Cloud Gaming

I thought I’d make a post about something less so work or business related. A ton of people I know and work with unwind by gaming. Older people who I never even thought knew what a video game was were playing Baldur’s Gate 8 hours straight when it released, so yeah – there are secret gamers among us no matter the age.

And I had another revelation – a lot of people have no idea what Cloud Gaming is, when it’s the perfect solution to so many common problems people have with enjoying their video games, for example. All my devices are now Apple & I travel quite a bit. Making it really hard for me to enjoy my video games. This means I have 2 main issues.

Apple Device Issues

Firstly, Apple devices especially Apple silicon ones (all the newer apple devices) have a real issue of not being able to play most games. Either because the specs are too low to run it or because the game simply isn’t available for Mac. (There are workarounds with emulating window systems and such but they’re all confusing nerd things that are cumbersome)

Travel Limitations

Secondly, traveling doesn’t allow me to bring my iMac with me, just a MacBook. MacBooks can surprisingly natively run some demanding games but it’s a very narrow cross section of games it can run and games that support Mac.

What’s the solutions? Well for me, the longest time it was the Nintendo switch, a nice little handheld console that has a surprising amount of games on it although nearly all of those games are either indie or older titles- I’m a PC gamer, I want to play real games – like Baldur’s Gate in 4k.

Cloud Gaming Solution

Well, the best solution is cloud gaming. Companies like NVIDIA have cloud gaming offerings. NVIDIA hosts massive servers that have their high-end gaming cards and top tier configurations.

You basically rent a top-of the line gaming PC to run the game for you and it gets streamed right back to you. You are literally watching a live-stream of a PC running your game & taking in your inputs.

Now, you may ask, how is this playable? If everyone’s input needs to be sent via the internet to the rig, processed and then sent back to you that seems like the experience would be terrible! I press a button and the game reacts an entire second later, called input lag.

However, somehow it’s very close to perfect. On my home connection(which is just wifi- not even wired!) I can stream and play a game flawlessly at 4k 60fps.

On a hotspot I can still play just fine at 2K (watch your usage!!! It uses up a ton of bandwidth)

This is no easy feat. Cloud gaming has been getting tried for over a decade and only now is it getting good, and it’s not because internet connections have gotten that much better. The latency from you, to the rig and back to you still seriously adds up! There isn’t any servers for GeForce now in Ireland so I always get connected to somewhere in Germany, hence the latency should be quite bad.

I won’t pretend to understand the tech but NVIDIA in the background has a bunch of really cool stuff that smooths it all over and it just works. Nearly flawlessly, very close to magic.

GeForce Now Limitations

This is awesome tech and allows you to enjoy over 2,000 games even on your mobile phone or from a browser. But wait, only 2000 games?

Well, NVIDIA doesn’t technically give you to entire computer. It gives you a little cut-out that is just running the 2000 pre-approved games from Steam, Xbox and Epic Games.

This means you can’t install external mods if you’re playing Skyrim for example. You can’t play most older titles and you can’t play banger games that have their own launchers – like Tarkov or my favourite game of all time – Star Citizen.

Last week it was over a year since I went all Apple, and for 12 long months I’ve been unable to play Star Citizen. GeForce doesn’t support it, it’s an utter Behemoth of a game that even if it was available on Mac there’s no chance would run.

So, I waited hoping one day in the distance future it would be added to NVIDIA’s GeForce Now platform, but the itch was too strong and I wanted to well, upgrade my cloud gaming workflow.

Full Control Cloud Gaming

I dived deep into seeing if I could rent my own server or a rig that would give me full control of the computer. Allowing me to install my own software, namely Star Citizen. Turns out, there are a few platforms there which allow you to get your own cloud gaming rig.

Stim.io & Shadow seem to be the main players. The only one with any servers in Ireland seems to be Stim.io, so I went with that. Note that the costs and limitations are far far higher going with your own entire rig than with GeForce. To get the recommended specs for Star Citizen sets me back $65 a month, with a generous limit of around 100 hours of playtime per month compared to the unlimited hours for $25 a month on GeForce.

This allowed me to just enough space and specs to squeeze in a download of Star Citizen although it’s not perfect. NVIDIA really does have some magical tech as the experience on other platforms has been less than stellar. Fighting dropping stream quality, broken mouse movement and laggy inputs. Fixing these issues requires a lot of patience but they can be resolved with some software, some settings tweaks and ideally – wiring your internet connection.