Here’s everything you need to know about GeForce Now in Australia

At the advent of Netflix’s global domination, every media giant worth their salt started scrambling to create the next Netflix of [insert medium here]. In the video game space, Xbox was the first to find success with a monthly subscription to a library of over 100 games ready to download and play at any given time. While Game Pass got the key value proposition down pat (a single monthly fee for a truckload of games), it still didn’t hadn’t solved the convenience factor: the ability to stream games on just about any internet connected device available. Now with a true 1:1 video game equivalent to Netflix (Xbox Cloud Gaming) in its infancy (here in Australia, at least), a new challenger has arrived to claim some of the digital real estate Xbox has acquired. A new challenger known as NVIDIA GeForce Now.

Unlike Xbox Game Pass, the true value of GeForce Now lies in its connection to your Steam and Epic Games Store accounts. It is, primarily, a game streaming (or cloud gaming) platform, that allows you to stream the games you already own through Steam or Epic using racked GeForce RTX graphics cards to deliver high-performance gaming to your low or mid-performance machine. So you don’t need the latest and greatest PC hardware to enable fancy features like ray tracing for your library of games, just a subscription and a compatible device (iOS, Android TV, PC or Mac, just to name a few).

After signing up for a free (Basic) or paid (Priority) plan, you need to download the GeForce Now app on the device you wish to play on. Here in Australia, GeForce Now is powered by Perth broadband provider Pentanet, so you can find the PC app on its dedicated landing page. If you don't feel like downloading another app, you can also use it straight from the browser using that same link. For iOS devices, you'll need to visit the above link in Safari but for every other Android device, you will download the GeForce Now app from the Google Play Store. 

Once you've downloaded the app or logged in via a browser, you will need to find some games to play. To do this, you will need to connect your Steam or Epic Games account in the GeForce Now app. 

Note: Your Steam profile also needs to be set to public for GeForce Now to be able to find it.

GeForce Now does have game recommendations on its front page. Some of those games you'll need to purchase with your own money, while others seem to be free trials of sorts that still need to connect to your Steam or Epic account. 

Here in Australia, GeForce Now is available in two tiers that offer different experiences. The Basic tier is free and it offers standard queuing privileges, one-hour play sessions and blocks access to RTX reatues like ray tracing. The Priority tier costs $19.99 per month or $215.88 for an annual subscription (which works out at $17.99 per month). Priority gets you four-hour session times, priority access to game servers and all the bells and whistles of RTX, like ray tracing and Tensor Cores for AI.

Great question, because it’s not entirely clear from the outset. As we’ve touched on above, GeForce Now isn’t a game library akin to Xbox Game Pass. Your subscription doesn’t give you access to a library of games you don’t already own. Instead, it allows you to stream the games you already own in Steam, Epic or Ubisoft Connect on a number of devices. But there’s still one more caveat, not only do you need to own the game already, the game needs to support GeForce Now. The list of supported games is huge (with over 1,000 titles already available) but you can’t guarantee if and when a new release will get GeForce Now support. For example, I’ve recently purchased Inscryption on Steam, a game I would love to play from the comfort of my lounge on my Sony Smart TV, but Inscryption doesn’t support GeForce Now. In fact, only 6 of the 20 games in my Steam library support GeForce Now. Sure, I can play Apex Legends, Superhot, Armello and Disco Elysium but there are still some massively popular titles missing, such as Doki Doki Literature Club, Hotline Miami, Inside and PUBG are all incompatible. Sure, I don’t require a high-performance machine to play a lot of those titles but I’d still love to play them on my phone or my Smart TV.

If you’re wondering whether your games will work with GeForce Now, you can search the table below for the titles in your Steam or Epic game library.

In Australia, GeForce Now is available for a variety of browsers, smartphones, tablets and Smart TVs. Here’s the list of eligible devices:

• Windows PC (Windows 7 or later)
• MacOS desktop and laptops (MacOS 10.11 or later)
• Chromecast with Google TV
• Sony Smart TV
• Android smartphones and tablets (Android 5.0 or later)
• iPhones and iPads via the Safari web browser (iOS 14.3 or later)

However, in our experience so far, there have been some weird caveats. For example, when we tried to test GeForce Now on a 2020 Sony Bravia Smart TV, it would only allow us to connect an Epic Games Store account, not a Steam account, despite Steam being connected to the account in the PC app. 

We’ve established you don’t need cutting-edge hardware to stream games with GeForce Now but you do need—and this might be a bit hard to stomach for some Australians—a stable internet connection of at least 15Mbps and that’s just for 720p streaming at 60fps. If you want 1080p streaming at 60fps, you’re going to need a minimum of 25Mbps (NBN Basic II speeds). Lastly, you’ll also want to be hardwired with an Ethernet connection to a 5GHz router for the best experience, which could be the one big hurdle for a lot of gamers. That's according to Nvidia's Help Page, though we managed to connect just fine over WiFi.

If you’re not sure what your current internet speed is, use the internet speed test tool above to find out. If you find you’re lacking the required megabits-per-second, take a look at the popular NBN 100 plans below for a potential upgrade path.