NVIDIA CEO Jensen’s keynote just wrapped up and he didn’t mention GeForce NOW once. But! That doesn’t mean GeForce NOW didn’t have a lot news to share at CES!
GeForce NOW just put out a blog post with a bunch of substantial announcements.
Official Native Steam (Linux) App
Lots of people are already using GeForce NOW on their Steam Deck as a way to supplement the local gaming experience. It looks like NVIDIA has taken notice and is now releasing a native Linux client targeted at the Steam Deck. This should make it dead simple to install and run GeForce NOW on the device.
NVIDIA says it is coming later this year and:
Steam Deck gamers can gain access to all the same benefits as GeForce RTX 4080 GPU owners with a GeForce NOW Ultimate membership, including NVIDIA DLSS 3 technology for the highest frame rates and NVIDIA Reflex for ultra-low latency. Because GeForce NOW streams from an RTX gaming rig in the cloud, the Steam Deck uses less processing power, which extends battery life compared with playing locally.
GeForce NOW Officially Coming to India – Chile and Columbia Now Live
NVIDIA will launch RTX servers in India imminently. NVIDIA will seemingly run these datacenters itself. They also recently expanded to Chile and Columbia with the help of alliance partner Digevo. The addition of India adds 1 billion new potential customers. From the provided map (see below) it looks like the servers will be in the New Delhi region.
GeForce NOW Coming to VR
NVIDIA GeForce NOW will be officially coming to Meta Quest 3 and 3s headsets as well as the Apple Vision Pro. In addition, ByteDance’s Pico virtual- and mixed-reality devices will be supported as well. This won’t be for playing VR games, but will be for playing the existing GeForce NOW library in big screen mode similar to how Xcloud works on Meta devices.
Like the case with Xcloud, users can immerse themselves with virtual backgrounds (like movie theaters) or use a pass-through background.
Wondering about RTX 5080 support? The new line GeForce GPUs got announced during today’s keynote with impressive upgrades. But, there is no word yet on when they might hit GeForce NOW’s servers.
