Gears 5 is the first Xbox exclusive to come to GeForce Now as Microsoft cosies up to Nvidia

techradar.com:

Nvidia has released its weekly roundup of games coming to its GeForce Now cloud streaming service, and there’s a noticeable first, with Gears 5 becoming the first Xbox exclusive to come to the platform.

As with pretty much all Xbox exclusives, Gears 5, which is the latest game in the Gears of War franchise, also launched on PC, and now the Steam version can be streamed via GeForce Now to any device that supports the service – including PCs, Macs and MacBooks, smartphones and tablets.

Thanks to Nvidia’s background in graphics cards and servers, GeForce Now is one of the best cloud streaming services in a market that’s got a little bit smaller since Google gave up on its rival, Stadia. Unlike with Stadia, you don’t need to rebuy your games if you’ve already bought them on supported PC stores such as Steam and the Epic Games Store.

GeForce Now comes in various tiers, with the maximum tier offering the power of Nvidia’s high-end RTX 4080 GPU, and comes with DLSS 3 and ray tracing effects, and you can play for eight hours straight. It is pricey, however, at $19.99 / £17.99 a month, with the Ultimate tier seemingly not available in Australia.

There are also mid-tier options that are cheaper but with less powerful hardware, and there’s a free version, too, which is a good way to test out the platform. 

This means you could potentially play Gears 5 on a cheap Chromebook and, depending on the tier and quality of your internet connection, get better performance than if you played the game on an Xbox Series X console.

While Gears 5 will be the first Xbox game on Nvidia GeForce Now, it won’t be the last, with Deathloop, Grounded and Pentiment coming on Thursday May 25, and more likely to come soon.

According to Nvidia, support for the