PC vs GFN?

[Igor Kadan]

I had an interesting argument with a friend recently.

Let's say you use Apple devices on a daily basis for your work and life routine, and you don't need a PC for that. The only thing you need a PC for is gaming (not console gaming, PC gaming exactly).

Would you rather spend a couple of thousand bucks to build your own gaming PC at home or pay $90 a year for GeForce Now (or any other similar platform) and play on your MacBook + external monitor?

 

[BeardyHat]

If these are my only two options, I would probably piece together a PC for gaming, but decide on my budget, my target games and performance desired (Am I looking to play say, Baldur's Gate 3 at 1440p 144hz for instance) and go from there.

I wouldn't choose streaming simply because I do not like it and don't find it reliable, but your mileage my vary.

But also: The best gaming device is the one you already have. In this case (and I should take my own advice here), I might start looking at games that look interesting or fun to me, but run natively on a Macbook. A quick Google search turns up a nice list of indies via Reddit. And if your flavor is more towards the AAA space, depending on the age and specs of your Macbook, it looks like there's a lot to play there, as well.

But also, you can play a surprising amount of stuff on older, less powerful hardware, especially at lower settings. My HTPC was taking everything I could throw, playing smoothly at 1080p/60fps with an old i7-7700k and GTX 1070. It runs Spider-Man Remastered great, Dead Space Remake great, RDR2, etc, etc. Buying an old Workstation on eBay (or locally for cheaper) for $200-$300 would get you similar specs, then throw in a video card for $100 (GTX 1070's are just about exactly $100 on eBay) and you've got yourself a very capable 1080p Gaming machine.

That HTPC I'm talking about, Benchmarks almost 2000-points (in 3dmark) higher overall than a newer laptop with a i7-11850H and a 3050 Ti in my own testing. That's hardware that's 5 years newer, performing worse (or in the case of the CPU, on par. Granted, a desktop CPU vs laptop) than significantly older architecture.

 

[DXCHASE]

Id get a PC and you dont need to spend "a couple thousand bucks" to do that. You might be used to using Apple stuff, but you can absolutely play a bunch of games with pcs ranging from 700-1300 bucks. Not to mention the thousands of tasks you can do on a PC over a console.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

My only real argument against Geforce Now if it worked perfectly is that I like playing around with hardware. From what I can see it will just let me buy Steam games as normal and run them through it.

Looking at the options here in Europe it costs €130 a year for the mid tier, which gets you 6 hour sessions and 'shorter queuing times'. To be fair thats less than I tend to spend in a year on hardware, though I'd still need a monitor and some sort of reliable system to stream through.

A lot of whether its worth anything to me would be based on how much the latency was a problem but also how long am I going to be waiting in a queue? Because sometimes I might want to play for 1/2 and hour while my wife has taken the kid to a park and I dont want to be waiting 10 minutes of that time to get logged in.

 

[Alm]

As gaming is my favourite hobby, I’d prefer having a dedicated PC. I think streaming services are OK though. I thought xcloud was good through quest 3.

 

[Pifanjr]

My main problem with streaming services like that are their availability. If I only have 30 minutes to play, I don't want to wait 5 minutes in a queue first, nor do I want to spend time messing around with my internet connection if it's unstable or be unable to play at all.