“Mac’s aren’t for gaming.” Yup. I know. I’ve heard it before and there is always a bit of a sting to hear those words. I love the Apple ecosystem for some of my creative side projects, but I also love gaming. Those words sting because there is a modicum of truth to them. Our thoughts on NVIDIA’s GeForce Now lie below…
For the longest time, I have been relegated to the edges of the PC gaming society – to the crumbs of game ports years outside of their relevancy, to indie titles, to Bootcamp’d systems, or to the rare rebel companies that put out a native macOS clients for their titles.
(Thank you, Blizzard… I will always love you.)
Introducing Nvidia’s newest beta initiative: GeForce NOW. Geforce Now takes your existing PC titles from your Steam library or Blizzard Entertainment launcher and, through the power of cloud computing, leverages a powerful Geforce GTX PC to transform your non-Direct-X-enabled Mac into a beastly gaming machine. Nvidia is also testing this as a solution for PCs as well.
Since I’m not one for kid-gloves, I decided to give this a whirl with one of the most resource heavy games that I think I have run across: ARK: Survival Evolved.
Natively, I have been able to run ARK with a mild degree of success. Load times were long and the game lag made the game in more recent patched nearly unplayable. Nothing is worse than trying to grab some berries to survive, only to find yourself mauled by a dinosaur that you could hear, but not see.
Enter GeForce NOW.
Playing on higher graphics settings, ARK performs beautifully – as it was intended to! The scenery is breath-taking and gameplay smooth. I did not notice any lag time between the input of my controls and the actions on screen. I was stunned by how well it played and will definitely be giving the game another shake!
I also tested GeForce NOW out with The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Having played the game in Bootcamp, the performance bump was immediately noticeable! While my system had no issue handling the game in Bootcamp, it’s always a hassle to have to reboot into Windows only to find a laundry list of updates. I know, I’m lazy, but with this convenience, I will likely be spending some more time here as well!
At the moment, the scope of games available for testing is limited, but I am looking forward to how this service develops and what the cost will be upon launch.
Thanks to GeForce NOW, it’s time to let the beauty be the beast.
(Hardware: I am running a modified 2009 Mac Pro tower with a 3.2 Ghz Xeon, 16 gigs of 1066 DDR3, and an nVidia GeForce GTX 680)
