Having been a long time Xbox gamer, I only learned about GeForce Now cloud streaming yesterday. Out of curiosity, I signed up for a month to give it a try.
It was very easy to set up and configure. You can stream through a browser but Nvidia recommends using their standalone Windows app for better performance. So I installed that and was up and running in minutes. MSFS 2024 is one of the games that features RTX 5080 support in GFN. All I had on hand to stream with was a decade old Lenovo Y700 gaming laptop with an i7 6700 and an AMD R9 275M graphics card. This should be plenty to stream with.
My Xbox series X is connected to an LG 4K UHD projector, so I’m accustomed to playing FS in 4K. Unfortunately, my old laptop only has an HDMI 1.4 port and although that should be capable of outputting 4K, it would not do so at a level that GFN would recognize. GFN wants at least 60 FPS for 4K. So I was limited to 1080p.
Consequently, inside the cockpit things looked a little softer than I’m accustomed to, but not bad. After a little while fiddling around, I hardly noticed it. But the graphics outside the cockpit were nothing short of phenomenal. I spent a number of hours playing around with the graphics settings that I’ve never had access to on Xbox before, increasing LOD to 400 and everything set to Ultra and it was buttery smooth. GFN gives a statistics overlay on the screen which shows the game’s FPS, the streaming FPS, and the latency. With 600 Mbps fiber to the modem, I was getting game FPS as high as 180, streaming FPS was rock solid at 60, and latency around 11 ms.
I saw a level of detail on the ground that I’ve never seen before, even at 1080p and the smoothness was better than playing locally on the Xbox. I mostly flew low and slow in the 172 over my local OKC area, but also took a flight out of KTEB over Manhattan and into KJFK, a flight that I’ve flown dozens of times as a performance test. It was better than I’ve ever experienced before. There was almost no noticeable pop in, even at night when the streetlights make it even more noticeable.
I tried various methods of capturing video but it was jerky and pixelated. I think the old laptop just isn’t up to streaming at this level and capturing at the same time. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.
But it’s not all unicorns and rainbows..
At this time, GFN has limited support for flight peripherals. It’s mostly Logitech stuff. I’ve got a Turtle Beach VelocityOne yoke and pedals, and they were not recognized at all. So I was stuck flying with an Xbox controller, which is something I’ve done maybe once when I first got MSFS 2020. Fortunately my keyboard and mouse did still work, so that helped a lot. My MIAP also works, as it simply emulates a keyboard.
On a whim, I decided to try launching GFN within the Edge browser on the Xbox, hoping that I could get 4K this way and that my peripherals would work. It was both better and worse. The projector was detecting a 4K signal from the Xbox, but GFN and MSFS still listed 4K as unavailable. Even so, the graphics looked better than it did through the laptop and the frame rate and smoothness were as good or better.
The bad news is that not only did my VelocityOne set up still not work but now the Xbox also hijacked the controller for use as a mouse in Edge and all I had to work with was the mouse and keyboard. I still managed to get airborne and if I’m ever able to use my controls this way, this is the path I will take. It’s simpler, looks better and runs just as smoothly.
So after playing around with it for about 8 hours, I’ve decided that if Nvidia ever supports Turtle Beach peripherals, it’s worth $200 per year to me to get this level of performance without having to invest in a gaming PC. If they don’t, I guess the next version of Xbox in my future, provided there actually is one.
One thing I’ve yet to try is to cabbage together a basic gaming PC from all the spare parts my son has laying around after years of upgrading his. He’s got an extra case, motherboard, power supply, GTX 3060 ti, and an Intel i5. All that’s lacking is some memory and a hard drive. I ought to be able to throw something together to use for streaming 4K for just a few hundred bucks.
For giggles, I even installed GFN and my Android phone and played around a bit. These screenshots don’t do it justice - it looked much better than this. But again, I couldn’t capture video. The stats didn’t show the Game FPS on the phone, but it was still streaming 60 FPS over wifi.
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