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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Starting today, purchase of a new Chromebook comes with a GeForce Now Fast Pass for a full year.
- The Blackwell RTX architecture upgrade brings big performance improvements.
- GeForce Now is also adding over 2,300 games to its Install to Play feature.
Google and Nvidia just announced a partnership to get more gamers on Chromebooks. Starting today, any purchase of a new Chromebook will come with a free GeForce Now Fast Pass — a new membership tier designed for Chromebook users, active for a full year.
The offer coincides with Nvidia’s Blackwell RTX architecture upgrades to GeForce Now. We’re talking full ray tracing, DLSS 4 multi-frame generation, and more efficiency with Nvidia citing a 15% bandwidth savings without compromising image quality.
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The Fast Pass allows for 10 hours of gaming per month on GeForce Now, letting you skip the queue and jump right into your game. You also get access to higher performance settings — better resolutions, more FPS, and more virtual RAM compared to free users.
If you don’t use all 10 hours of gaming in a month, up to five of your unused hours will roll over to the next one. This makes cloud gaming on a new Chromebook Plus a lot easier to get into, as several models released in the last year are equipped with the hardware to run many of the latest titles off the cloud.
The upgrades to GeForce Now’s infrastructure with Blackwell RTX technology unlock some significant upgrades to gaming performance for its Ultimate tier, including DLSS 4, full ray tracing, ray reconstruction, DLSS multi-frame generation, and DLSS super resolution for up to 5K 120 FPS streaming.
Additionally, its new “Cinematic Quality” upgrades visuals aimed at improving graphics fidelity across the board. I recently had the opportunity to experience the cinematic quality of streaming in person at a demo in New York, and the visual improvements are immediately noticeable in complex textures, such as foliage, water, rocks, and landscape elements.
Higher bandwidth for improved color and texture modeling results in smoother sampling, higher frame rates, and total system latency at sub-30ms. That’s lower than a PlayStation 5 Pro, Nvidia says.
New screen optimization technology joins the feature list as well, with the platform automatically detecting display resolution for the best possible streaming quality without (hopefully) fiddling around in settings by the user.
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This is all great, but is your favorite game still not available in GeForce Now’s game library? The new Install to Play feature allows subscribers to run games that aren’t officially offered through a temporary allotment of cloud storage.
Users can upload select games (the developer has to opt in) to a single-session 100GB of cloud storage. This amount of storage comes free with the Ultimate and Performance tier memberships, and is temporary, meaning you’ll have to reinstall it to the cloud once you log out.
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If you want persistent cloud storage for your game, however, you can get that as well. Multiple plans exist as add-ons to the two paid tiers: 200GB for an additional $3/mo, 500GB for $5/mo, and 1TB for $8/mo.
Nvidia GeForce Now has three tiers of service available: Free (with ads), Performance (which is $99 for a year), and Ultimate ($200 for a year). The paid tiers offer significantly better performance, with queue times of less than a minute, 56GB of DRAM, up to 4K resolution and 240FPS, and support for ultrawide gaming monitors.
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