The new native GeForce Now app for the Steam Deck is causing quite a stir, and for about $20 a month, this might be the visual and endurance upgrade Deck owners have only dreamed about.
Let's face it: cloud gaming has its fair skeptics. However, the early returns suggest that GeForce Now on the Steam Deck could be a watershed moment. And while this doesn't equate to the specs of a custom-built desktop rig (no handheld can truly compare to a top-tier GPU yet), GeForce Now's "Ultimate" tier surely packs a punch.
Just think about it: you get to enjoy the power of an RTX 4080. It includes all the bells and whistles like DLSS 4.0 and gorgeous ray tracing-things that your Steam Deck's hardware simply can't manage. The difference Eye-wateringly good. Visual comparisons, including one reported by The Verge, show a night-and-day difference in the visuals of titles like Expedition 33 through GeForce Now versus running natively.
And to pour salt in the wound: battery life. Running demanding games on native can bring the Deck down pretty exhaustively, but with the cloud-heavy lifting, users are apparently reporting 7 to 8 hours of life on the Steam Deck. That's some serious extra gaming.
By now, you have some serious second thoughts about shelling out $20 a month just to play games you already own. Fair enough. But try to look at it this way: What you are getting for that $20 is a level of graphical fidelity and length of play that in truth, until now, was just not an option for the Steam Deck bar some obscure workarounds to install Windows or macOS.
That is what this comes down to- accessibility and an almost entirely different experience you will gain. Given a decent internet connection and an NVIDIA server not too far away for low latency, voila-your Steam Deck becomes a far superior in-home gaming device. Furthermore, streaming in GeForce Now is even supported on a 4K display, which the native dock of Deck can't achieve for any demanding games.
Essentially, using GeForce Now on your Steam Deck is not merely finding the cheapest way of playing. I mean you could cloud game on some cheap Chromebook. This is about giving a new level of versatility and visual splendor to an already existing handheld. The native app cleans up this whole idea and opens a door into a major upgrade to the gaming experience, provided you want to invest.
While not covering every new release, the GeForce Now library does have its share of games that should make testing out those enhanced graphics rather appealing. It ultimately seems to come down to whether or not you find $20 a month to be a worthwhile trade-off for what would otherwise be a huge upgrade to your life as a Steam Deck gamer.
