“Today, here in Las Vegas, I did something that made my soul scream. No, it didn’t involve gambling, drugs, or strippers,” Brad Chacos writes for PCWorld. “I gamed on a Mac.”
“I played Witcher 3 — a game that’s never been released on Macs. On a GeForce GTX 1080 — a graphics card never found in Macs,” Chacos writes. “And it was all thanks to Nvidia’s new GeForce Now streaming service for PCs and Macs. Think of it like Netflix for PC games that also happens to work on Macs.”
“The PC and Mac version of GeForce Now is a completely different beast from the subscription service of the same name that’s available for Nvidia’s swanky Shield TV, because that won’t get confusing or anything,” Chacos writes. “This GeForce Now instead is basically renting your own powerful, virtual gaming PC in the cloud, then playing any game you own on it — be it on Steam, Origin, Battle.Net, uPlay, you name it — from any PC or Mac, with saves and settings carrying over from device to device.”
“So thanks to the power of the Interwebz, I played Witcher 3 on a MacBook Air today — and it went pretty damned well! I didn’t notice any extreme hitching, buffering, or latency no matter how wild I acted in-game or how violently I shook the mouse,” Chacos writes. “The same was true when I played Rise of the Tomb Raider on a Retina iMac…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Have fun!
$25 for 20 hours of play. DOA.
Teens and dweebs are the biggest market for this. That’s $100 a month right there. Not many teens I know can lay out that kind of cash for gaming. Better to just save up their $$ for a few months and buy a used gaming rig of Craigslist.
I think at this point its more a Proof of Concept.
Eventually we won’t have our own computers, just dumb terminals.. It will be Amazon that will bring this.. not Apple. Apple uses Amazon for iCloud, and look how crappy they are doing it. Fully federated Windows 10 instances on Amazon is the future of the business world. Why have all that in house crap when Amazon will do it for you.
They’re called “thin clients” and many businesses already use them.
I would be interested in this if I could stream content creation tools such as 3D animation apps or compositing apps. Though, at $25/10 hours, I can rent time on rendering farms for less. Nvidea really do need to rethink the their pricing model.
Nvidia figured out how to get all those quarters back from the arcades of the old days.
I say macbook air are not gaming-oriented
If you want unlimited gaming hours, get a PC with GTX 1080 or RX480.
So the Mac is not for this, this Mac model is not for that or those interested should go else where… Bright!
We are living and breathing creatures who sometimes forget or want to forget we are corporate, rational, meticulous realistic people.
Yes, the Mac is not for this, and that is plain wrong. Of course I have a top PC for gaming.
But it happens I want my Mac with a top Nvidia card, full support, top current games, all I could think, create and dream. It is not going yo happen overnight but we need the right steeps.
Apple is not a small studio or business and others are making sustainable money. Apple has to deliver.
I play games on my Mac and in Windows with boot camp. Works perfectly on my iMac 5K. I don’t need to pay a subscription fee nor buy a PC. I have both in this machine.
Yeah, no. That is a workaround that got too far away. I got tired of rebooting to play a game years ago and bought a PC. In the end you need to support 2 systems in your Mac and save or include a partition drive for Windows.
But also you are using the same underpowered GPU provided with a Mac or you are tied to it for the rest of your ownership because you can’t upgrade the GPU to one you could use to play a top game at a top resolution using your 5K screen.
What the biggest computer business should do is to provide a real Mac experience and not climb over the competition ‘s shoulders to say check, we have a support for gaming under the Mac.
For iOS gaming is a fundamental part, but the iPhone is also a business device, so why the Mac should have a different standard.
SONY created the Playstation from scratch and they make money from it. Does Apple wants to expand to other areas, why not?. So it is about a will and a vision and it requires a lot of money and work. But we are excusing Apple too much for they pasts limitations that are now gone. Apple is a super powered company full of cash they don’t know what to do with it.
My GPU is 4 gigs with plenty of power and it beats trying to maintain two separate machines and OS’s. I don’t need to upgrade it. By the time I need to upgrade it I will be able to buy a newer Mac. Plus I have a 3 year warranty with AppleCare on my iMac versus no support for a separate PC and I don’t need to rely on a network connection to Nvidia for the same thing I already have on my Mac. It works and I am using it so don’t tell me something that you don’t know.