GeForce Now, Terrible for Assassins Creed

[Alex Atkin UK]

As I signed up to Shadow via the LTT offer I was curious to see while settings up my nvidia Shield that its automatically signed up to Geforce Now Beta for supporting games I already owned, so figured I'd give it a try while waiting for my Shadow activation.

 

I started with Sonic and all-stars Racing Transformed as I'm familiar with it over Steam in-home streaming and being a fast kart racer its pretty latency sensitive.

 

I was surprised how well it ran, didn't notice any troubling latency or blocking which I was quite surprised about.  I'd say it was probably a slightly softer picture than in-home Streaming on my RTX 2080 though, which is kinda strange as it was using about the same bandwidth of 28Mbits. But importantly, a vastly superior experience to any of the console versions.

 

After that success I thought I'd really go for it and try Assassins Creed Odyssey, at that point things went down hill, fast.  I noticed the graphics settings were only on high (that's a far cry from what Shadow is promising) yet the frame rate was constantly fluctuating from about 15fps to 60fps.  Pretty much unplayable.

 

I switched to Origins which on my PC seems to need slightly less power, but that performed even worse.  The frame rate graph looks better, but the real world performance was completely unplayable with constant stalls.  Granted some of that was because it kept telling me there were bandwidth issues, but very odd after Sonic ran so well.

So overall, not that impressed.  It will be interesting to see how Shadow compares as surely they will be using a very similar GPU, in fact their claims of comparable to GTX 1080 makes it sounds like it could be the identical GPU.

[tikker]

Could it be the Xeon isn't really good enough for Odyssey? On my 7700k/1080 Ti right I get around 100 FPS average I'd say depending on the scene complexity; dips to 60, peaks to 120ish.

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 12/14/2018 at 9:01 PM, tikker said:

Could it be the Xeon isn't really good enough for Odyssey? On my 7700k/1080 Ti right I get around 100 FPS average I'd say depending on the scene complexity; dips to 60, peaks to 120ish.

I think it most likely is, although will soon see as my Shadow is ready.

[tikker]

16 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I think it most likely is, although will soon see as my Shadow is ready.

Ah I completely misread, I thought that was on Shadow's system Let's hope they live up to the performance.

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 12/17/2018 at 3:56 PM, tikker said:

Ah I completely misread, I thought that was on Shadow's system Let's hope they live up to the performance.

First impression was Shadow ran a lot smoother, but then I did immediately enable vsync there.  I was going to try Geforce Now again but it didn't save my UPlay login details and my Bluetooth keyboards battery was dead.

On the bad sides however today I was stuck only doing 600K/s for the stream for no obvious reason.  Latency was still fine, but the picture quality was awful with the odd stall.

This is why I can't see streaming taking off, there are no guarantees of reliability between your connection and the data centre.  Bearing in mind my route to Shadow in France very direct, my ISP peers directly to LINX as do Shadow.

[Alex Atkin UK]

My broadband issues remain so I've pretty much given up on this now.