Seeing Black Myth: Wukong running on GeForce Now may have finally convinced me that cloud gaming is the future

pcgamer.com:

For someone that spends their life covering the cutting edge of tech, I can be surprisingly old-fashioned. I've lost the love for multiplayer gaming, I care not a jot for esports, and I like my games running on the powerful piece of hardware sitting on my desk, thanks very much. None of that cloud gaming malarkey for me.

However, watching Black Myth: Wukong streaming via a GeForce Now-equipped MacBook at Gamescom 2024, I had something of a realisation. A re-assessment of my principles, if you will. This is a game that caused our Tyler's mighty RTX 4090 to struggle, and while you can absolutely tweak the settings to get a smooth experience (our Nick has put together an excellent guide to help you do just that), it can require a fair bit of adjustment to get the best out of it.

Playing it with the settings turned up, at a seamless 80 fps + with zero-perceptible latency—on a MacBook, of all things—suddenly made me realise how much sense cloud streaming services make for a game like this. Put simply, the experience looked brilliant. Perfect, even. 4 ms or less of latency. Excellent visuals, delivered via a connected ultrawide display. A very demanding game, made to look trivially easy to run on a standard-issue laptop. 

And for all my long-held instincts to treat cloud-based gaming with caution, I was left wondering whether I'd fallen behind.

I thought about my rig at home. Sure, I could fire the game up on my RX 7800 XT, have a play around with the settings, and continually pull myself out of the magic on screen by keeping a watchful eye on the frame rate counter.

Or, I could log in to Geforce Now on a supported device, and simply press play. And, y'know, actually get on with the business of enjoying the game, rather than continually wondering whether my hardware was up to the task, or whether I was one setting tweak away from a seamless experience.

My demonstration was on trade show internet, which is notoriously unreliable. Chatting with the folk at the Nvidia booth,