John VoorheesFeb 22, 2023

At WWDC last year, Apple began promoting Macs to developers as a premium videogame platform, showing off 3 titles, only one of which has shipped.

In the meantime, streaming games has become an increasingly viable way to enjoy AAA titles on the Mac.

In fact, NVIDIA's GeForce NOW Ultimate tier, that streams games running on the RTX 4080 GPU is currently the best way to enjoy the most demanding games on any Mac.

My story on @macstories: https://www.macstories.net/stories/the-best-mac-gaming-experience-is-a-pc-sitting-in-a-dallas-data-center/

The Best Mac Gaming Experience Is a PC Sitting in a Dallas Data Center

I’ve seen the future of Mac gaming, and it’s not Metal 3 or Apple silicon. It’s a PC sitting in a Dallas data center with an NVIDIA 4080 GPU. That’s the data center my Mac connects to when I log into GeForce NOW Ultimate, the top tier of NVIDIA’s videogame streaming service. NVIDIA has data

Show threadPaul StocktonFeb 22, 2023
@johnvoorhees @macstories not finished your article yet but if I play mainly first-person shooters where your reaction time and latency has to be as fast as possibly in order to kill the enemy before they kill you, how does this work playing it "remotely"?
Wonder if anyone has done any comprehensive tests frame-by-frame to show what each player sees and reacts to compared to a gaming PC
Show threadJohn VoorheesFeb 22, 2023

@pauls I'm probably not the best person to answer this since I don't play a lot of FPS games, but here's what NVIDIA said at CES:

“With the addition of NVIDIA Reflex, GeForce NOW achieves click-to-pixel latency below 40 milliseconds — another first in cloud gaming.”

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-brings-rtx-4080-to-geforce-now

NVIDIA Brings RTX 4080 to GeForce NOW

NVIDIA today announced GeForce NOW™ is going beyond fast, delivering GeForce RTX™ 4080-class gaming to billions of devices — available exclusively in the new, high-performance Ultimate membership tier.

NVIDIA Newsroom
Show threadPaul Stockton
@johnvoorhees thanks for that - I may need to try this for a month in the interests of science to compare to my 2080Ti gaming PC
Feb 22, 2023 at 3:29pmWeb
Show threadMatt BirchlerFeb 22, 2023
@pauls @johnvoorhees I would also check out Digital Foundry's looks into this over the past year or two. The short version, I believe is that in optimum conditions the latency can be shockingly close, but it's not as consistent as running things locally.
Show threadJohn VoorheesFeb 22, 2023
@matt @pauls Very true. I haven’t see, any latency issues, but I’ve been playing more forgiving games when it comes to that. The biggest factor I’ve seen so far is the consistency of your Internet connection. A slower wired connection is much better than a fast WiFi connection that dips in and out.
Show threadPaul StocktonFeb 22, 2023
@johnvoorhees @matt thanks guys - very interesting, I'm going to keep a close eye on it, plus the list of games. A 4080 graphics card is way out of my budget for a long time so if ever I have a game that my 2080Ti can't handle at 1440p then this seems the way to go