The Xbox Series X&S and Xbox One are first and foremost designed for playing Xbox console games. However, the devices can do a lot more than that! For many people, the Xbox is the centerpiece of their living room or home theater. Via apps for Netflix, YouTube, YouTube TV, Disney+, Hulu etc. in the Microsoft store, you can use your Xbox to watch just about any TV Show or Movie ever created.
You can of course play Xbox Cloud games on your Xbox, too. But, did you know you can also stream games from other cloud gaming services on your Xbox, as well? You can play games from GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna, Boosteroid and more on your Xbox! Some of these games aren’t available natively on Xbox – for example, Hell Divers 2 and God of War via Boosteroid and Steam!
While there have been rumors of GeForce NOW getting support baked into the Xbox game library itself, you can actually already play GeForce NOW on Xbox!
And, it works really well!
The trick is that all of these services have web-apps that can be accessed from the Microsoft Edge browser on the Xbox. And, perhaps a little surprisingly, Microsoft has gone above and beyond in order to make sure these services work well on the Xbox.
What Microsoft did to make these services work well on the platform isn’t always obvious at first. But, Microsoft has begun advertising this feature every time you visit a cloud gaming website. The big enhancement is a simple and easy to use toggle that lets you change the mode of your controller as seen from the browser from a keyboard/mouse to an actual gamepad. More on that later.
Steps to play GeForce NOW games on an Xbox
- In order to get the Microsoft Edge Browser to open full screen, you’ll need to change a display option in the Xbox settings app. Open up Settings; then go to “General TV & display options” -> “Video fidelity & overscan” and turn off the setting at the bottom right that says “Apps can add a border” – see the two images above.
- Open the Microsoft Edge Browser on your Xbox.
- Navigate to play.geforcenow.com in the browser. You can then choose to bookmark this page, so you don’t have to enter the URL in the future.
- If this is your first time visiting the GFN website in your browser, you’ll have to accept the GFN terms and conditions and you’ll have to log in to your NVIDIA account. This is a pretty standard process, similar to logging into a new app on the device. However, it may help to zoom out in the browser (go up to the top right and click on the menu “…” button and go to where it says “Zoom” and press on the minus “-” button a few times. Remember to reset the Zoom to 100% after you have logged in).
- Now here is the trick! Once you are logged in on the GFN home page, press the menu button on your controller and select the top option “Use game controls” (see the picture below). This is what makes the website “see” your controller as a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard.
- Navigate with the controller to a game you want to play, press “a” to launch it, and prepare to be amazed by how well it all works!
When you are playing a game and want to bring up the NVIDIA GeForce NOW menu you press LB (Left Bumper) + Up on the DPad. You can even turn on statistics for the stream like you can on any other GeForce NOW apps. These will show you the game rendered FPS, the stream FPS, your latency to the GFN server (ping), the resolution and codec being used and other stats.
Once you are done playing, you can toggle back out of “game controls” mode by holding down the menu button. This will put the controller back in mouse and keyboard mode as far as the browser is concerned. You probably want to make sure not to accidentally hold down the menu button while playing, but fortunately it is not a common mistake to make. Still, we’ve yet to come across that requires you to hold down the menu button for any reason.
Other Tips and Tricks
One issue for us that, by default, the stream defaulted to 1280×720 (720p). But, you can set a fixed resolution of 1920×1080 in the GeForce NOW settings. This allowed us to achieve a 1080p and 60FPS stream as shown in the pictures above. The gameplay remained smooth in this mode. Unfortunately 4K is not an option. The Xbox browser actually registers itself as a 1280×720 device with 1.5x scaling factor for a total resolution of 1920×1080 max.
Let us know how this works for you.
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