but not a regular amount as the experience just wasn't the best overall.

Now though? It's actually quite amazing. The app is so easy to use and setting it up is a total breeze (here's a guide for it). A friend wants me to jump into Fortnite? Yeah, okay — not a problem! I've been repeatedly shocked at just how good it feels overall, 99% of the time I truly cannot tell that the game is being beamed from somewhere far away through the internet. At times, it feels a bit like magic.

The battery life you get on the Steam Deck OLED with it is simply amazing. Over 7 hours playing Fortnite. I think that's enough in one sitting for anyone.

And gosh, visually, it looks absolutely magnificent on the Steam Deck OLED screen.

What truly makes my mind get into a mess is just how the input is just so good. I cannot tell the difference between playing a local game and playing via GeForce NOW. This game is being beamed through various wires across vast distances, and yet — I can very rarely tell.

Pricing is perhaps is an issue though, but that very much depends on how you look at it. Free for one hour to test, £9.99 a month for the 1440p Performance sub and £19.99 a month for the Ultimate sub with 4K HDR and 240FPS. Both the subscriptions support RTX too. However, you can also buy a 6 month subscription at a discounted rate.

If we take the £9.99 monthly rate across let's say 3 years, that's about the price of a reasonable modern GPU. Not taking into account all the other components. So even thinking about it like that, the cost is actually pretty reasonable for what you get access to on lower-end cheaper devices.

One major issue I've come across is that the Steam integration is just at times — rubbish. It will get stuck on "Loading user data..." and nothing happens. This is not a Linux / Steam Deck issue, it's a clear problem with the service that has lots of reports from even a quick Google search. It seems to happen on specific games with no clear cause even on Windows. Sometimes games won't load either, jumping in again today before publishing, it took Dune: Awakening 4 attempts before it actually launched.

There's one element I really dislike about it though in terms of features, which is the 100 hour a month playtime limit. Even if you're paying for the highest tier, you get a static 100 hours per month (with a 15 hour rollover). Across 31 days that's less than 3 and a half hours a day. To some, it might still seem like a fair amount overall, but it could be pretty easy to go over it and have to pay more. I get why they added a limit (nothing is truly unlimited), but I still don't like it.

Another obvious downside to note is that developers need to actually opt into GeForce NOW and not every developer does, and even then it still needs NVIDIA to accept the game onto the service. The list of what you can play on it is quite long, but still has plenty of limits. Games also do get removed from it now and then when agreements expire.

It's not a one-size-fits-all solution for those reasons above, and add to that the issue of your internet service and your home networking. You need a reasonably good ISP to make the most of it in terms of speed and bandwidth, plus your home network has to have a strong signal. Small bumps in latency can be felt quite clearly at times in random visual quality drops and controls suddenly lagging. For me, that has been an extremely rare thing, only happening a couple of times in a lot of hours testing but it does happen.

We're coming to Summer now in the UK, and GeForce NOW has actually been a huge benefit for me here too. My office gets way too hot with my PC running, unbearably hot at times and being able to escape with the Steam Deck and play various games that I wouldn't be able to usually in a cooler environment (and with vastly better battery life) is such a nice double bonus.

I wouldn't be doing my duty at this point if I didn't moan about something though. NVIDIA now support the Steam Deck which is great, but what about other Linux distributions? SteamOS as a whole? Traditional desktop Linux?

They've shown very clearly they can make it work to the point that it feels fantastic. It's currently limited to 1080p in the browser on Linux, so either removing that restriction, or opening up the Steam Deck app properly to desktop Linux would be the next step. I'll be bugging them about this regularly.

Pictured - GeForce NOW Fortnite, Desktop Linux

Overall, when it actually works properly, GeForce NOW is truly awesome on Steam Deck. But there's still quite a number of annoying issues with all their integrations at times.

You can check it out at GeForce NOW.