We are big Steam Deck fans at Shortlist, but this latest feature unlock could help level-up the handheld: Nvidia GeForce NOW.
Well, in a roundabout way, anyway.
The Steam Deck is getting on a bit in power terms, but with GeForce NOW you can play the latest, most GPU-melting of games at up to 4K resolution, 60 frames per second.
How? It’s a streaming service, where the actual game is “played” on a PC in the cloud, and the video of it running is effectively broadcast to your Steam Deck.
GeForce NOW has been around for years — it launched to the public in 2020 — but a “native” Steam Deck app has only just landed, after being announced in January.
Based on our experience of testing these streaming services a while ago, GeForce NOW is among the very best of ‘em, with top image quality and minimal lag. It’s basically like having your own super-powered gaming PC, but one you can only access through the internet.
This also means how you access games is a little different to, say, Xbox Game Pass cloud streaming. You still have to own them, or at least already have access to them.
Steam, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft, Xbox and battle.net libraries are supported, and you can stream “over 180” Xbox Game Pass titles from the PC library. In total, more than 2200 games are supported through GeForce NOW.
There is a free tier of GeForce NOW you can try out, which provides a “basic rig” virtual PC that would still wipe the floor with a Steam Deck. But there are ads, wait times, and your sessions are limited to an hour.
The Performance Tier costs £29.99 for six months as part of Nvidia’s Summer Sale deal, and that unlocks ray tracing graphics effects and 1440p resolution-grade performance. Or for god-tier gaming, there’s the Ultimate tier at £99.99 for six months, which provides the equivalent of an RTX 4080 GPU PC. That graphics card alone is worth about a grand.
Ready for the bad news? You can’t simply install GeForce NOW through the Steam Store on your Deck. You’ll need to use Desktop mode, but Nvidia has provided us with a step-by-step guide on how to get it working.
It is perhaps the best antidote to that sinking feeling you get when you have a gander at a brand new game, only to realise it’s not going to play properly on your Steam Deck.
Nvidia has added six new games added to the service this week, including indie Skyrim-a-like Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. You can search through the whole library over at the GeForce NOW website.
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