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GeForce Now is an incredible value for gamers. For $20/mo you get a 4080 streamed from the cloud, 6 hours at a time (and you can just relaunch after that). It h

GeForce Now is an incredible value for gamers. For $20/mo you get a 4080 streamed from the cloud, 6 hours at a time (and you can just relaunch after that). It has a smallish library, but the games it supports run very well. This first party service is miles ahead of their competitors, many of who also use their cards. Shadow, for example, costs 3x as much for a worse experience. I don't really understand how they can make the economics of it work. which worries me, especially as their AI work is just printing money. I wonder if it's just a matter of time before they abandon the gaming market.

justinclift 3y ago
Hmmm, at $20/mo (for 6 hours at a time) then each of those 4080's is able to bring in $80/mo of revenue. That's about $1k per year. Seems potentially reasonable if that's amortised over a few years.
- solardev 3y ago
  You're not limited to 6 hours per day (though that's a lot of gaming anyway). But I doubt people are playing in optimally spread out times, i.e. it's usually a lot busier in the evenings, and on weekends and holidays. So they have to plan for bursty peaks and a lot of bandwidth that can't be cached or CDNed (it's all generated in real-time), heat management (bunch of GPUs running at full blast), virtualizing and isolating every user's Steam instance, etc. And of course all the staff it takes to manage the whole thing, test games, fix issues, etc. The other cloud gaming providers need to do the same thing, and they either cost more and/or have worse hardware and/or have publisher relationships. Xbox and PS streaming use actual consoles and are much less powerful, for example, Shadow costs a lot more for worse hardware, Luna works with publishers, Stadia just gave up before ever really trying (lol), etc. Maybe in Nvidia's case, at least they can get the GPUs at cost, and maybe use them for non gaming async workloads during off peak times? I dunno. I just hope they keep GFN going; it's completely replaced my desktop PC.

justinclift 3y ago

Hmmm, at $20/mo (for 6 hours at a time) then each of those 4080's is able to bring in $80/mo of revenue. That's about $1k per year. Seems potentially reasonable if that's amortised over a few years.

solardev 3y ago
You're not limited to 6 hours per day (though that's a lot of gaming anyway). But I doubt people are playing in optimally spread out times, i.e. it's usually a lot busier in the evenings, and on weekends and holidays. So they have to plan for bursty peaks and a lot of bandwidth that can't be cached or CDNed (it's all generated in real-time), heat management (bunch of GPUs running at full blast), virtualizing and isolating every user's Steam instance, etc. And of course all the staff it takes to manage the whole thing, test games, fix issues, etc. The other cloud gaming providers need to do the same thing, and they either cost more and/or have worse hardware and/or have publisher relationships. Xbox and PS streaming use actual consoles and are much less powerful, for example, Shadow costs a lot more for worse hardware, Luna works with publishers, Stadia just gave up before ever really trying (lol), etc. Maybe in Nvidia's case, at least they can get the GPUs at cost, and maybe use them for non gaming async workloads during off peak times? I dunno. I just hope they keep GFN going; it's completely replaced my desktop PC.