I'm sure this will excite some of our readers who are fans of game streaming: NVIDIA has added the ability to play GeForce NOW game streaming via the browser.
Currently, it's limited to ChromeOS and Chromebooks as per their announcement. However, you can easily get around that because of how stupidly flawed browser agent strings are. Spoofing it is easy, although it only works in Chrome and not Firefox from my own testing. Just grab a User Agent Switcher plugin (like this), then add this as an option:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 13099.85.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.110 Safari/537.36
That allows NVIDIA GeForce NOW to run on desktop Linux, simply in a Chrome browser. Just like Google Stadia has been able to since release. Here's a video of it in action on my Linux desktop:
Direct Link
Well, how about that? Another barrier broken down for Linux gaming fans. Surprisingly it did actually work really well. Input was responsive and the picture quality was really good.
NVIDIA GeForce NOW is quite different to Stadia, in that it uses games you have in your library across Steam, Origin, Ubisoft, Epic Games and more. However, if you wish to play past 1 hour, you have to pay a monthly subscription. The integration also feels far weaker than Stadia, which is a proper platform. On GeForce NOW, it's clearly Windows machines in the cloud to the point of hearing the Windows 10 ping sound when you click around as it doesn't let you. Stadia feels much tighter as a system and platform but GeForce NOW has the big benefit of games being available locally on your system as you "own" them as well as streaming them which Stadia does not, Stadia can only stream the games.
Obviously, at this point NVIDIA are not supporting the Linux desktop with GeForce NOW in any way and it could break any time - so keep that in mind. A mod on the community GFN Reddit did indicate this looks like the direction NVIDIA are going (having it in the browser), to open it up to more. Options are good for everyone though of course and we're just here to bring the tips.
You can try it on play.geforcenow.com.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Otherwise I think it's nice to be able to rent a virtual Windows machine in the cloud for so cheap.
Last edited by thykr on 20 August 2020 at 12:00 am UTC
buckysrevenge Aug 20, 2020
Quoting: mao_dze_dunOnce again, I read the comments on something "controversial" like cloud gaming and remember why we can't have nice things on Linux...People comments is a reflection of the issues with these streaming services.
Stadia could become a detriment in that if it becomes dominant it can undermine local releases of games. Not to forget they are already doing a bad thing, exclusivity. There are other concerns too. Stadia does have potential to be successful by leveraging cloud servers, such as the features they have and are working on. Yet even at this early stage they have resorted to one bad tactic already.
Geforce Now unlike Stadia is using Windows servers. This is negative for gaming on Linux. With Stadia improvements are made that will be of benefit for proper Linux (desktop distributions). Most obvious thing is that it uses Vulkan, and that will be a very important for native game development on Linux.
I take issue with your comment. If you view posts made about Steam Remote Play or/and Play Together you will find many positive comments. And those two features are streaming using your own computers. Should everyone dig a hole in ground and stick their heads into it like a ostrich? These "nice things" (Stadia and Geforce) aren't as nice as you make them out to be. If they were you'd see overwhelming support for them.
Last edited by Linuxwarper on 20 August 2020 at 2:24 pm UTC
Quoting: mao_dze_dunOnce again, I read the comments on something "controversial" like cloud gaming and remember why we can't have nice things on Linux...I have nice things on Linux, dunno why you don't.
So, what, it's a terrible thing to think about things rather than just accepting them uncritically? Yeah, I'm fine with Linux people bothering to evaluate. Some of the people arguing here must be wrong, perhaps none are entirely right, but at least they're trying to figure things out. In the internet era it is wise to look gift horses in the mouth, since they rarely turn out to be actual gifts. Actual gifts create no profit. About the only gift horses that stand up to a good inspection are the open source ones.
Quoting: mao_dze_dunOnce again, I read the comments on something "controversial" like cloud gaming and remember why we can't have nice things on Linux...Well, I'm just calling things as I see them, not making a complete judgement on whether or not they should be taken advantage of. Though I don't feel that DRM games on Steam are exactly one hundred percent owned by me (in fact, inability to transfer a game to someone else is also an argument against "ownership" of your copy) I do still play games on Steam. As an example of a positive for playing a game on Steam, it's much more likely to be maintained well enough to continue working on newer versions of Linux (without me going to great lengths to seek out old dependencies) than downloads that I got years ago from Humble Bundle, of which I may have a copy that I do clearly own, but have trouble using.
Quoting: AwesamLinuxI just checked and GeForce Now counts as playing a game on Windows (regardless of spoofing the browser ChromeOS).
Why would you think otherwise? The game is literally running on Windows. So it would be a misdetection not to count it as such.
Last edited by Shmerl on 23 August 2020 at 6:42 pm UTC
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: AwesamLinuxI just checked and GeForce Now counts as playing a game on Windows (regardless of spoofing the browser ChromeOS).
Why would you think otherwise? The game is literally running on Windows. So it would be a misdetection not to count it as such.
Yea it makes sense, but I thought there would be something more advanced involved here. Like some kind of communication between Nvidia and Steam servers, so that it is known when a game is running on GeForce Now, the browser and OS used being reported etc.. But appears this is just basically the same thing as running a game on just any virtual machine
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