Starfield on GeForce Now is among the best and worst ways to play
By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
I’m not ready to upgrade my PC. Would I pay $20 a month to rent one that lives in the cloud? Starfield is the first game that’s actually making me consider the possibility.
Today, Starfield arrived on Nvidia’s GeForce Now, a service that lets you tap into an RTX 4080-equivalent GPU, and I spent a little time benchmarking the hard-to-run game. It absolutely looks and plays better than it did on my aging 1440p desktop, and looks great handheld.
It’s not a silver bullet. I currently have wired gigabit fiber optic internet and live only a few towns over from Nvidia’s west coast servers. Even then, the game doesn’t currently run as smoothly as it does on the highest-end gaming PCs. In the city of New Atlantis, I saw dips down to 47 and 48 frames per second no matter my graphics settings or resolution, because many worlds are fundamentally limited by your CPU speeds.
But in the cyberpunk core of Neon, I never saw a dip below 60fps at 4K resolution and Ultra spec, regardless of whether I simply walked through town or provoked a battle. It’s so much smoother than my 5600X / 3060 Ti desktop machine.
(By default, GeForce Now sets the game to Ultra with FSR2 enabled, at 75 percent render resolution. I got 70-80fps in Neon’s core that way — consistently 10fps higher than native resolution.)
On other worlds, and in lighter firefights, my cloud gaming framerate was far north of 60fps at Ultra spec. I do still need to test on Masada III, though.
Right now, you’re probably wondering about my headline. If it’s so great, why’s it also a “worst way to play”? How can
Read more on theverge.com
