Nvidia GeForce Now on Steam Deck lets you stream games at max settings
Streaming games on the Steam Deck looks better, runs smoother, and saves battery life
📣 Nvidia GeForce Now is available as a native app for the Steam Deck at long last
🎮 GeForce Now lets you stream games onto the Steam Deck while they’re played from a much more powerful PC
🌈 Grants you full ray tracing and DLSS upscaling from Nvidia graphics cards
👾 Stream any of your Xbox Game Pass, Epic, Ubisoft, EA, and GOG games on the Steam Deck through Nvidia GeForce Now
🕹️ Streaming games on the Steam Deck look better and run smoother than playing games on the actual device
🔋 Nvidia GeForce Now reduces battery usage by 75% vs playing games directly on the Steam Deck
📲 The Nvidia GeForce Now app is available to download now and you can try streaming games for free yourself
Nvidia GeForce Now has finally come to the Steam Deck with a native app, letting you stream games from an Nvidia RTX 4080-powered gaming PC. I’ve been testing streaming gaming on the Steam Deck for the last week, and it's been fantastic. Not only do I get to stream games at the highest settings with ray tracing and HDR at 60fps, but streaming affords a massive 75% battery life increase. Best of all, I can finally play my Xbox, Epic, Ubisoft, EA, GOG, and other PC platform games on the Steam Deck without having to add Windows to my gaming handheld.
There’s a small hurdle to installing the Nvidia GeForce Now app onto the Steam Deck, and it requires a good internet connection. But if you want to play games at higher settings on the Steam Deck and have access to your Epic, Xbox, and other PC platform games, it’s worth it. It’s also entirely free to try, so there’s almost no reason not to if you have a Steam Deck. After that, you can decide if it's worth subscribing to get a higher-performance streaming experience.
🎮 Gaming at ultra. Handheld gaming almost requires you to lower the quality settings on all your games to their lowest settings with FSR 2.1 or FSR 3 upscaling set to performance. With Nvidia GeForce Now, I can just turn all those levers to max. Global ray-traced illumination, highest resolution textures, maximum draw distance, etc, the RTX 4080-powered gaming PC servers can handle it all. Best of all, these games all shine in HDR10 on the Steam Deck OLED’s screen with fantastically bright highlights up to 1,000-nits and true blacks.
🏃🏻♂️ 60fps on Steam Deck. Games also run at a locked 60fps on the Steam Deck while streaming from GeForce Now, and you don’t have to sacrifice quality settings to get a playable frame rate anymore, either. Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Space Marine II, and Hogwarts Legacy all play at a locked 60fps while streaming from GeForce Now. Trying to play those same games on the Steam Deck, I would be lucky to get 30fps even after making heavy sacrifices in visual quality settings. Even simpler games like Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor can run between 39-60fps on the Steam Deck, but with streaming, I get a locked 60fps.
🤞 90fps coming soon? 60fps is of course well below the Steam Deck OLED’s native 90fps refresh rate, but the most Nvidia GeForce Now can output to the handheld itself is 60fps. You can actually get the Steam Deck to output 120fps at 1440p resolution if you have it docked to an external monitor or TV. Also Nvidia has said it’s evaluating 90fps support for a future release.
🔋 Battery saver. Streaming games on the Steam Deck not only makes them look better and run smoother, but it also helps extend battery life. There’s a 75% battery life improvement from streaming games vs playing them on the Steam Deck. Where I would see my battery life decrease by 9-8% in 10 minutes while playing any game on the Steam Deck, streaming them for the same amount of time only ticked off 2-3%.
👾 Multi-platform at last. Another big thing Nvidia GeForce Now brings to the Steam Deck is multi-platform access to all your PC games. If you have Xbox Game Pass, purchases on Epic, Ubisoft, EA, or GOG, you can play all those games on the Steam Deck now. It solves one of the most significant problems with the Steam Deck, and you don’t have to install Windows in a partition or anything.
📲 Sideloading necessary. Unfortunately, downloading and installing the GeForce Now app isn’t as simple as finding it on the Steam Store. Rather, you’ll have to switch the Steam Deck to desktop mode to download the Nvidia GeForce Now website and install it from there. The whole process is simple, and you can add the app to your Steam Deck’s library so you can find it without having to get back into desktop mode.
Also see: Sony PSP 2 handheld rumors and our Switch 2 hands-on
🛜 It’s all about connecting. As you might expect, you’ll need a solid and fast internet connection for streaming gaming. However, you might be surprised at how often you can stream games on a public Wi-Fi. I was able to play Call of Duty. Black Ops 6 at JFK Airport in NYC, using just the airport’s public Wi-Fi. The connection was fast enough that I didn’t see any artifacting, though there were a few lag spikes where I was playing, and then suddenly I was dead. You could also run into streaming problems at home. In my experience, I saw Cyberpunk 2077 suddenly go from streaming perfectly to a blotchy, laggy mess when my partner started streaming a 4K movie.
🙅🏻♂️ Usual Nvidia GeForce Now annoyances. Streaming games on the Steam Deck with GeForce Now is great, but it hasn’t fixed any of the platform’s usual annoyances. You should expect to have to log into your different platforms every time because you’re basically connecting to a new virtual PC every time. Nvidia doesn’t save a machine with all your logins for you, and you wouldn’t want that either for security's sake. You also may not find every game you want to stream on GeForce Now. Like, for instance, Helldivers is not on the service, but Nvidia is pretty good at adding big and niche games at launch like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Tokyo Drift Masters, and Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny.
🪙 Free to play or subscribe? Nvidia GeForce Now is available as a free-to-play service. You don’t get much at this tier, but you can play for an unlimited amount of time if you’re willing to wait in the queue and only have 1-hour gaming sessions at a time. The Free-tier also doesn’t include any RTX or DLSS, so you’re basically playing with a beefed-up Steam Deck. The Performance tier for $49/month ($29/month for the first six months) gives you 1440p gaming with RTX and DLSS, which is more than what you need for the Steam Deck. Lastly, the Ultimate Tier for $99/month nets you an RTX 4080-equivalent gaming PC that lets you max out settings with reckless abandon, which is what I enjoy, but it overkill for streaming games for you.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.