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NVIDIA 'GeForce NOW Recommended Routers' Program Helps Gamers Choose Networking Gear (betanews.com)

NVIDIA has launched the "GeForce NOW Recommended Routers" program to help gamers choose the best router for them. From a report: "The GeForce NOW game-streaming service has transformed where and how you can enjoy your favorite high-performance games. We've rolled out enhancements during its beta period to improve the quality of service from our data centers to your home. With our recommended routers, in-home network congestion becomes a thing of the past, helping to keep your gameplay silky smooth," says NVIDIA. The gaming company also says, "The latest generation of routers allows you to configure settings to prioritize GeForce NOW before all other data. But we wanted to make it even easier. Recommended routers are certified as factory-enabled with a GeForce NOW quality of service (QoS) profile. It's automatically enabled when you're gaming with GeForce NOW."

126 comments

  1. Outstanding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Bring that right here so I can run my finger across the heat sink. Shit I got another 500 error accessing the article.

  2. Yeah... fuck off with your online games. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    When (not if) your company dies, or just loses interest, or gets bought, or wants to gouge me more, or, or, or, ... and I can't have access to my games, I'm not giving the money to you, but to whoever puts you in prison first.

    Online is only OK, if it's either peer-to-peer or if I have and can use the server software.

    1. Re:Yeah... fuck off with your online games. by pushing-robot · · Score: 1

      So far "GeForce NOW" has just been a service that lets you play your own Steam/Blizzard library on nVidia's servers. The service could shut down and you could still play your games on your own hardware.

      nVidia also makes their GameStream software available to users so you can send your own games from your PC to a nVidia console or tablet, or any device running the FOSS Moonlight client. Or you can cast your games using Steam's streaming protocol.

      Mind you, I'm not a big nVidia fan for other reasons, but so far they've handled game streaming pretty well. Still, GeForce Now is a beta product so things could always change before (or after) release.

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
  3. This is retarded. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Republic of Gamers branded routers. Now I've seen it all.

    1. Re: This is retarded. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The real question is how much are they getting paid per router model they recommend.

    2. Re:This is retarded. by Kuruk · · Score: 1

      A killer gaming router with the same pings and bloatware that will not be supported in 6 months and become part of a bot net.

      Take my money.

    3. Re:This is retarded. by Cederic · · Score: 1

      Without even checking I'd assume the ROG routers are just aesthetically embedded versions of the Asus RT line of routers that get regular firmware updates many years after release.

      My rt-ac88u offers joyful wireless bandwidth but also includes a bunch of gamer friendly software built in, such as the ability to route online gaming packets via dedicated paths to minimise hops and maximise performance.

      I don't use that, but it does show that the ROG routers wouldn't have to do anything different or special, which both makes them cheap to design/build and easy to keep maintained.

      Asus are terrible at tablets but great at routers and monitors. I'm still ambivalent on the motherboard I got from them so wont say whether they're any good at those.

    4. Re:This is retarded. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      WOW believe marketing wank much? Dedicated routes to improve gaming performance? HAHA. Your router has no say in how your packets get routed over the internet. Your ISPs routers and their backbone providers routers makes those routing decisions. Even a VPN between your gaming router and the gaming server makes zero difference. It may logically appear through the VPN that you are a single hop from the gaming server but that VPN tunnel is still hopping over say 20 different hops all over the internet all decided by your ISP and their backbone provider's routing. Not to mention a VPN itself introduces extra latency on top.

      The only way a VPN might give you an edge is if you have a shitty ISP like Sharter who routes their traffic haphazardly all over the CONUS. This is a real world example for me. I use PIA VPN over Sharter. If I use the Sharter connection bareback and do a trace route to google it is 20 something hops. However due to the positioning of the PIA VPN server I connect to, I am only about 5 hops from PIA. If i trace route over the VPN session I hit google in about 5 hops, plus the 5 hops the VPN session is running over, so about half the hops. Basically this points to the fact that the PIA VPN server is sitting in a data center with real backbone connections where they actually have clue how to route packets, and not bounce them all over the place like Sharter does.

      I used to work for one of the companies that Sharter purchased, so I know just what level of "network engineers" are left there. Basically everyone who had no marketable skills and didn't want to risk unemployment, so they took relocation offers and being locked into 2 year indentured servitude contracts. Lest you have to pay back the relocation costs. Everyone with marketable skills took their severance checks and laughed all the way to the bank and their next job.

    5. Re: This is retarded. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ROG Reuters are pretty awesome. However Ubiquity is far more flexible for setting up a home networks with subletting and internal routing between those subnets. If you arent a network guy it's tough to beat ASUS ROG for the money.

    6. Re: This is retarded. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where the gaming router has an edge is basically running QoS for a games particular traffic. It's just giving it priority over all other traffic. Once it leaves the router then it's up to the ISP to send those packets quickly and the destination server to reply without hesitation.

    7. Re: This is retarded. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So basically spending $100 more on a "gaming" router for a few preconfigured QOS entries, that would probably take someone less than 5 minutes to setup themselves?

      QOS isn't even all it's cracked up to be in a home environment. Unless you have your home internet connection constantly saturated, or have a older shit slow router there is really no point in QOS at the home level.

    8. Re: This is retarded. by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Saturation can happen at any timescale, it doesn't need to be constant. About 5 years ago I was having issues where all of the streaming services were sending at least 1Gb/s at me. The streaming services use HTTP over TCP and transfer in 250KiB chunks, which fit in most network buffers. Since no packets were dropped, the TCP window kept opening up. Since the streaming services only need to average around 8Mb/s per stream, this resulted in the TCP connection being idle for most of the duration. With the connection being idle and the window was large enough to fit the entire 250KiB chunk and the 250KiB chunk fit in all of the buffers without causing packet loss, every time a chunk needed to be transferred, it resulted in the sender sending at max rate. If I was gaming while someone was streaming, about every 20-30 seconds, I would get a 200ms+ latency burst and loss in some cases.At the time the ISP was using normal FIFO buffering, which results in the fat flows monopolizing the buffers and sparse flows getting their packets dropped. This is the opposite of what you want. At some point in the last few years, my ISP can switched to using an AQM and this is no longer an issue.

      My anecdote raises several issues. 1) TCP packet pacing is important 2) TCP shouldn't go from idle to full rate, probably do a slow start all over 3) Fair queuing is important because FIFO buffers reinforce bad behavior by statistically rewarding fat flows

  4. Ubiquiti by war4peace · · Score: 1

    No earlier than a week ago I have bought an ERPoE-5 and an AC-Pro from them. They run very well.

    --
    ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
    1. Re:Ubiquiti by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Did you learn the Ubiquiti command line interface stuff? I've been meaning to but too busy for a new brain project right now.

    2. Re: Ubiquiti by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No and you clearly did not either. Dumb is not the right word. I would lose my mind if I had to learn this although it must be nice to have a few more commands and be able to track more things with those commands in-game

    3. Re: Ubiquiti by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I thought it was very clear based upon me specifically saying I hadn't, but then you're the detective here obviously. Jesus wow, you have no idea what I'm talking about.

    4. Re: Ubiquiti by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah okay. Whoosh. In another decade you will say âoeoh shit!â

    5. Re: Ubiquiti by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Good luck with your "in game" Ubiquiti command line lol. How are you going to find the pokemon with your head up your ass, c6?

    6. Re:Ubiquiti by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 0

      to bad that with that is all settings are lost then the controller pushes out an new config.

    7. Re:Ubiquiti by war4peace · · Score: 1

      I haven't bothered trying. Truth be told, I don't understand more than half the stuff it can do, I'm a beginner when it comes to networking. But in time I'll learn.

      --
      ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
    8. Re:Ubiquiti by Xord · · Score: 1

      That would be only on the Unifi Security Gateway. He has the ERPoE-5, which is not managed by the Unifi controller.

  5. help gamers? or help nvidia? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    surely there's a licensing fee involved here, so i doubt nvidia is actually 'recommending' products based on their merit, and only that.

    1. Re: help gamers? or help nvidia? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If all we had were a consumer reports review of the card for all applications and not just select games it would not have required any hype to select the best card immediately

  6. GeForce NOW by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I've been beta-testing GeForce NOW since the beginning and I believe this cloud gaming is going to have a huge impact on the market. I can run the latest AAA games on ultra using a PC that doesn't come close to meeting system requirements or on my Macbook pro. And I mean smooth. As in no lag. First person shooters, racing games, whatever. They play great, and don't feel any different than playing them on my own system.

    Now, it's been a free service to me because I'm beta-testing (you have to own the games, of course), and I really don't know how much nVidia is going to charge for this once it's released. But if it's $5/month, I'd pay for this all day long. At $20/month, probably not. You also need a really good internet connection with unlimited data because it uses up a LOT of bandwidth.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
    1. Re: GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't believe there is no lag, it just isnt possible. I notice lag streaming games (steam) on my LAN, adding "the cloud" can only add to that.

  7. Ban Net Neutrality Now!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No wonder the FCC had to kill Net Neutrality with all these selfish and childish people hogging the bandwidth of the internet for streaming their movies and games!!!

    AJIT2020!!!!

  8. Clearly the problem by forgottenusername · · Score: 1

    Not the shite state of broadband internet in most regions of America.

    Full 10g network at home, 10 down / 1 up with 8% packet loss.. how is fast home network helping.. most games don't push much traffic.

    Here's to hoping Musk sat internet becomes a reality. Kessler Syndrome aside.

    1. Re:Clearly the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Latency, derp. Not throughput. Don't just name-drop Musk for no reason, that's pedo cave-diver shit.

    2. Re:Clearly the problem by Computershack · · Score: 1

      Don't give a shit about throughput. Get Fortnite to show live network stats and you'll find its sending and receiving a whopping 3-5k a second. Apart from the latency that means you could game on dialup.

      --
      I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
  9. Chinese princess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Kinda smells like NVIDEA got one from Long Dong Wuu. Smooth as a cheerleaders thigh ... Bet her fav router loves shipping gamrboi data to the slant central committee for further "analysis". Future chi.com pimp future spy future malware dev spews the hidden relations ? GOOGLE software will tell them.

  10. Screw the cloud. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They can take my physical disc when they pry it from my cold, dead drive.

    1. Re: Screw the cloud. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see your brain is wired directly to your mouth

    2. Re:Screw the cloud. by omnichad · · Score: 1

      The one that includes a stream installer and a partial cache, but none of the release-day patches because nothing is ever working correctly on launch day anymore. Game preservation of going to become a near impossible job someday soon.

  11. Re:GeForce NOW by citizenr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > They play great, and don't feel any different than playing them on my own system.

    That means you never properly played PC games at >=60fps with 80ms between pressing a button and reaction on the screen.

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  12. advertisement by DrYak · · Score: 1

    good routers, in the real world:
      - any random router with half-decent hardware (decent CPU, sufficient RAM) *as long as you kick out whatever horrible joke for a firmware was provided by the manufacturer and install OpenWRT instead* (e.g.: a slightly higher range device form cheap no-name Asian manufacturers like TP-Link is actually okay, once paired with OpenWRT, you don't need an ultra fancy one that cladvertises support for on-router torrent client and command center of cryptocoin mining ASICs)
    - a couple of companies that actually still give a damn about router quality and haven't completely forgotten the meaning of the word"update" (examples such as Fritz by the German AVM comes to mind, you can even look at Freetz if you want some extra opensource pieces of software)
    - forget about whatever crap with beautiful but horribly limited interface you service provided for free (unless you're in one of these European country where the ISP's router *is* a Fritz)

    good router, according the recommendations that are inevitably going to pop up in such "for the gamers" infovertisement:
    - the crap from whoever happened to pay the most sponsor money (expect to see a decent amount of multicoloured useless LEDs paired with horrendous firmware that sucks all your private data and that also just plain sucks)

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:advertisement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fun fact: On most routers, OpenWRT can't handle more than a few hundred Mbps throughput, because there is no support for hardware offloading and the "decent CPUs" in those things are actually pretty slow compared to even the lowest end desktop or laptop CPUs. FTTH isn't adequately served by OpenWRT yet.. I do second the AVM recommendation, but they are pricey.

  13. Re:GeForce NOW by citizenr · · Score: 1

    Wtf /. code at half of my reply :o, probably got confused by greater-than/less signs. Again:

    That means you never properly played PC games at > = 60fps with 80ms between pressing a button and reaction on the screen."

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  14. Re:GeForce NOW by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

    You also need a really good internet connection with unlimited data because it uses up a LOT of bandwidth.

    So I guess they'll never bother to offer this in Canada.

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
  15. Re:GeForce NOW by citizenr · · Score: 1

    Ok, this is hilarious, /. is eating everything between less/greater than signs.

    "That means you never properly played PC games at "over" 60fps with "less than" 20ms total input lag.
    GeForce NOW "over" 80ms between pressing a button and reaction on the screen."

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  16. Is this just another con? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Is there seriously such a difference that you would need to recommend one brand over another. Wouldnt you just recommend a feature set - like QoS.

    This sounds like just one more way that NVIDIA controls other organisations. And, FYI, QoS wont fix people that have a bad connection in the first place, but I'm sure they wont explain that and have all the nubs in the world just think they must get this to get better speed.

    1. Re:Is this just another con? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not only that, Nvidia is just going to "pick" the ones they have a deal with. It's not necessarily going to be the best thing consumers can buy, and trusting Nvidia is trusting a company that pushes fake benchmarks and crippleware...

      Even if a router is "the fastest" at this kind of QOS, one wonders what the fatal flaw will be in the rest of their implementation that makes it exclusively a toy for Xbox types. Any decent router can set up QOS, it's not some magic thing.

    2. Re:Is this just another con? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      It is marketing nonsense, plain and simple. Unless you have a lot of other load on the connection, the router does not make one bit of difference.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:Is this just another con? by KingMotley · · Score: 1

      Because feature sets are often useless. I've had numerous routers in the past that "have" QoS, but when enable it, the entire network goes to crap because the QoS is being offloaded to the CPU (even though it has hardware QoS support). How something is implemented is often just as important as what is implemented.

    4. Re:Is this just another con? by Cederic · · Score: 1

      Is there seriously such a difference that you would need to recommend one brand over another. Wouldnt you just recommend a feature set - like QoS.

      Fuck yes, there's a massive difference. Wireless networking chipset, onboard RAM, all the other components that make modern routers miniature servers in their own right.

      Then there's the software that runs on them. A feature list doesn't factor in usability, efficiency, effectiveness or frequency of updates.

      For many people the ability to install their own software matters too.

      Home wifi routers are not just routers. Router brands are not just badges on the same underlying product. I absolutely would recommend a router brand, and recommend against another, but in preference I'd recommend a specific router model, because most of the good brands offer a range of products that meet different needs.

      Whether Nvidia's recommendations have value is a very different question..

  17. Holy Slashvertisement by Excelcia · · Score: 1

    Holy Flaming Slashvertisements, Batman.

    I've seen Slashvertisements before, but most are at least subtle. This is like one of those articles that should actually be labelled with that little "advertisement" tags that the advertiser hopes their "click bait" title will induce you to ignore.

    Is readership down? This is actually troubling to see editorial standards drop like this.

    1. Re: Holy Slashvertisement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I prefer the banner ads. The timing of the articles is somewhat suspect

    2. Re:Holy Slashvertisement by weilawei · · Score: 1

      Yeah, this wasn't even subtle. It reads like a press release.

  18. It is surprisingly difficult to find fast routers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And I mean routers that don't cost as much as a small x64 system. I have FTTH, so I was looking for a router that can handle full symmetric gigabit throughput between WAN and LAN with some firewall rules and QoS. I ended up with a Mikrotik Hex S. It is a wired only router, but at least with IPv4, it can saturate gigabit Ethernet both ways simultaneously. With IPv6, not so much, as it lacks hardware offloading for that. I'm seriously considering just getting a Zotac CI327 and running OpenWRT on it. That easily handles full throughput, so ~$150 is my limit for a router. Anything more and I'd roll my own.

  19. Re:GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Welcome to html tags.

  20. Re: It is surprisingly difficult to find fast rout by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I do not think the stats and brands really matter although the perfect case in the perfect device makes a heck of a difference. I want to know how the router performs for getting accurate ones and zeroes to where they need to be as fast as they need to get there. When I see a good one I then ask what the brand is. I suppose I might be missing out but frankly my dear I donâ(TM)t give a damn

  21. QOS only affects outgoing traffic by gtoomey · · Score: 2

    QOS only affects outgoing packets. This is generally light traffic on a home network - mainly ACKS. QOS can not affect your incoming traffic, which usually has a far greater volume than incoming. In other words QOS has virtually no affect in a typical home environment. Its a marketing gimmick .

    1. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Indeed. The only situation where this may help (but is not assured to) is if they upload oodles of data while playing online reaction games. But if they do that, then the core problem is between keyboard and chair.

      The whole thing is completely ridiculous bullshit.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    2. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So very wrong. You need to at least make sure you get the ACKs out quickly, which means letting them jump ahead in the queue of packets. You also want to throttle bulk downloads to leave room for realtime applications like games and VoIP. Even though you are shaping traffic after the bottleneck, it still affects bandwidth utilization, because TCP and application layer protocols adapt to the available bandwidth. By throttling bulk downloads, you can control how much bulk traffic is sent your way. And the home network is exactly where this needs to take place. The ISP should not ever prioritize anything. If there is congestion on the ISP network, they oversold their bandwidth too much. The bottleneck should be and usually is your last mile connection, and it's only your traffic, so you are free to prioritize as you want. That's exactly where you want traffic management.

    3. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      QoS affects traffic by reordering or dropping packets before a bottleneck. You can create an artificial bottleneck by throttling traffic to just below the actual bottleneck. Then the previous bottleneck becomes congestion free and no longer needs QoS. This works with well-behaved protocols like TCP, not against DoS attacks, obviously. Good routers with QoS can handle bulk transfers both ways without degrading the performance of real-time protocols.

    4. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      sufficient qos rules can neuter windows 10's habit of saturating your downstream connection whenever it fucks up updates and re-downloads a 4+ gigabyte update several times per day.

    5. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Chozabu · · Score: 1

      perhaps slightly large for a home network, but running QOS (the SQM package) seems to make a difference like night and day on my network.
      Phones doing backups were the worst - but a couple of people streaming would also seriously clog up the network (hundreds of ms ping, perhaps even thousands).
      Now it is often not noticable - though torrents with a high number of connections can still be problematic.

    6. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Network engineer here. Something is seriously wrong with your network if streaming causes latency and the streams aren't completely unwatchable. And phones doing backups, that's a tiny amount of traffic for home networks.

      Replace your router. Upgrade to newer protocols for wireless. What you are experiencing shouldn't happen unless some terrible settings are implemented and the total throughput is less than 10mbps.

    7. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Bengie · · Score: 1

      That's only true if the sender is DDOSing you or you literally don't have enough bandwidth. I QoS my incoming just fine by dropping packets which signals the sender to back off. And it's not just any packets getting dropped, it's statically biased to almost always be packets from the fattest flows. I can have my connection loaded to 99% of its provisioned rate and get 0 dropped gaming packets and less than 1ms of jitter.

    8. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by auzy · · Score: 1

      I disagree.. Most home connections have limited uploads, so it probably only takes 1 person's phone to start uploading their photos to the cloud for network performance to get a bit sketchy.

      Downloads generally everyone has an excessive amount

    9. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      And yet in a situation where both directions are relevant to the overall experience: video conferencing, calling, or say timely feedback of input events in reaction to a video feed, then QoS even on only one of the streams actually makes a big differences.

      Sometimes marketing is just telling people about something that already makes sense.

    10. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL you have no fucking clue what you are talking about. The reality is unless they are running uploads from multiple users chewing up the bandwidth there is NO QUEUE to jump ahead of.

    11. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Cederic · · Score: 1

      Hmm. You having no fucking clue about what he's talking about doesn't mean he has none.

      His post was accurate and sensible, and although QoS will make the most difference when bandwidth is a bottleneck your router will indeed be handling queues constantly, even at relatively low loads.

      Such is the way of computers.

      Anyway, who the fuck needs multiple users to chew a connection? Shit, at full load I have multiple PCs, a couple of TVs, a blu-ray player, two NAS boxes, three IP cameras and various mobile devices all randomly choosing to make internet connections, plus the router itself. Why would I let any of that interfere with my latency in Rocket League?

    12. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by omnichad · · Score: 1

      Throttling outgoing ACKS on inbound traffic can absolutely prioritize one connection over the other for download QoS.

    13. Re: QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is how lag switches are built.

    14. Re:QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      QOS is wank on a home network. It makes ZERO difference. I have no QOS setup on my home LAN. I have no difficulties streaming to multiple devices, using VoIP and downloads at the same time even on a 100mbps connection. QOS makes ZERO difference after the packet has left your router.

    15. Re: QOS only affects outgoing traffic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it's not. By throttling the bandwidth just so much that the home router becomes the new bottleneck, and then prioritizing real-time traffic, including game protocols, you maintain low latency for the real time protocols even when bulk transfers use up most of the bandwidth. It's the opposite of a lag switch.

  22. Bullshit by gweihir · · Score: 1

    Networking gear is not a factor in gaming. This is probably for the morons that think their reflexes and visual cortex are fast enough that 120Hz displays or 1000Hz keyboards make a difference. They do not.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:Bullshit by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      The selling points are the ability to "game" while video streaming and downloading.
      More easy to setup with games.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    2. Re: Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you ever actually sat in front of and used a 120hz screen before? It is an imemdiately noticeable difference.

    3. Re: Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Zactly. A more apt comparison would be: as long as you're not buying a $20 Walmart router, this is like blowing $300 on RAM, screaming about CAS latency, and hurling death threats at developers because your friend who blew $300 on a better processor instead is handing your l33t rig its own ass on a platter.

      Gamers do tend to be fucking morons when it comes to hardware.

    4. Re:Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is a factor. With default settings a standard http download would murder the latency of anyone trying to play vidya. Some routers offer better control over this than others.

    5. Re: Bullshit by gweihir · · Score: 1

      The difference is there. But it is not a difference you can translate into reaction speed.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    6. Re:Bullshit by gweihir · · Score: 1

      QoS really only works in the sending direction the way the Internet is set up today. So it would absolutely have to kill download speeds for a real effect. It would basically have to keep TCP reliably in slow-start and that makes it really, really slow. What it can improve is the impact of uploads.

      Bottom line: Bullshit. Or rather an attempt to get the money of the uninformed. Apparently it is even going to work.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    7. Re:Bullshit by Bengie · · Score: 1

      I don't use QoS, I use an FairQ + AQM. Dropped packets is not just normal for TCP, it's a requirement. Dropping a packet early before bufferbloat kicks in reduces latency is reduces packetloss by signalling to the sender to backoff before the buffer fills and bloat plus burst loss occurs.

    8. Re: Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Who talks about reaction speed? It stutter less, the control is better, it's easier to aim.

    9. Re:Bullshit by Cederic · · Score: 1

      Networking gear is not a factor in gaming.

      Of course it fucking is, if the game involves use of a network.

      Try playing an online game with your router unplugged if you want a pretty fucking simple demonstration of its importance.

      For much online gaming latency has a massive impact on the game. Networking gear has a massive impact on latency. QED.

      Or maybe you think you can win on Fortnite using IPoAC?

      I can tell when playing games when my router is fucked. I could tell from a friend's interactions in a game when his was fucked. Networking gear quite definitely is a factor in gaming.

      This is probably for the morons that think their reflexes and visual cortex are fast enough that 120Hz displays or 1000Hz keyboards make a difference.

      Oh for fucks sake.

      Gamer A has fighter pilot reflexes and reacts to on-screen stimuli in 250ms.
      His screen refreshes at 60Hz, so he's already had to wait up to 16ms for the screen to display whatever triggered him to hit the 'fire' button.
      His mouse refreshes at 125Hz so he's had to wait another 8ms for the button press to register.

      Already he's at 274ms, adding around 10% to his reaction time.

      Gamer B has Formula 1 race driver reactions and responds to on-screen stimuli in 250ms.
      He bought a monitor that refreshes at 120Hz and a graphics card to drive it. He bought a mouse that updates at 1000Hz.

      Gamers A and B walk around a corner in a game, see each other, press 'fire' in 250ms.

      Gamer A's in-game character dies. Every fucking time.

      They do not.

      Of course they fucking do. The margins are immensely tiny but they do exist and there are a lot of people out there with the ability to exploit them.

      It's ok, you don't have to buy one. You don't have to be able to play competitively against e-sports professionals. You don't have to play games at all. Just stop being such an ignorant cunt regarding the people that do.

    10. Re:Bullshit by Bengie · · Score: 1

      I found the person who never played Quake style deathmatch games. Fast paced close quarter action. 60hz and 120hz is the difference between seeing something and not seeing something when an object is only in your field of view for less than 1/60th of a second. Humans can react to objects below 1/300th of a second.

    11. Re: Bullshit by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      An expensive pro Sumer grade router like my Cisco ac1900 for home works wonders. You don't need a gaming one. Just a good one with a decent CPU and network acceleration chips in it.

    12. Re: Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I tried AQM on openbsd I think it was. Could never get it to work properly. I think the PC I had running as my firewall/router was just too old. The NICS were like 10Mbps. Pretty bad.

    13. Re: Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it does not. You still see the same amount of data. The picture is just clearer in 120hz.

    14. Re: Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pretty much all you need to do to sell shitty hardware to a gamer is put RGB LEDs on it. OHHHH BLINKY LIGHTS!!!!!!!1!!11!!

      My guess is these routers are going to look like a mini disco on your desk, Just like the gaming PC that said luser has under their desk.

    15. Re: Bullshit by Bengie · · Score: 1

      PFSense using FairQ+Codel is pretty decent and really easy to setup. Many Linux firewalls support fq_codel, which has a fair queue algorithm baked in. If you're ISP has an AQM, like mine, depending on the algorithm you can potentially have zero packetloss, within reason, while under a DOS. I've tested up to a 500Mb/s DOS over 32 streams against my 250Mb connection and suffered zero packets lossed and unaffected latency. My bandwidth was severely reduced, but the AQM was mostly fairly distributing the bandwidth among all of the data streams, including the "unwanted" DOS streams. If I set the DOS to emulated a DDOS by making each packet look like it was coming from a different sender, that overwhelmed the AQM and I started to suffer loss and 20-40ms of latency.

      Unless someone is DDOSing me, I can let any device attempt to hog as much bandwidth as it wants and not care. Zero configuration outside of enabling the AQM. No setting priorities, no marking traffic, nothing. Just enable and forget.

      Of course the DOS packets were being dropped, but the main point is that other traffic was unaffected by the fat flows.

    16. Re: Bullshit by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Data is literally linearly scales with the number of frames displayed. Double the viewed frames, double the amount of data. An object that shows for 1 frame at 120hz has a 50/50 chance of displaying at all at 60hz .

  23. Re:GeForce NOW by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1, Troll

    That means you never properly played PC games at >=60fps with 80ms between pressing a button and reaction on the screen.

    You sound like the kind of guy who thinks he can hear the difference between cheap speaker wire and expensive speaker wire.

    No, if you played on GeForce now, you would never know you weren't on your own computer. I'm playing competitive FPS against people on high-end gaming machines and consoles and they don't notice except that I'm always just above them on the leader boards.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  24. Re:GeForce NOW by gweihir · · Score: 1

    Well, we will see. In the end, this will probably be a bit more expensive than $20/month, because they actually have to finance more hardware than you would need to (except screen). That is unless they find oodles of people that then do not actually use the service. Otherwise I really prefer to have the performance of my somewhat older gaming set-up even on Saturday evening and not have to share with others.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  25. Maybe? by Cylix · · Score: 1

    I was out of town and getting a network reconfigured. They were using the ISP router for everything and it couldn't even set fixed incoming port redirection. This was going to cause a bit of a problem and the damn thing was certainly leaking something. The off the shelf stuff these days is horrible and just meets whatever buzzword by a hair. My off the cuff solution was to attempt to find something we could at least upgrade to open-wrt or dd-wrt to get some features. That was also a challenge and managed to find something that was functional until I could ship a real solution.

    Unfortunately, making a feature set certification would still likely confuse most people and I'm scratching my head as to anything most people would understand beyond 'good fer games' stamp.

    Home devices went on a serious race to the bottom, but I'm a bit biased because there was virtually no place to buy anything good at the time.

    --
    "You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
  26. Re: GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I am noticing latency streaming from my own computer at home to the coffee shop a couple blocks over... In a platformer. Latency while aiming in an FPS is enough for me to have given up on them entirely while streaming. If people can notice a difference between different mice, they can certainly notice a difference between streaming vs local.

  27. Re:GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    60-80+ ms is mid-high latency in a fps. You may not care in Civilization or angry birds or something like that, but latency being important to games of certain types is not a made up thing.

    I know you were probably referring to the "monster" cables with their diamond-braided gold-plated crap, but still if you use too thin gauge (cheap) a wire (back in the day when people wired their own speakers) you actually can affect current required for full range speaker dynamics in hi-ohm setups or create other artifacts that yes, you can notice audibly. Now I get that audiophiles will sell you a $5000 HDMI cable for "clarity" but the truth is always somewhere in the middle isn't it?

  28. Re:GeForce NOW by citizenr · · Score: 1

    I wasnt aware of any html tags build using newline (\r\n) character sequence.

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  29. Re:GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    no lag? riight. you have no idea what you're talking about.

  30. Re:GeForce NOW by citizenr · · Score: 1

    Playing competitive FPS game is not the same as playing on a competitive level. You are saying same things console players have been saying for almost 20 years, and you probably know how confrontation between console player and mouse/kb combo looks like. Next thing you will claim there is no difference between "cinematic" 30Hz vs 144Hz :).

    You might be playing fortnite against teenagers using gamepad (handicapped input device) and big screen TV (up to 150ms input lag without switching to game mode https://www.rtings.com/tv/test... ), colloquially called "shitters".

    Yes, GeForce now might be good enough for people who find current consoles with dips below 24fps perfectly acceptable.

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  31. Re:GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    you sound like someone who lacks the ability to play well enough for it to matter. keep to your mobas newb...

    I'm playing competitive FPS against people on high-end gaming machines and consoles and they don't notice except that I'm always just above them on the leader boards.

    highly unlikely..

  32. Re:GeForce NOW by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 1

    I'm playing competitive FPS against people on high-end gaming machines and consoles and they don't notice except that I'm always just above them on the leader boards.

    Ah, Jim -- I do have to credit you with adjusting your game and now generally constraining the tall tales to ones that are completely impervious to fact checking. Merry Christmas!

  33. Re:GeForce NOW by willy_me · · Score: 1

    When posting, select Options and set the "Comment Post Mode" pull-down menu to plain text. Either that or write valid HTML messages.

  34. Re: GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I totally believe you. Why I just had a three way with Taylor Swift and every member of AKB while racing my stretch Ferrari down the slopes of an iceberg (I got snow tires), after escaping the lost city of Atlantis and my Razer Gaming Phone 2.0 Plus Platinum Edition never dropped below 120fps at 4k ultra detail in the pre release beta. The inifinite distance rendering mod works great, I can use my sniper rifle (I'm an Ace marksman naturally) to zoom onto the mirror of my private satellite and scan into my penthouse apartment skylight and watch my rare albino smilidon playing while I evade terrorist plots.

    Or maybe your level of truth was no better than mine and you suck at games. I'm not young enough to be elite now but I wouldn't even join a server with over 30ms pings back in the day when Thresh was famous.

  35. Re:GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    found the paid shill.

  36. Re:GeForce NOW by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2

    Yes, GeForce now might be good enough for people who find current consoles with dips below 24fps perfectly acceptable.

    Look, I know it's crazy, but I'm playing 60 fps consistently. I'm not smart enough to know how it's being done, I just know it's happening. My big gaming PC has a 144Hz monitor, and that even looks flawless on this nvidia cloud thing. Now, I'm fairly close to one of their server farms (less than 100mi) so maybe that makes a difference.

    You really ought to sign up for the beta. They're still letting people in as they load-test it. I'd like to hear what you think after you try it out.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  37. Re:GeForce NOW by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2

    Oh, I agree with you completely. I'm not giving up on having my own bespoke gaming PC sitting next to me, warming my feet. Plus, not all the publishers are offering their stuff on GeForce NOW. No Origin games, or EA, for example. Most everything that's on Steam and Uplay is there, but not the Microsoft games like Forza Horizon (I'm a big racing game fan).

    But this is going to disrupt the market, imo. My guess is that publishers will start to offer their own game-streaming clouds, and that's why they're holding out.

    I'm not really happy about the change to the cloud "game as service" model, but if my experience is any indication, it's coming nonetheless.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  38. Because they want to collect data from you! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The last couple of years... NVIDIA driver updates turn on the data collection vacuum. Pretty much nobody realizes this after they click the EULA. If you actually saw all of the data that driver update collects you'd be appalled. They are ready and willing to sell your gaming profile, your gaming stats, your computer's profile and also... World+Dog.

    Now... they recommend routers to you that will advance their data-harvesting agenda and the masses will just keep clicking the EULA and enjoy their total lack of privacy.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/8lvuyt/nvidia_privacy_guide_doing_this_again_after_the/

    Peace out.

  39. Re:GeForce NOW by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    < is your friend.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  40. Re:GeForce NOW by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    80 ms lag is easily perceptible by any serious gamer, indicating that you are not one.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  41. Re:GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    60fps is your screen, not 60 ticks 1:1 with the server. You're looking at 4-5 layers of latency abstraction depending. Your actions render smoothly but you're "that much more" behind the realtime server tick. This is unavoidable.

    If you were facing an opponent with regular low latency, say 20ms, and you both clicked at the same time, he would AWP you dead even if your gun seemed to fire on your side. That's just how it works, it's why low ms is required.

    If you want to say "it doesn't matter" that's up to you, but competitive twitch gamers know it does. You're saying "its good enough for me" which of course nobody can argue with. Just try not to brag about your lag, bruh.

  42. Re:GeForce NOW by Moridineas · · Score: 1

    No offense, but aren't you an old dude (and I say that as a 40-year-old who absolutely considers himself an "old dude" in the context of video games)?

    Nobody who is older than 22.4 years old can be competitive in FPSes. And damn, have you seen the new Super Smash Brothers? So many things going on, how do the kids tell what is happening??

  43. Re:GeForce NOW by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2

    No offense, but aren't you an old dude

    Oh, I'm an old dude alright.

    When I say I'm competitive in FPS, I don't mean I'm doing eSports. I just beat more asses than beat me, I guess you would say. And Super Smash Bros is way beyond my ability and my endurance.

    But truly, for the 99% of gamers that don't do eSportsj professionally, services like GeForce NOW are gonna be plenty good. I'm goddamn impressed with it. It's fun to play games on my Macbook that have never been ported to macOS. I like the idea of not having to invest a couple of grand every year into a gaming rig.

    Now excuse me, youngster, because it's time for my evening vodka & prune juice and the reruns of Columbo are starting.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  44. Re:GeForce NOW by gweihir · · Score: 1

    It will definitely be interesting to see what happens. My personal expectation is that it will kill the console market, but do not a lot to the gaming PC. I may be completely wrong, of course.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  45. Re: GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    QoS only helps of there's contention.

  46. Re:GeForce NOW by ArchieBunker · · Score: 1

    I love it when "new" technology is rediscovered. Where have we seen this before? Thin clients and fat servers? Genius! Nobody has ever done heavy processing on the back end and pushed the data to thin clients.

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
  47. Windows sticker by ArchieBunker · · Score: 1

    Is this any different than my monitor having a sticker that it's guaranteed to work with Windows?

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    1. Re: Windows sticker by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Call me cynical. Nvidia did this shit with gsync and charged a $209 premium while freesync is free. My guess is Nvidia will put a $200 charge and a special chip which uses a proprietory protocol to talk with Nvidia cloud and your GeForce driver software to stream the games.

      Once you're hooked it will be hard to leave as you will purchase the cloud games and will lose them if you go to AMD.

      Nvidia has been slimy for awhile and their new rtx 20xx shows no different

  48. Nope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Outside of San Fransisco it's not going to work like that

  49. Re:GeForce NOW by Bengie · · Score: 1

    I'm trying to look into this. I've seen some tests with gaming machines where the input lag was around 90ms from keypress to screen. Someone was testing input lag between their local machine and Shadow Play and got the exact same results when they had a 5ms ping to the remote. The network latency was not accumulative with the other latencies. This indicates that some portion of the total input latency is relatively fixed in some fashion and as long as the effective round trip is below this value, there is no difference.

    I don't know how Geforce Now is implemented, but accumulative latency is not a fundamental issue.

  50. Re:GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I would say that says more about you and your gaming experience than the service. The idea that you think a streaming service has no lag is simply idiotic, you are the wrong tester for their service as you obviously can't objectively evaluate it.

  51. Re:GeForce NOW by Bengie · · Score: 1

    Human reaction time is around 250ms for primitive visual stimuli. Humans treat 80-100ms as "instant" because of how the brain works. Audio on TV is about 100ms out of sync but it seem in sync because the brain makes it seem that way. It takes nearly 150ms for information to get incorporated into your consciousness.

    In competitive FPS games when dealing with the upper percentile, latency differences all the way down to 10ms can make a statistical difference over many games. My guess is what most people complain about "high latency" isn't the latency, but the jitter of a crappy route that is highly correlated with latency. Stability of latency is the most important below 80ms.

    I actually am lucky to have a less than 10ms ping to most FPS game servers that I play. And a very stable 6-10ms with less than 0.1ms of jitter. I actually have noticed more issues with ultra-low latency servers than higher latency servers, all the way into the 80ms range. Client side prediction seems to have a a strange interaction at such low latencies. Around 20-30ms seems to be optimal where I'm not noticing strange micro-stuttering of player locations caused by what I assume is the server correcting what I'm seeing. It's like I'll see players making frequent location corrections of very small amounts instead of infrequent corrections of marginally larger amounts.

    I'm very sensitive to these oddities because I grew up playing games like Quake over unstable dialup where there was no prediction logic of any kind and I had to in near real time identify changes to network quality by the way the game was acting in order to adjust my input compensations. I was a very competitive player and could mop the floor against most LPBs with their ISDNs and T1 dorm connections over my 250-500ms dialup over staticy lines.

  52. Re:GeForce NOW by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

    80 ms lag is easily perceptible by any serious gamer, indicating that you are not one.

    Perhaps. Except some gaming machines actually measure 90ms. This is from a keystroke to when the application reacts - using the standard "hit spacebar and see how long until the screen changes". It's a fairly standard measurement - used all the way from measuring emulator latencies versus actual hardware to measuring OS latencies.

    And the streaming gaming services measure 90ms as well. Granted, the actual network latency is around 5ms or so.

  53. Re:GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    0.02$ has been deposited to your account.

  54. Ngreedia strikes again by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    God I swear I will never buy another product by them. If the new rtx 2070 being a revamped 2060 sold at an 2080 price being $600 for economical isn't bad enough. A rumored 2060 being $399 with ram so low it can't go beyond 1080P for their low end card!

    Now +$1000 plus for any decent gpu, $200 gsynch surcharges, proprietory Cuda, cheating benchmarks by making rgb 10-254 instead of 0 - 254 and compressing colors to make AMD look slow, to sending gaming companies engineers to ruin their engines on AMD hardware to cheat on more benchmarks, to rtx 20xx dying, to paying reviewers like Tech of tomorrow, linusctech tips, and Jay2cents to lie with statements like the 2080ti is the new ititan so $1300 for a gaming card is ok etc, to now this?!

    Jesus. They are turning into the Apple of pc gaming too with their fanboys willing to open their wallets and laugh at AMD too. Good ridance

    They are a threat to PC gaming at this point as the console now is starting to look attractive again like it's 2003 all over.

    When will the greed end?

  55. Re: GeForce NOW by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    I like my AMD more than my GTX 680 I replaced. The drivers are much better quality and I have much less issues and no latency lag or Windows 10 bugs related to the Nvidia drivers.

    I think the tide has turned and the shitty AMD catalyst drivers were retired years ago. They are totally redone.

  56. Re: GeForce NOW by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    I use AMD and don't have this problem. If you go to YouTube and check for example a 1060 vs Rx 580 you will see the AMD is more fluid and less choppy regardless of fps.

    Also the fps for the 1060 is now crap compared to the RX 590 and 580 if you look at a recent video. GeForce drivers went to shit somewhere

  57. Re: GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The reason you thought you were so good is, the other players can't even fucking see you. With 250/500ms pings, you were probably bouncing all over the map.

  58. Re: GeForce NOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ummmmm,
    MOBAs require the lowest ping possible.

    Playing a moba on anything over 100ms ping is unplayable.

  59. Re:GeForce NOW by citizenr · · Score: 1

    80ms gaming machine? were they using office grade 10 year old LCD monitors and gameport joysticks? Normal PC:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    re Shadow Play - streaming to another pc in the house? 5ms difference is impossible, unless again someone was using TV as his main monitor. NVFBC adds 16-25ms delay alone, locally, then you need to factor network and used monitor.

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  60. Re:GeForce NOW by citizenr · · Score: 1

    https://www.esportsearnings.co...

    Im ~40 and currently top 99.9% in WoT (tank fps), there is a lot more to FPS than just fast reaction times. Super smash terrifies me tho :), so does tetris and fighting games.

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  61. Re:GeForce NOW by citizenr · · Score: 1

    You might be used to console gaming (usually >150ms input lag).

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  62. Re:GeForce NOW by Bengie · · Score: 1

    5ms network RTT to remote VM, not input delay. The 90ms input delay was using all decent quality mid-grade gaming components with a 60hz name brand "gaming" monitor with out of the box Win10 settings.

    That link was awesome. 20ms difference in input delay just because of the model keyboard. Don't forget the test was done with 180hz monitor. The 90ms test I watched was with a typical mid-grade 60hz gaming monitor.

  63. Re: GeForce NOW by Bengie · · Score: 1

    That's an issue with current client and server prediction. I was playing games that didn't have prediction. That means if I had packet loss, I looked like I was standing still to others, and you also look like you can't move on your end. It wasn't until a later version of Half-life that you saw the whole gaming the prediction system with artificial latency and loss.

  64. Just Say No to video gaymez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just Say No to video gaymez.