[ffsm8]

> having to buy a 1300€ GPU, that one would have to replace every year

The flagships usually get refreshed every 2+ years, not yearly. If you're switching yearly, then every second change is gonna be a performance downgrade.

Furthermore, the flagship of last generation is usually at least on par with the card below the new flagship, so you'd have top of the line performance for at least 2 generations, which is 3-5 years. The 4080 specifically has worse performance then a 3090 unless you're using dlss/upsampling. Which most people on high budget systems don't want as it increases latency.

Your napkin math wrt the energy doesn't really make sense either, your card only draws so much power if it's actually on full load. My 4090 is usually mostly idle.

My MacBook pro actually draws more then my desktop PC with a 4090 if both are idle (that's because the MacBook has an integrated display which offsets the higher power draw of the desktop components). At least according to the measurements of my smart plugs that measure energy drain at the plug/wall

Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day.

Overall I'd say you've no idea what you're talking about and are just rationalizing and in denial. The performance you get from cloud gaming providers is terrible, worse then a budget PC which costs 1k in it's entirely. And you'll still have it at the end, while the cloud gaming subscriber will have nothing after the sub ends.

[ftrobro]

GeForce Now works great. I subscribed for a while to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a remote 4080 and it felt like playing on a local computer. But with much higher settings and framerate than I get on my local GeForce 1080.

> Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day.

Don't make the assumption that everyone live their lives exactly like you do.

[ffsm8]

A 1080 is 8 years old and wasn't a flagship, an equivalent card costs ~$100 currently... Also: that's 4 generations, not 2.

It'd be a complete disaster if gfn couldn't beat that performance.

I've attempted to use GFN several times too and can only conclude that you've never played at a decent setup if that felt like a local machine.

The input latency is so high that anything with pvp is entirely unplayable (it adds at least 40-80ms).

Maybe the only thing you're paying is Scenematic single player? In that case, sure. It works well enough. Not worth the subscription as you'd get better performance and experience from a steam deck, but to each their own.

[NikolaNovak]

I have and love a steam deck, and used to have geforce now for about 18 months before I got a 3080 new rig. We might be playing incredibly different games in very different ways, and that's ok - but geforce now being beaten by steam deck is, again, taking a reasonable position way too far.

Geforce now lets me play cp2077 on ultra with all the ray tracing on high resolution 32" monitor. Steam deck can "play" cp2077 at 800 resolution if you don't mind a melting jet engine in your hands. They're both great for what they do and are, and they can make a powerful combo, but in terms of performance I don't see how they can possibly be compared :-/

Edit : did you by any chance only try the free / low tier version of geforce now?

[ffsm8]

No, Nvidia always gives out a 3 month free trial with every purchase. I tried it out when I bought a 3080 when it was released and a 4090 last year.

> cp2077

That's indeed a game that works well with GFN, witcher 3 and similar games too. Pretty sure you're still playing at 720p on GFN though, they're just using dlss for upsampling. You should be able to see the upsampled resolution in the settings of cyberpunk if I remember correctly. My sub ran out however, so no checking anymore

[NikolaNovak]

Thanks for reply!

Fwiw - Cp2077 ran at full res internally. I've played it both with and without dlss on GFNow. I believe when I started it was 2080 for first paid tier and 3080 for the top paid tier. Now the top paid tier is 4080.

[nothercastle]

It’s great for turn based like BG3 or cities skyline. My biggest issue with it is how long it takes to start up a session

[LoganDark]

> Your napkin math wrt the energy doesn't really make sense either, your card only draws so much power if it's actually on full load.

Not only that, but there's evidence that more powerful cards can actually perform the same workloads as less powerful cards more efficiently. Of course, it's not going to be more efficient if you let it run at full tilt, but if, for example, you lower the power limit of a 3090 to 200W, it's still going to blow a 3060 Ti (also 200W) out of the water in terms of performance. Higher performance for the same power means you can also get the same performance at a lower power.

> Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day.

I work full-time and still get the hours of 5 PM to 12 AM to myself, which is 7 hours, and then I can still get 8 hours of sleep

[NikolaNovak]

I agreed with everything up to the "performance of cloud gaming is terrible " - I'm an extremely happy geforce now user. I have gigabit internet and use it with 27" monitor, historically for performance reasons, now that I got a 3080 for occasional convenience reasons (I have half a dozen Intel NUC around house, it's usually simpler and more reliable to stream game from geforce now servers thousand of km away than via steam stream from my upstairs pc - go figure)

Now! Neither one of us have spoken our assumptions out loud so let's do that - I play mostly single player games. There are people who mostly play pvp, cannot live without a 250hz screen and million dpi mouse, and those users likely won't enjoy cloud gaming. That does not mean "cloud gaming is terrible" overall but it may well be that "cloud gaming is terrible for high demanding pvp competitive usage " :).