Stadia's Future is Uncertain as It Struggles to Find Its Place in the Streaming Market

At this point, Stadia is on life support, and its future is uncertain. However, it still manages to offer 4K streaming when it does function, albeit with some limitations. The service has been struggling to find its footing, and users are left wondering if it's worth investing time and money into. For those curious about the platform, we recommend trying out the free trial of Stadia Pro and paying $10 per month afterwards to rent access to the pro game library instead of buying individual games. This may turn out to be a poor investment, as the service has been slowly killing off its competitors.

Google's Recent History is a Cause for Concern

Google's recent history with streaming services is a cause for concern. They've been killing these services off slowly but surely, and the writing is on the wall. The company seems to be focusing on Luna, their new streaming service, which looks alarmingly similar to Stadia in some ways. While it's still worth keeping an eye on, there's no practical reason to use Luna at this point, especially for users like Ubisoft Plus subscribers who could just switch to Stadia instead.

The Cable Package Style Subscription Model is Depressing

The cable package style subscription model is depressing, and it doesn't seem to be doing much to attract consumers. The service feels like a bonus feature for PS Plus subscribers rather than a standalone fully priced feature. It's only selling point right now among our audience is the ability to play PlayStation games on a PC, which may not be as exciting as it once was.

PlayStation Now's Future is Uncertain

PS Now is by far the oldest streaming service on our list, dating back to 2013. However, it feels like one of the most half-baked services in its current state. It seems like it should be a bonus feature for PS Plus subscribers rather than a standalone fully priced feature. The only selling point right now among our audience is the ability to play PlayStation games on a PC.

Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate

Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is an interesting addition to their service, offering users access to a vast library of games. However, it's not a great reason to subscribe to the service on its own. The game streaming aspect of Game Pass Ultimate is still in early development and has yet to be officially released.

Nvidia's GeForce Now

GeForce Now, Nvidia's cloud gaming service, has been getting a lot of attention lately. While we've had our issues with the company's recent announcements, GeForce Now is still the easiest to recommend. The free account offers exactly the same experience as the paid accounts in one-hour chunks, except without ray tracing. We wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia changes the subscription model in the future, but for now, there's not much reason not to try it out.

GeForce Now's Technical Capabilities

GeForce Now is situationally more powerful than the other streaming services, depending on what hardware you're using and what game you're playing. The load of the hardware either way can make a big difference in performance. However, GeForce Now consistently behaves more like a PC gaming experience, allowing users to change graphics settings and menus.

Luna's Future

Luna, Nvidia's new streaming service, is still worth keeping an eye on. It looks alarmingly similar to Stadia in some ways, but it also has the potential to be something exciting. The closed beta test is currently available for $6 per month, which may not be a practical reason to use it at this point. However, we hope that Amazon can figure out a way to combine Luna with Twitch in a cool and unobnoxious way that doesn't have a dark future like some of the other services on the list.

The Overall Streaming Market

The overall streaming market is still evolving, and it's hard to understand what exactly each company is trying to do. The cable package style subscription model feels outdated, and the constant switching between different services can be confusing. We hope that Amazon can find a way to make Luna more appealing to consumers without sacrificing their own identity.

The Future of Streaming Services

The future of streaming services is uncertain, but it's clear that each company has its own unique approach to offering users access to games. While some services like GeForce Now are easy to recommend, others like Stadia struggle to find their footing. The key to success will be finding a way to offer users ownership and flexibility while also providing a seamless gaming experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're doing a huge round-up piece on various game streaming services this comes back to look at the the rotting corpse of stadia we'll also be looking at geforce now this is the first time we've really done a look at that and ps now and xcloud which is the xbox one and amazon luna so this is about as in depth of a roundup as we can fit in the time we're doing for this video we're going to be covering latency image quality and the game settings and we'll be going over the hardware that's used in the servers for those of you who prefer the hardware aspect of things before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and the silent base 802 case the silent base 802 got high accolades in our review for its high build quality and its versatility in both sound focused and airflow focused built the 802 comes with swappable mesh panels or noise damped panels so you have options for either approach the silent base 802 case is able to fit larger builds as well without being overbearing and it stands out for its mechanics quality and assembly quality learn more about be quiet's new case at the link in the description below so this will look at latency it'll look at the graphic settings the level of customization you get as a user we'll be going over some of the basics like billing and how the experience is on that end but also server hardware and what type of gaming quality you'll get out of the system on the other end of the connection so this is a big endeavor for us it will be a long piece but our goal was to create sort of a one place to go if you're really interested in this stuff and want to know which one's best for you hopefully this will give you a great starting point so we've covered game streaming before and just to be straight up with everyone up front it is impossible to do a full review of one service within a piece comparing multiple services so we are by nature of this trying to not be in our lawn going to have to make cuts we're not going to talk about every single thing but we're going to do our best to cover everyone in sort of the same level of detail and we have previous in-depth coverage of stadia for example if you want to see more of that depending on interest we may do standalone pieces going forward but all these things are sort of in the early stages and that means it makes a lot of sense to do a roundup now because of the gpu shortage of course this topic came up again and geforce now has regularly been uh suggested as sort of an alternative or a stopgap solution while waiting for hardware to come in there are a lot of sort of social concerns about game streaming that we're not going to really talk about too much today but the ones for you to maybe think about are ownership or possession of the things that you use that you enjoy games have long been out of the possession of gamers at this point uh exchanging convenience of things like digital stores and security rather than owning a physical copy of the thing and hardware could go that way too with things like challenges to write to repair and then on this end of things streaming or hardware becoming a service rather than something you own so that's another topic for another time we're interested in the technology today and the performance of it we'll leave that aspect for something else at some point in the future surprisingly there are still only a few major players in the world of cloud gaming and cloud gaming here we're talking about services that allow you to stream from a pc or a console across the internet rather than something like steam in-home streaming we're leaving that out for this one so there are several services other than nvidia's geforce now and google's stadia for example amazon luna is newish it's in limited early access there's xbox cloud gaming formerly called project xcloud that only allows streaming xbox games there's ps now which offers only playstation games and we wanted to check bethesda's orion as well but it's likely to be wrapped into project xcloud since microsoft has acquired bethesda we're going to do everyone a favor here and do bottom line up front with some of the the latency numbers first so we'll look at a chart comparing everything there's a lot of nuance and important information to really understand the way those numbers are derived the hardware they ran on the game settings they ran on we're going to cover all that but we're gonna do you a favor give you the charts early and then we'll explain it all so stick around to make sure you really understand it before you start posting reddit comments trying to explain the two charts at the beginning so for methodology we picked the surge 2 and assassin's creed valhalla these wouldn't typically be our benchmarking choices but it's difficult to find games that share more than two of the platforms we're covering today the surge ii comes the closest at four out of five but it's absent unfortunately from stadia valhalla is available on stadia it's also available on luna and geforce now but it's missing from the two console services this complicates benchmarking so we're just sort of doing the best we can combining the titles that are on as many uh of these platforms as possible before we get started a quick note as well that we're based in the continental us many of these services have limited availability in other countries and stream quality depends on having a data center nearby all of our test data was performed on a very expensive wired fiber internet connection and that means the recommended speeds for all these services are met by our service that we receive of course for things that are mobile devices those are not wired so those would be over a wireless connection latency testing was done using the latency analyzer and a 360hz monitor we covered these in previous content and explained the methodology for those check that piece if you'd like to learn more about that and each service was tested using its own dedicated client to give each the best possible chance stadia luna and gfn except mouse input so it makes it very easy to use ldap testing for these and a mouse while psnow and xcloud accept only controller input and occasionally touch screen in the case of xcloud and this was all accounted for in testing so here's the the bottom line of the latency numbers before we get into the many other important aspects of streaming that would be things like the quality of service the games availability the billing options whether they want your card up front or not we'll talk about that but in the surge2 geforce now with the 1080c configuration we'll explain that more later and very high settings ran at 80 to 91 milliseconds with luna the next best at 113 milliseconds and then gfn 2060 b configuration at 115 157 milliseconds ps now and xcloud did the worst at 222 to 246 millisecond averages and beyond 100 milliseconds is what really starts to become significantly more noticeable as a player and the psn and x cloud options are mechanically laggier on end to end latency for click to response which is what we're looking at here they start to become noticeable in game play in valhalla we measured about 147 milliseconds for stadia 160 for the gfn 2080d config and 221 for luna stadium did well here and we'll talk about all these numbers in more depth in a bit and again as a reminder these numbers are not as sort of perfect and easy to control as a lot of other benchmarks we do because it is based on where these companies have data centers what type of hardware they're using which we'll talk about and there's a lot of factors at play when you start involving the internet and all the hops to get to wherever it's going to and coming from so numbers can move around a little bit based on where you are basically ours might not represent your numbers if you live in say europe and the data center's next to your house or in america either way the numbers are going to change for latency and that's why we're reviewing most uh other aspects of the services as well today so we'll start with stadia we've recovered stadia a lot in the past stadia is still sort of around it is a nominally free storefront that allows buying the games and streaming them at 1080p this is done through a chrome browser on desktop simply enough so the stadia app on android also works there's safari on ios allows streaming or chromecast ultra with updated firmware those are your options the list of android devices that support the stadia app is growing but is still limited while a fully enabled ios app is unlikely to appear at this point unless apple changes its app store policies google has also recently announced added support for integrated chromecast and google tvs some android tv os devices and nvidia shield the easiest way to use stadia is to install chrome on a pc or a laptop a stadia controller exists but it's only necessary when using stadia on a chromecast ultra otherwise its main selling point is direct wireless connection from the controller to a wireless router and then straight to google server bypassing the physical connection otherwise the latency reduction from a direct wireless connection was minimal in our testing we'll put the chart on the screen or at least one of them from last time the reason we say stadia is nominally free is that as of right now signing up requires participating in a free trial of the paid stadia pro tier that means entering payment information this is pretty much a guarantee that google will collect 10 from everyone that signs up and who forgets to cancel their subscription stadia pro allows streaming in 4k and also offers access to a library of games while the pro subscription is active google has done an excellent job of confusing customers but given the limited selection of games for sale it makes sense for it to push a paid subscription model there's a decent chance for new aaa games to end up on stadium but google doesn't have access to a huge back catalog of games like some companies do and adding new titles requires additional work from developers to set up a custom stadia version especially games with social features the amount of money that google can make through directly selling games is limited though because there just aren't that many games to buy whereas subscriptions guarantee monthly payments stadia's biggest strength is that it offers 4k hdr streaming which synergizes well with google fiber for those lucky enough to have it google's server-side hardware wasn't impressive at launch though and it hasn't become better with the passage of time more demanding games will upscale rather than running that native 4k server side that's acceptable for a living room console but it's really not acceptable for server hardware from a company with effectively infinite money as far as we're aware google is still using amd graphics hardware without hardware based ray tracing and that rules out the use of rt or dlss or any other modern feature without a total server overhaul hopefully fsr makes its way to some stadia titles but even still stadia is arguably the best looking streaming choice for someone who has the money to spend on a 4k display a fast internet connection and a 10 per month pro subscription and somehow hasn't bought a console for themselves yet one thing stadia added since last time is tandem controller mode which is the exhibit meme of controllers we heard you like controllers so you can plug your controller into a controller so that you can game while you game this mode allows a secondary controller to connect to the stadia controller for a direct connection to its wireless router it has some accessibility benefits and in the very least it shows that people at stadia are still kind of updating something stadia games and entertainment the in-house stadia game development studio was recently shut down speaking of having time to update things and its in-development projects were cancelled and multiple high-profile team members left some of them for other cloud gaming projects it seems unlikely at this point that stadia will be significantly expanded either in terms of software or hardware before its ultimate death so for any new users this is it it is what it is it's unclear what will happen to the purchased games in the event of stadius closure but given stadia similarities to luna and google's list of dead projects it would be cool if the two services could perhaps somehow cooperate since stadia is the first we're examining we don't have anything to compare benchmark numbers against yet but we'll add them as we go through this piece our latency numbers are of limited usefulness right now just keep them in mind as we go in assassin's creed valhalla the average delay between mouse input and response on the screen was 147 milliseconds for a much more detailed breakdown of stadia's latency and the effects of the wireless stadia controller you can check out our video from last year it really hasn't changed much geforce now is up next so this one is a service from nvidia it's been years in the making it actually used to be called grid and we covered it in 2015 but it only recently got an official launch this launch of course was followed by what you would expect from any successful product launch and that was a mass exodus of game publishers who apparently suddenly realized that nvidia was competing with any streaming services that they themselves might want to launch the strength of geforce now is that it isn't a storefront access to any game requires logging into a third party client nvidia doesn't sell games on gfn and so it's more familiar to a pc experience users browse a list of games they select the platform to be epic steam etc on which the user owns that game and then they launch the game on nvidia's remote hardware for example selecting cyberpunk 2077 offers a choice of logging into gog galaxy epic games or steam because the games are hosted on nvidia server they're pre-installed and usually pre-updated in practice that doesn't mean games launch instantly set up for a game like the division 2 can still take minutes of all the streaming services gfn seems most likely to have any given game thanks to its not a storefront approach the list of games is a drop in the bucket compared to the full steam catalog of course but it's still a big list and nvidia reliably adds more titles on thursdays game and stream resolution is capped at 1920x1200 for gfn with the highest 16x9 resolution being 1920x1080 multiple other resolutions and aspect ratios are supported but they go down down to a minimum of 720p at 16x9 or an absolute minimum of 1024x768 the resolution cap is likely a network limitation rather than nvidia worrying about hardware capabilities games launched on gfn actually freely allow you to adjust the settings even to the point of causing poor performance just like when you play a game locally and you can adjust the settings up even if your hardware can't run it it makes sense that established internet or streaming companies like amazon and google have a head start in stream quality and it also makes sense that nvidia has a head start in hardware quality allowing users to tweak graphic settings raises an interesting issue low stream quality may be enough to cancel out fancy effects that would otherwise be selling points for gfn if a game is being played through a compressed 1080p stream then rtx on loses a lot of its impact streams are limited to 60fps but because the settings aren't locked it's possible to disable vsync and run games at much higher frame rate server side that doesn't make the stream more fluid it doesn't scale with the fps but it does reduce the latency the more frequently frames are rendered by the server the fresher the data is that gets pushed out to the user 60 times per second there are only a couple of differences with priority and free accounts rtx is one of them it's available for paid priority accounts but disabled for free users via software and free users are also limited to one hour sessions while paid users have access to an extended session length of six hours with immediate priority access to a new session those are the only differences free users must queue for a session we observed queues starting anywhere from 10 to 200 with wait times lasting a few minutes but this is entirely dependent on the time of day and sometimes sessions randomly started with the count still in the hundreds switching or relaunching games requires re-cueing and with paid priority access we never encountered a queue at all but again this is dependent on demand at any given time using gfn for free also doesn't require entering payment information or signing up for a trial account with your credit card saved unlike stadia so that's a small benefit gfn is strangely non-homogenous compared to a lockdown platform like stadium the first paid account we created for testing reported an nvidia driver version of 461.87 released sometime in february or march while the free account we created a couple days later reported a driver version of 466.27 released april 29th we ran a few in-game benchmarks of shadow of the tomb raider with the intention of finding out whether paid accounts get better performance but instead we found that the free account reported a consistent 105 fps average at high settings and the retracing while the paid account under the same conditions reported an equally consistent 91 fps average at exactly the same setting that's a 15 advantage for the free account it doesn't mean that gfn free accounts all will have better performance or that they're supposed to it just means that nvidia's machines aren't upgraded in lockstep and performance may vary perhaps based on server load some brief additional testing in division 2 showed identical performance between the two accounts although the driver versions remained different hardware configurations were reported as identical between all these test passes as well nvidia also openly uses a mixture of hardware in its servers some contain xeon e5 26 97 v4 cpus which are 18 cores 36 threads per cpu or 4 cores and 8 threads per virtual machine and they also reported tesla p40s others contain intel cc150 cpus and tesla t10 gpus divvied up into various sub configurations among multiple virtual machines a virtual tesla t108 for example is part of a physical t10 control alt f6 during a gfn session launches an overlay that reports the current hardware config which can be matched up to a community generated chart this hardware is assigned at game launch on a priority or availability basis so your sessions resources might not always be matched optimally it says the p40 systems are older pre-rtx but haven't been fully phased out we were assigned a p40 at least once during our testing for this piece and ampere will presumably make its way onto the gfn servers at some point adding even more variation but the important thing to remember is that the hardware is assigned at launch not based on user-defined settings so the performance of individual titles is determined by what nvidia thinks the title deserves in terms of hardware supported platforms for the gfn app or android android tv mac os and windows there's no ios app but like stadia gfn is usable within safari gfn also works in browser with chrome enabling use on chromebooks and it's interesting that the development work has been done to get both amazon luna and gfn specifically working on chrome even though google has a competing game streaming service that also only works in chrome latency testing on gfn was done with a priority account set to 1920 by 1080 stream quality with 50 megabit per second bit rate cap that's the maximum allowed the stream was maxed out at 60 fps with vsync disabled again these are the stream settings not the game setting for the surge2 the maximum very high preset with 100 resolution scaling and vsync off were used for settings we were occasionally assigned the older tesla p40 1080c configuration with this game and latency was significantly lower with the older hardware that's down 31 from 115 milliseconds average on the 2060 b configuration to 80 milliseconds average quick spot checking of the frame rate the search 2 doesn't have a built-in benchmark and we can't use any software with this setup showed the 1080c config running at 80 to 90 fps average and the 2060 b configuration running at 50 to 60 fps average the 2060 b is the lowest tier of configurations that use the t10 so it seems that nvidia has judged the surge 2 to be a relatively undemanding game we've seen some user reports that the p40 outperforms the t10 and this may be part of the reason games that are lightweight enough to get the 1080c p40 configuration will likely only ever get the lowest tier 2060b t10 config we don't have an easy way to compare for example the 1080c performance to the 2080d performance for valhalla we used the maximum ultra high preset the 2080d configuration was consistently assigned for this game with a resulting average latency of 160 milliseconds with peaks at 180. in the same vein as geforce now there are other companies that allow renting a remote system with the focus on gaming for example shadow shadow provides an entire persistent system with storage it doesn't have the insta launch capabilities of gfn but it's more flexible and it can be used for production tasks as well as for gaming for all intents and purposes using shadow is the same as remoting into a desktop pc and for all we know it might literally just be that we haven't tested shadow and we don't plan to the idea of logging into our accounts especially on a pc and some unrelated companies warehouse is alarming to us especially when that company is relatively small and can change ownership easily we're uncomfortable with the security of it all while nvidia on the other hand openly harvests data and usage information the same as everyone else but we're also confident that nvidia has zero use for our steam password and a vested interest in keeping our accounts secure amazon luna is still in the invite-only early access phase as of this writing amazon seems to be attempting a channel-based approach as in tv channels with games available through individual add-on packages that cost monthly fees currently only two channels are available lunaplus at six dollars per month and ubisoft plus at 15 per month subscribing to ubisoft plus or other channels doesn't require a luna plus subscription each channel has its own games its own pricing capabilities for example the luna plus channel allows streaming on two devices simultaneously but ubisoft plus only allows one device at a time the majority of luna plus titles are lightweight indie games as opposed to demanding aaa 3d games that users might want to stream because their pcs aren't up to the task notable exceptions here would be resident evil 7 and metro exodus but neither of these are particularly new releases it seems likely that amazon will keep the lunaplus channel as an inexpensive entry-level demo and reserve the high demand titles for its partner channels like ubisoft plus ubisoft plus gives access to according to ubisoft 100 plus games as well as some other perks one of which is titled cloud gaming ubisoft doesn't have its own cloud gaming platform and instead it provides access to select titles through your stadia and luna with the choice of platform left up to you that's sort of cool and ominous every company offering a separate monthly subscription for access to their video games is a miserable future if it is going to happen and yes we are looking at you ea like stadia luna has its own optional controller for sale that is capable of direct wireless connection unlike stadia this feature is already enabled and working before the service has fully gone public the wi-fi connection should theoretically reduce latency although we found the effect to be negligible with stadia but the controller can also be used with a usbc cable or set to connect with neural bluetooth by default we do have a luna controller on hand and have used it but we'll save these reduced latency claim testing procedures for another day the luna controller has an alexa button rather than google assistant button so you've got two flavors of in-home espionage and its layout rips off the xbox controller while stadia rips off the playstations it's sort of like the perfect synergy between the two of them pages for individual games on luna prominently feature twitch streams which could be beneficial for streamers playing games that have a consistent player base but relatively few viewers attention can only flow in that direction however if luna becomes popular and we have our doubts amazon's game division has a notoriously poor track record and amazon has an equally poor track record for supporting its game division when it produces something that isn't immediately successful moving on to the hardware stuff luna's server hardware supports ray tracing but this feature hasn't yet been enabled in games amazon ec2 g4 instances are used for hosting luna equipped with nvidia t4 touring gpus and intel cascade lake cpus when we launched ubisoft's plus titles which report hardware configurations they indicated that these were specifically xeon platinum 8259 cls which are 24 core 48 thread processors that support up to eight socket configurations amazon web services is a huge multi-billion dollar subsidiary of another huge company so amazon can certainly afford to throw high-end hardware at luna if it so chooses during benchmarking valhalla even reported the temperature of the data center's gpu which climbed to adc over the course of a few tests nvidia's t10 is reported at lower temperatures when we spot checked closer to 60c doesn't actually mean anything or imply anything about performance we were just having fun spying on the company's data centers luna is intended to require very little work from developers in order to port the games but much like stadia some luna games have been modified to lock down graphics options this is in contrast to gfn and psnow which use essentially unmodified versions of games released on existing platforms channel holders however are able to provide more graphics options ubisoft plus for example has pc style graphics menus in its games because luna lets us adjust the graphics settings sometimes we can make a head-to-head comparison with geforce now in titles which have in-game benchmarks a quick comparison assassin's creed valhalla between luna and gfn puts gfbn at 41 ahead of luna at 60 fps average versus 43 fps this is the best case scenario for gfn as well because valhalla is demanding enough to merit nvidia's top of the line 2080 d server configuration as a luna plus title the surge 2 had no graphics options available average latency at the settings which amazon deemed appropriate was 113 milliseconds valhalla allowed changing settings so we picked the same ultra high preset that we did for gfn testing average latency was 221 milliseconds here which is dismal psnow is a service from sony that allows streaming playstation 2 3 and 4 games and sometimes downloading them on a ps4 or a ps5 playing a game on ps now offers at best exactly the same experience as playing the game on a local ps4 or ps3 except streamed the main advantage of ps now for pc gamers is that it allows playing playstation exclusive games like bloodborne on a pc this is not the same as playstation plus it's a separate subscription with the same pricing sixty dollars for a year the symmetrical branding would suggest that sony expects customers to pick one or the other but ps plus is required for online multiplayer so presumably many ps now subscribers pay 120 a year in total for both services paying for ps now gives instant access to a rotating library of games it is an impressively large collection compared to a service like stadium but it's nowhere near the full library of playstation games or even all the games that are available for sale digitally on the ps3 as sony has chosen not to offer ps2 and ps3 games for sale digitally on newer consoles or implement backwards compatibility ps now is the easiest legal way to play many of those games on a current gen platform so we'd like to see the library expand microsoft's streaming option which we'll cover in a moment only includes a fraction of xbox titles as well but his consoles also have some backwards compatibility with physical media making it less vital to make every game available for streaming ps now is also a potential way to circumvent the ps5's limited storage capacity especially for the digital only version but it's not currently possible to stream or download ps5 games or ps5 versions of the games through ps now in other words ps5 owners who get borderlands 3 through ps now can only download the ps4 version even though buying borderlands 3 would normally come with a free ps5 upgrade this is very confusing but hardly any of the games on ps now are new enough to have ps5 versions at all so this policy has avoided scrutiny we found ps now to be the most difficult service to navigate out of these five the desktop app has literally no search function every game on ps now is listed under scrolling categories like horror or what's hot followed by a scrolling alphabetical category for each letter check t for the elder scrolls oblivion and this is insanity we can only assume that sony doesn't actually expect anyone to use ps now on a pc uh because the console application actually does have a search bar this app is only available on windows and the windows app only works with dual shock 4 ps4 controllers or dualshock 3 controllers and normal gamepad so xbox controllers actually work too ps now is not available in a browser on macs or on mobile devices and it doesn't recognize ps5 controllers amusingly it does work with the xbox series x controller but ultimately games won't launch at all unless a compatible controller is detected 1080p streaming began to roll out in april of this year our testing with ps now was done with a 1080p 60fps stream because that's all there is there are no graphics options other than gpu hardware acceleration for the app and for the stream the stream quality adjustment is handled automatically note also that although the stream runs at up to 1080p 60 many of the games don't since they're running on ps3 and ps4 hardware latency for ps now was one of the worst we've seen so far at 222 milliseconds average overall we're not impressed we'd only choose to use ps now on desktop for older games and playstation exclusives that aren't available on pc microsoft is up last the streaming service is currently in beta under the name xbox cloud gaming and is only available through a game pass ultimate subscription in earlier preview stages it was known as project xcloud which was an objectively cooler and catch your name so we're gonna keep calling it that game pass ultimate is microsoft's catch-all subscription service and includes multiple things so the 15 per month or 180 per year price for game pass ultimate is not specifically for xcloud which is essentially a bonus feature that's in contrast to ps now which is 60 a year specifically for that service normal game pass subs without xcloud are 10 per month now when we wrote this piece xcloud only worked via an android app so there was no convenient way to play on desktop microsoft has since brought xcloud to browsers including safari circumventing the apple app store actually and in the future there will be a windows 10 app and microsoft has plans to release its own standalone streaming devices as well again when we wrote this piece the server hardware for xcloud was racks of xbox one s's with a peak streaming resolution of 720p and an android mobile app as the only way to play in the final hours of editing this piece though and actually we've gone back to do an insert for this xcloud has been upgraded to use xbox series x hardware with an accompanying stream resolution upgrade to 1080p but not 4k yet if there's enough interest we can do further xcloud testing with this upgrade but you'll have to let us know in the comments below xcloud's use of console hardware means that only console games are streamable and only at console settings just like psnow microsoft has won its race with sony to be the first to offer rt enabled current gen console streaming sort of but both companies seem reluctant to eat into the game sales by making brand new titles available for streaming so the smallest of rt enabled xbox games doesn't really overlap yet with the list of x-cloud titles control is one of the few games that should have rt on xcloud but there were no graphics quality options when we launched it the non-xs version is the one available through game pass and by extension the one available through xcloud of all the services we tested we found xcloud to be the hardest to actually play games on our testing was completed before the series x upgrade the latency is large it's 246 milliseconds on average which is absolutely enough to interfere with gameplay the fact that we had to play on a mobile device footage here captured on a pixel 2 and latency tested on a samsung x cover field pro connected to wi-fi and using a bluetooth controller undoubtedly also contributed to latency in addition because xcloud streams straight out of a normal xbox ui elements aren't scaled for tiny phone screen so closing it all out then this is where we we would have put those bottom line latency numbers but we really want to move it to the front hopefully that helps everyone understand really the context of what we talked about after that so let's start with stadia stadia at this point is on life support is the only service that offers 4k streaming when it does die however and it will it may take users game libraries with it so for the curious we'd recommend trying out the free trial of stadia pro and paying 10 per month afterwards to rent access to the pro game library rather than buying individual games because that may turn out to be a poor investment and the reason we can say things like stadiums on life support so confidently and not just be throwing shade for no reason is look at google's recent history they've been killing these services slowly but surely and the writing is on the wall as for luna luna is the most promising new service but it looks alarmingly in some ways like stadium it's just a couple years later luna's worth keeping an eye on and in its current six dollar per month closed beta test date there's really not a practical reason to use it even ubisoft plus subscribers could just use stadia instead for example so the the cable package style subscription model is depressing here maybe it will make the platform more attractive to publishers than stadia was but certainly not to consumers we hope amazon can figure out a way to combine luna with twitch in a cool and unobnoxious way that doesn't have quite the ominous uh future of this channel subscription pay-per-game publisher thing that they're doing right now where everyone's in some weird whatever we don't it's very hard to understand what exactly it is they're trying to do right now so luna's new and again worth keeping an eye on ps now is by far the oldest streaming service on our list it dates back to 2013 actually but it also feels like one of the most half-baked ones in its current state it seems like it should be a bonus feature for ps plus subscribers rather than a standalone fully priced feature it's only selling point right now among our audience is the ability to play playstation games on a pc so that's sort of interesting but sony also has become increasingly open to releasing its games on pc natively going forward may not be as much of a lure project xcloud is still in early development at this point but we'll be interested in revisiting it when the desktop application ships microsoft did it took it back so it should come out again at some point if microsoft ever decides to allow streaming pc games through xcloud that would also become very interesting overall it's an interesting addition to game pass ultimate for current subscribers but it's not a great reason to subscribe on its own just yet geforce now is nvidia's done a lot of things we didn't like lately 3080 tie the geforce rtx 3080 ti 3070 uh geforce now is however the easiest to loosely recommend here so if you are going to use a streaming service and it has the games you want it's the one that we're the most comfortable with put it that way i guess it's we're not really fully on board with the idea of of of this total lack of ownership of the entire entertainment chain but that's a different topic for another day technologically geforce now is the easiest to recommend put it that way so accounts are free free accounts offer exactly the same experience as paid accounts in one hour chunks except without ray tracing and we wouldn't be surprised to see nvidia change the subscription model in the future but for now there's not a ton of reason not to make an account and just try it out except for wasting time potentially uh and that's that's not as big of a deal as some of the other things where you're investing money wasting time and money we also like the fact that you don't have to put in payment information for that free account unlike stadia where you put in they hope you forget that you put it in and forget to cancel until that first charge is issued so gfn is also situationally more powerful than the other streaming services but it really depends on what hardware it signs you and that depends on what game you're playing to some extent also the load of the hardware either way gfn consistently behaves more like a pc gaming experience in that it will allow you to change the graphics settings and menus it's generally more open than the other services so that makes it interesting as well so that's our roundup of the streaming services like we said there's an infinite amount to talk about here and we got to cap it somewhere this is going to be it hopefully that helps give you a baseline and let us know which one you are the most interested in if you want us to look at more of them or in more depth thanks for watching subscribe for more as always you can go to store.gamertexas.net to pick up a shirt like this one or you can go to patreon.com gamers access we'll see you all next timetoday we're doing a huge round-up piece on various game streaming services this comes back to look at the the rotting corpse of stadia we'll also be looking at geforce now this is the first time we've really done a look at that and ps now and xcloud which is the xbox one and amazon luna so this is about as in depth of a roundup as we can fit in the time we're doing for this video we're going to be covering latency image quality and the game settings and we'll be going over the hardware that's used in the servers for those of you who prefer the hardware aspect of things before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and the silent base 802 case the silent base 802 got high accolades in our review for its high build quality and its versatility in both sound focused and airflow focused built the 802 comes with swappable mesh panels or noise damped panels so you have options for either approach the silent base 802 case is able to fit larger builds as well without being overbearing and it stands out for its mechanics quality and assembly quality learn more about be quiet's new case at the link in the description below so this will look at latency it'll look at the graphic settings the level of customization you get as a user we'll be going over some of the basics like billing and how the experience is on that end but also server hardware and what type of gaming quality you'll get out of the system on the other end of the connection so this is a big endeavor for us it will be a long piece but our goal was to create sort of a one place to go if you're really interested in this stuff and want to know which one's best for you hopefully this will give you a great starting point so we've covered game streaming before and just to be straight up with everyone up front it is impossible to do a full review of one service within a piece comparing multiple services so we are by nature of this trying to not be in our lawn going to have to make cuts we're not going to talk about every single thing but we're going to do our best to cover everyone in sort of the same level of detail and we have previous in-depth coverage of stadia for example if you want to see more of that depending on interest we may do standalone pieces going forward but all these things are sort of in the early stages and that means it makes a lot of sense to do a roundup now because of the gpu shortage of course this topic came up again and geforce now has regularly been uh suggested as sort of an alternative or a stopgap solution while waiting for hardware to come in there are a lot of sort of social concerns about game streaming that we're not going to really talk about too much today but the ones for you to maybe think about are ownership or possession of the things that you use that you enjoy games have long been out of the possession of gamers at this point uh exchanging convenience of things like digital stores and security rather than owning a physical copy of the thing and hardware could go that way too with things like challenges to write to repair and then on this end of things streaming or hardware becoming a service rather than something you own so that's another topic for another time we're interested in the technology today and the performance of it we'll leave that aspect for something else at some point in the future surprisingly there are still only a few major players in the world of cloud gaming and cloud gaming here we're talking about services that allow you to stream from a pc or a console across the internet rather than something like steam in-home streaming we're leaving that out for this one so there are several services other than nvidia's geforce now and google's stadia for example amazon luna is newish it's in limited early access there's xbox cloud gaming formerly called project xcloud that only allows streaming xbox games there's ps now which offers only playstation games and we wanted to check bethesda's orion as well but it's likely to be wrapped into project xcloud since microsoft has acquired bethesda we're going to do everyone a favor here and do bottom line up front with some of the the latency numbers first so we'll look at a chart comparing everything there's a lot of nuance and important information to really understand the way those numbers are derived the hardware they ran on the game settings they ran on we're going to cover all that but we're gonna do you a favor give you the charts early and then we'll explain it all so stick around to make sure you really understand it before you start posting reddit comments trying to explain the two charts at the beginning so for methodology we picked the surge 2 and assassin's creed valhalla these wouldn't typically be our benchmarking choices but it's difficult to find games that share more than two of the platforms we're covering today the surge ii comes the closest at four out of five but it's absent unfortunately from stadia valhalla is available on stadia it's also available on luna and geforce now but it's missing from the two console services this complicates benchmarking so we're just sort of doing the best we can combining the titles that are on as many uh of these platforms as possible before we get started a quick note as well that we're based in the continental us many of these services have limited availability in other countries and stream quality depends on having a data center nearby all of our test data was performed on a very expensive wired fiber internet connection and that means the recommended speeds for all these services are met by our service that we receive of course for things that are mobile devices those are not wired so those would be over a wireless connection latency testing was done using the latency analyzer and a 360hz monitor we covered these in previous content and explained the methodology for those check that piece if you'd like to learn more about that and each service was tested using its own dedicated client to give each the best possible chance stadia luna and gfn except mouse input so it makes it very easy to use ldap testing for these and a mouse while psnow and xcloud accept only controller input and occasionally touch screen in the case of xcloud and this was all accounted for in testing so here's the the bottom line of the latency numbers before we get into the many other important aspects of streaming that would be things like the quality of service the games availability the billing options whether they want your card up front or not we'll talk about that but in the surge2 geforce now with the 1080c configuration we'll explain that more later and very high settings ran at 80 to 91 milliseconds with luna the next best at 113 milliseconds and then gfn 2060 b configuration at 115 157 milliseconds ps now and xcloud did the worst at 222 to 246 millisecond averages and beyond 100 milliseconds is what really starts to become significantly more noticeable as a player and the psn and x cloud options are mechanically laggier on end to end latency for click to response which is what we're looking at here they start to become noticeable in game play in valhalla we measured about 147 milliseconds for stadia 160 for the gfn 2080d config and 221 for luna stadium did well here and we'll talk about all these numbers in more depth in a bit and again as a reminder these numbers are not as sort of perfect and easy to control as a lot of other benchmarks we do because it is based on where these companies have data centers what type of hardware they're using which we'll talk about and there's a lot of factors at play when you start involving the internet and all the hops to get to wherever it's going to and coming from so numbers can move around a little bit based on where you are basically ours might not represent your numbers if you live in say europe and the data center's next to your house or in america either way the numbers are going to change for latency and that's why we're reviewing most uh other aspects of the services as well today so we'll start with stadia we've recovered stadia a lot in the past stadia is still sort of around it is a nominally free storefront that allows buying the games and streaming them at 1080p this is done through a chrome browser on desktop simply enough so the stadia app on android also works there's safari on ios allows streaming or chromecast ultra with updated firmware those are your options the list of android devices that support the stadia app is growing but is still limited while a fully enabled ios app is unlikely to appear at this point unless apple changes its app store policies google has also recently announced added support for integrated chromecast and google tvs some android tv os devices and nvidia shield the easiest way to use stadia is to install chrome on a pc or a laptop a stadia controller exists but it's only necessary when using stadia on a chromecast ultra otherwise its main selling point is direct wireless connection from the controller to a wireless router and then straight to google server bypassing the physical connection otherwise the latency reduction from a direct wireless connection was minimal in our testing we'll put the chart on the screen or at least one of them from last time the reason we say stadia is nominally free is that as of right now signing up requires participating in a free trial of the paid stadia pro tier that means entering payment information this is pretty much a guarantee that google will collect 10 from everyone that signs up and who forgets to cancel their subscription stadia pro allows streaming in 4k and also offers access to a library of games while the pro subscription is active google has done an excellent job of confusing customers but given the limited selection of games for sale it makes sense for it to push a paid subscription model there's a decent chance for new aaa games to end up on stadium but google doesn't have access to a huge back catalog of games like some companies do and adding new titles requires additional work from developers to set up a custom stadia version especially games with social features the amount of money that google can make through directly selling games is limited though because there just aren't that many games to buy whereas subscriptions guarantee monthly payments stadia's biggest strength is that it offers 4k hdr streaming which synergizes well with google fiber for those lucky enough to have it google's server-side hardware wasn't impressive at launch though and it hasn't become better with the passage of time more demanding games will upscale rather than running that native 4k server side that's acceptable for a living room console but it's really not acceptable for server hardware from a company with effectively infinite money as far as we're aware google is still using amd graphics hardware without hardware based ray tracing and that rules out the use of rt or dlss or any other modern feature without a total server overhaul hopefully fsr makes its way to some stadia titles but even still stadia is arguably the best looking streaming choice for someone who has the money to spend on a 4k display a fast internet connection and a 10 per month pro subscription and somehow hasn't bought a console for themselves yet one thing stadia added since last time is tandem controller mode which is the exhibit meme of controllers we heard you like controllers so you can plug your controller into a controller so that you can game while you game this mode allows a secondary controller to connect to the stadia controller for a direct connection to its wireless router it has some accessibility benefits and in the very least it shows that people at stadia are still kind of updating something stadia games and entertainment the in-house stadia game development studio was recently shut down speaking of having time to update things and its in-development projects were cancelled and multiple high-profile team members left some of them for other cloud gaming projects it seems unlikely at this point that stadia will be significantly expanded either in terms of software or hardware before its ultimate death so for any new users this is it it is what it is it's unclear what will happen to the purchased games in the event of stadius closure but given stadia similarities to luna and google's list of dead projects it would be cool if the two services could perhaps somehow cooperate since stadia is the first we're examining we don't have anything to compare benchmark numbers against yet but we'll add them as we go through this piece our latency numbers are of limited usefulness right now just keep them in mind as we go in assassin's creed valhalla the average delay between mouse input and response on the screen was 147 milliseconds for a much more detailed breakdown of stadia's latency and the effects of the wireless stadia controller you can check out our video from last year it really hasn't changed much geforce now is up next so this one is a service from nvidia it's been years in the making it actually used to be called grid and we covered it in 2015 but it only recently got an official launch this launch of course was followed by what you would expect from any successful product launch and that was a mass exodus of game publishers who apparently suddenly realized that nvidia was competing with any streaming services that they themselves might want to launch the strength of geforce now is that it isn't a storefront access to any game requires logging into a third party client nvidia doesn't sell games on gfn and so it's more familiar to a pc experience users browse a list of games they select the platform to be epic steam etc on which the user owns that game and then they launch the game on nvidia's remote hardware for example selecting cyberpunk 2077 offers a choice of logging into gog galaxy epic games or steam because the games are hosted on nvidia server they're pre-installed and usually pre-updated in practice that doesn't mean games launch instantly set up for a game like the division 2 can still take minutes of all the streaming services gfn seems most likely to have any given game thanks to its not a storefront approach the list of games is a drop in the bucket compared to the full steam catalog of course but it's still a big list and nvidia reliably adds more titles on thursdays game and stream resolution is capped at 1920x1200 for gfn with the highest 16x9 resolution being 1920x1080 multiple other resolutions and aspect ratios are supported but they go down down to a minimum of 720p at 16x9 or an absolute minimum of 1024x768 the resolution cap is likely a network limitation rather than nvidia worrying about hardware capabilities games launched on gfn actually freely allow you to adjust the settings even to the point of causing poor performance just like when you play a game locally and you can adjust the settings up even if your hardware can't run it it makes sense that established internet or streaming companies like amazon and google have a head start in stream quality and it also makes sense that nvidia has a head start in hardware quality allowing users to tweak graphic settings raises an interesting issue low stream quality may be enough to cancel out fancy effects that would otherwise be selling points for gfn if a game is being played through a compressed 1080p stream then rtx on loses a lot of its impact streams are limited to 60fps but because the settings aren't locked it's possible to disable vsync and run games at much higher frame rate server side that doesn't make the stream more fluid it doesn't scale with the fps but it does reduce the latency the more frequently frames are rendered by the server the fresher the data is that gets pushed out to the user 60 times per second there are only a couple of differences with priority and free accounts rtx is one of them it's available for paid priority accounts but disabled for free users via software and free users are also limited to one hour sessions while paid users have access to an extended session length of six hours with immediate priority access to a new session those are the only differences free users must queue for a session we observed queues starting anywhere from 10 to 200 with wait times lasting a few minutes but this is entirely dependent on the time of day and sometimes sessions randomly started with the count still in the hundreds switching or relaunching games requires re-cueing and with paid priority access we never encountered a queue at all but again this is dependent on demand at any given time using gfn for free also doesn't require entering payment information or signing up for a trial account with your credit card saved unlike stadia so that's a small benefit gfn is strangely non-homogenous compared to a lockdown platform like stadium the first paid account we created for testing reported an nvidia driver version of 461.87 released sometime in february or march while the free account we created a couple days later reported a driver version of 466.27 released april 29th we ran a few in-game benchmarks of shadow of the tomb raider with the intention of finding out whether paid accounts get better performance but instead we found that the free account reported a consistent 105 fps average at high settings and the retracing while the paid account under the same conditions reported an equally consistent 91 fps average at exactly the same setting that's a 15 advantage for the free account it doesn't mean that gfn free accounts all will have better performance or that they're supposed to it just means that nvidia's machines aren't upgraded in lockstep and performance may vary perhaps based on server load some brief additional testing in division 2 showed identical performance between the two accounts although the driver versions remained different hardware configurations were reported as identical between all these test passes as well nvidia also openly uses a mixture of hardware in its servers some contain xeon e5 26 97 v4 cpus which are 18 cores 36 threads per cpu or 4 cores and 8 threads per virtual machine and they also reported tesla p40s others contain intel cc150 cpus and tesla t10 gpus divvied up into various sub configurations among multiple virtual machines a virtual tesla t108 for example is part of a physical t10 control alt f6 during a gfn session launches an overlay that reports the current hardware config which can be matched up to a community generated chart this hardware is assigned at game launch on a priority or availability basis so your sessions resources might not always be matched optimally it says the p40 systems are older pre-rtx but haven't been fully phased out we were assigned a p40 at least once during our testing for this piece and ampere will presumably make its way onto the gfn servers at some point adding even more variation but the important thing to remember is that the hardware is assigned at launch not based on user-defined settings so the performance of individual titles is determined by what nvidia thinks the title deserves in terms of hardware supported platforms for the gfn app or android android tv mac os and windows there's no ios app but like stadia gfn is usable within safari gfn also works in browser with chrome enabling use on chromebooks and it's interesting that the development work has been done to get both amazon luna and gfn specifically working on chrome even though google has a competing game streaming service that also only works in chrome latency testing on gfn was done with a priority account set to 1920 by 1080 stream quality with 50 megabit per second bit rate cap that's the maximum allowed the stream was maxed out at 60 fps with vsync disabled again these are the stream settings not the game setting for the surge2 the maximum very high preset with 100 resolution scaling and vsync off were used for settings we were occasionally assigned the older tesla p40 1080c configuration with this game and latency was significantly lower with the older hardware that's down 31 from 115 milliseconds average on the 2060 b configuration to 80 milliseconds average quick spot checking of the frame rate the search 2 doesn't have a built-in benchmark and we can't use any software with this setup showed the 1080c config running at 80 to 90 fps average and the 2060 b configuration running at 50 to 60 fps average the 2060 b is the lowest tier of configurations that use the t10 so it seems that nvidia has judged the surge 2 to be a relatively undemanding game we've seen some user reports that the p40 outperforms the t10 and this may be part of the reason games that are lightweight enough to get the 1080c p40 configuration will likely only ever get the lowest tier 2060b t10 config we don't have an easy way to compare for example the 1080c performance to the 2080d performance for valhalla we used the maximum ultra high preset the 2080d configuration was consistently assigned for this game with a resulting average latency of 160 milliseconds with peaks at 180. in the same vein as geforce now there are other companies that allow renting a remote system with the focus on gaming for example shadow shadow provides an entire persistent system with storage it doesn't have the insta launch capabilities of gfn but it's more flexible and it can be used for production tasks as well as for gaming for all intents and purposes using shadow is the same as remoting into a desktop pc and for all we know it might literally just be that we haven't tested shadow and we don't plan to the idea of logging into our accounts especially on a pc and some unrelated companies warehouse is alarming to us especially when that company is relatively small and can change ownership easily we're uncomfortable with the security of it all while nvidia on the other hand openly harvests data and usage information the same as everyone else but we're also confident that nvidia has zero use for our steam password and a vested interest in keeping our accounts secure amazon luna is still in the invite-only early access phase as of this writing amazon seems to be attempting a channel-based approach as in tv channels with games available through individual add-on packages that cost monthly fees currently only two channels are available lunaplus at six dollars per month and ubisoft plus at 15 per month subscribing to ubisoft plus or other channels doesn't require a luna plus subscription each channel has its own games its own pricing capabilities for example the luna plus channel allows streaming on two devices simultaneously but ubisoft plus only allows one device at a time the majority of luna plus titles are lightweight indie games as opposed to demanding aaa 3d games that users might want to stream because their pcs aren't up to the task notable exceptions here would be resident evil 7 and metro exodus but neither of these are particularly new releases it seems likely that amazon will keep the lunaplus channel as an inexpensive entry-level demo and reserve the high demand titles for its partner channels like ubisoft plus ubisoft plus gives access to according to ubisoft 100 plus games as well as some other perks one of which is titled cloud gaming ubisoft doesn't have its own cloud gaming platform and instead it provides access to select titles through your stadia and luna with the choice of platform left up to you that's sort of cool and ominous every company offering a separate monthly subscription for access to their video games is a miserable future if it is going to happen and yes we are looking at you ea like stadia luna has its own optional controller for sale that is capable of direct wireless connection unlike stadia this feature is already enabled and working before the service has fully gone public the wi-fi connection should theoretically reduce latency although we found the effect to be negligible with stadia but the controller can also be used with a usbc cable or set to connect with neural bluetooth by default we do have a luna controller on hand and have used it but we'll save these reduced latency claim testing procedures for another day the luna controller has an alexa button rather than google assistant button so you've got two flavors of in-home espionage and its layout rips off the xbox controller while stadia rips off the playstations it's sort of like the perfect synergy between the two of them pages for individual games on luna prominently feature twitch streams which could be beneficial for streamers playing games that have a consistent player base but relatively few viewers attention can only flow in that direction however if luna becomes popular and we have our doubts amazon's game division has a notoriously poor track record and amazon has an equally poor track record for supporting its game division when it produces something that isn't immediately successful moving on to the hardware stuff luna's server hardware supports ray tracing but this feature hasn't yet been enabled in games amazon ec2 g4 instances are used for hosting luna equipped with nvidia t4 touring gpus and intel cascade lake cpus when we launched ubisoft's plus titles which report hardware configurations they indicated that these were specifically xeon platinum 8259 cls which are 24 core 48 thread processors that support up to eight socket configurations amazon web services is a huge multi-billion dollar subsidiary of another huge company so amazon can certainly afford to throw high-end hardware at luna if it so chooses during benchmarking valhalla even reported the temperature of the data center's gpu which climbed to adc over the course of a few tests nvidia's t10 is reported at lower temperatures when we spot checked closer to 60c doesn't actually mean anything or imply anything about performance we were just having fun spying on the company's data centers luna is intended to require very little work from developers in order to port the games but much like stadia some luna games have been modified to lock down graphics options this is in contrast to gfn and psnow which use essentially unmodified versions of games released on existing platforms channel holders however are able to provide more graphics options ubisoft plus for example has pc style graphics menus in its games because luna lets us adjust the graphics settings sometimes we can make a head-to-head comparison with geforce now in titles which have in-game benchmarks a quick comparison assassin's creed valhalla between luna and gfn puts gfbn at 41 ahead of luna at 60 fps average versus 43 fps this is the best case scenario for gfn as well because valhalla is demanding enough to merit nvidia's top of the line 2080 d server configuration as a luna plus title the surge 2 had no graphics options available average latency at the settings which amazon deemed appropriate was 113 milliseconds valhalla allowed changing settings so we picked the same ultra high preset that we did for gfn testing average latency was 221 milliseconds here which is dismal psnow is a service from sony that allows streaming playstation 2 3 and 4 games and sometimes downloading them on a ps4 or a ps5 playing a game on ps now offers at best exactly the same experience as playing the game on a local ps4 or ps3 except streamed the main advantage of ps now for pc gamers is that it allows playing playstation exclusive games like bloodborne on a pc this is not the same as playstation plus it's a separate subscription with the same pricing sixty dollars for a year the symmetrical branding would suggest that sony expects customers to pick one or the other but ps plus is required for online multiplayer so presumably many ps now subscribers pay 120 a year in total for both services paying for ps now gives instant access to a rotating library of games it is an impressively large collection compared to a service like stadium but it's nowhere near the full library of playstation games or even all the games that are available for sale digitally on the ps3 as sony has chosen not to offer ps2 and ps3 games for sale digitally on newer consoles or implement backwards compatibility ps now is the easiest legal way to play many of those games on a current gen platform so we'd like to see the library expand microsoft's streaming option which we'll cover in a moment only includes a fraction of xbox titles as well but his consoles also have some backwards compatibility with physical media making it less vital to make every game available for streaming ps now is also a potential way to circumvent the ps5's limited storage capacity especially for the digital only version but it's not currently possible to stream or download ps5 games or ps5 versions of the games through ps now in other words ps5 owners who get borderlands 3 through ps now can only download the ps4 version even though buying borderlands 3 would normally come with a free ps5 upgrade this is very confusing but hardly any of the games on ps now are new enough to have ps5 versions at all so this policy has avoided scrutiny we found ps now to be the most difficult service to navigate out of these five the desktop app has literally no search function every game on ps now is listed under scrolling categories like horror or what's hot followed by a scrolling alphabetical category for each letter check t for the elder scrolls oblivion and this is insanity we can only assume that sony doesn't actually expect anyone to use ps now on a pc uh because the console application actually does have a search bar this app is only available on windows and the windows app only works with dual shock 4 ps4 controllers or dualshock 3 controllers and normal gamepad so xbox controllers actually work too ps now is not available in a browser on macs or on mobile devices and it doesn't recognize ps5 controllers amusingly it does work with the xbox series x controller but ultimately games won't launch at all unless a compatible controller is detected 1080p streaming began to roll out in april of this year our testing with ps now was done with a 1080p 60fps stream because that's all there is there are no graphics options other than gpu hardware acceleration for the app and for the stream the stream quality adjustment is handled automatically note also that although the stream runs at up to 1080p 60 many of the games don't since they're running on ps3 and ps4 hardware latency for ps now was one of the worst we've seen so far at 222 milliseconds average overall we're not impressed we'd only choose to use ps now on desktop for older games and playstation exclusives that aren't available on pc microsoft is up last the streaming service is currently in beta under the name xbox cloud gaming and is only available through a game pass ultimate subscription in earlier preview stages it was known as project xcloud which was an objectively cooler and catch your name so we're gonna keep calling it that game pass ultimate is microsoft's catch-all subscription service and includes multiple things so the 15 per month or 180 per year price for game pass ultimate is not specifically for xcloud which is essentially a bonus feature that's in contrast to ps now which is 60 a year specifically for that service normal game pass subs without xcloud are 10 per month now when we wrote this piece xcloud only worked via an android app so there was no convenient way to play on desktop microsoft has since brought xcloud to browsers including safari circumventing the apple app store actually and in the future there will be a windows 10 app and microsoft has plans to release its own standalone streaming devices as well again when we wrote this piece the server hardware for xcloud was racks of xbox one s's with a peak streaming resolution of 720p and an android mobile app as the only way to play in the final hours of editing this piece though and actually we've gone back to do an insert for this xcloud has been upgraded to use xbox series x hardware with an accompanying stream resolution upgrade to 1080p but not 4k yet if there's enough interest we can do further xcloud testing with this upgrade but you'll have to let us know in the comments below xcloud's use of console hardware means that only console games are streamable and only at console settings just like psnow microsoft has won its race with sony to be the first to offer rt enabled current gen console streaming sort of but both companies seem reluctant to eat into the game sales by making brand new titles available for streaming so the smallest of rt enabled xbox games doesn't really overlap yet with the list of x-cloud titles control is one of the few games that should have rt on xcloud but there were no graphics quality options when we launched it the non-xs version is the one available through game pass and by extension the one available through xcloud of all the services we tested we found xcloud to be the hardest to actually play games on our testing was completed before the series x upgrade the latency is large it's 246 milliseconds on average which is absolutely enough to interfere with gameplay the fact that we had to play on a mobile device footage here captured on a pixel 2 and latency tested on a samsung x cover field pro connected to wi-fi and using a bluetooth controller undoubtedly also contributed to latency in addition because xcloud streams straight out of a normal xbox ui elements aren't scaled for tiny phone screen so closing it all out then this is where we we would have put those bottom line latency numbers but we really want to move it to the front hopefully that helps everyone understand really the context of what we talked about after that so let's start with stadia stadia at this point is on life support is the only service that offers 4k streaming when it does die however and it will it may take users game libraries with it so for the curious we'd recommend trying out the free trial of stadia pro and paying 10 per month afterwards to rent access to the pro game library rather than buying individual games because that may turn out to be a poor investment and the reason we can say things like stadiums on life support so confidently and not just be throwing shade for no reason is look at google's recent history they've been killing these services slowly but surely and the writing is on the wall as for luna luna is the most promising new service but it looks alarmingly in some ways like stadium it's just a couple years later luna's worth keeping an eye on and in its current six dollar per month closed beta test date there's really not a practical reason to use it even ubisoft plus subscribers could just use stadia instead for example so the the cable package style subscription model is depressing here maybe it will make the platform more attractive to publishers than stadia was but certainly not to consumers we hope amazon can figure out a way to combine luna with twitch in a cool and unobnoxious way that doesn't have quite the ominous uh future of this channel subscription pay-per-game publisher thing that they're doing right now where everyone's in some weird whatever we don't it's very hard to understand what exactly it is they're trying to do right now so luna's new and again worth keeping an eye on ps now is by far the oldest streaming service on our list it dates back to 2013 actually but it also feels like one of the most half-baked ones in its current state it seems like it should be a bonus feature for ps plus subscribers rather than a standalone fully priced feature it's only selling point right now among our audience is the ability to play playstation games on a pc so that's sort of interesting but sony also has become increasingly open to releasing its games on pc natively going forward may not be as much of a lure project xcloud is still in early development at this point but we'll be interested in revisiting it when the desktop application ships microsoft did it took it back so it should come out again at some point if microsoft ever decides to allow streaming pc games through xcloud that would also become very interesting overall it's an interesting addition to game pass ultimate for current subscribers but it's not a great reason to subscribe on its own just yet geforce now is nvidia's done a lot of things we didn't like lately 3080 tie the geforce rtx 3080 ti 3070 uh geforce now is however the easiest to loosely recommend here so if you are going to use a streaming service and it has the games you want it's the one that we're the most comfortable with put it that way i guess it's we're not really fully on board with the idea of of of this total lack of ownership of the entire entertainment chain but that's a different topic for another day technologically geforce now is the easiest to recommend put it that way so accounts are free free accounts offer exactly the same experience as paid accounts in one hour chunks except without ray tracing and we wouldn't be surprised to see nvidia change the subscription model in the future but for now there's not a ton of reason not to make an account and just try it out except for wasting time potentially uh and that's that's not as big of a deal as some of the other things where you're investing money wasting time and money we also like the fact that you don't have to put in payment information for that free account unlike stadia where you put in they hope you forget that you put it in and forget to cancel until that first charge is issued so gfn is also situationally more powerful than the other streaming services but it really depends on what hardware it signs you and that depends on what game you're playing to some extent also the load of the hardware either way gfn consistently behaves more like a pc gaming experience in that it will allow you to change the graphics settings and menus it's generally more open than the other services so that makes it interesting as well so that's our roundup of the streaming services like we said there's an infinite amount to talk about here and we got to cap it somewhere this is going to be it hopefully that helps give you a baseline and let us know which one you are the most interested in if you want us to look at more of them or in more depth thanks for watching subscribe for more as always you can go to store.gamertexas.net to pick up a shirt like this one or you can go to patreon.com gamers access we'll see you all next time\n"