After testing the RTX 3080 GeForce Now service for the past few days, I figured I needed a second opinion on the matter, so I signed up for a free account. Wow. What a difference that made! The hardware was noticeably slower, framerates couldn't maintain a steady 60 fps, and even at 1080p, ultra quality in many games was no longer an option. Once I dropped to 1080p medium in Far Cry 6, though, it wasn't too bad and I found myself enjoying the game — right up until I got booted after the one hour time limit was reached.

The loss in image quality, specifically the overall fuzziness of the stream, was more noticeable to me. However, it wasn't something that I couldn't ignore, and particularly in the midst of fights — in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Control, Watch Dogs Legion, and Far Cry 6 — I stopped thinking about image fidelity and just got lost playing games. Playing with the RTX 3080 account still had some fuzziness, but it was far less noticeably, and it was great to be able to basically max out the settings at 1440p in the games I tried.

The biggest drawbacks right now are the missing games and the price. I don't think $100 for six months is too much to ask, and certainly $50 for six months is viable (for RTX 2080 level hardware). If you're more of a casual gamer, you can try the free plan, but the 60 minute sessions can be a bit irritating if you time out in the middle of a critical moment. Also, if you're using the free version, you get to play on a Tesla RTX T10-8, basically an RTX 2060 equivalent, except I believe it can be shared between two people. Whatever the hardware, it's much slower than the other solutions, and struggled to maintain 60 fps in Far Cry 6 even when set to medium quality 1080p. Playing the game was still okay, but you definitely want to keep settings lower.

As for the games you can play, that's the blessing and curse of GeForce Now. You have to own all the games you want to use, and they have to work with GeForce Now. Many don't, but more are added every Thursday, and at least you can take the games with you if you ever use your own PC without streaming. There are "thousands" of games available on GeForce Now, which is certainly more than you'll find on Stadia, and Google doesn't have a great reputation when it comes to keeping products around (RIP Google+, among others). GeForce Now also does periodic free trials of games, and since the games are all on cloud servers, you don't have to spend time downloading and installing them.

Fundamentally, GeForce Now is a way for Nvidia to use data center hardware to power a game streaming service. The free version gets you in the door, but at least in my testing, the latency and experience of the RTX 3080 tier was far better than the free tier. That's understandable, but it also means people might try the free version and get frustrated with it rather than upgrading to a paid tier. Either way, if you're in need of a graphics card and can't seem to find one, Nvidia has apparently put tens of thousands of them into GeForce Now for people to use. That's got to be better than having them in the hands of miners, right?