On February 21, 2023, Microsoft announced a partnership with NVIDIA to bring its PC games to the GeForce NOW cloud platform. The move was ostensibly directed at regulators, who were in the middle of the regulatory process for Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but it was also very beneficial for consumers.
A few months later, Microsoft took the obvious next step, slowly starting to allow PC Game Pass subscribers to play games through GeForce NOW for select games. The list greatly expanded over time.
However, the integration between the two services might be about to get even tighter, even on the console side. Several users have reported seeing an option to stream games like Street Fighter 6, Resident Evil Village, and Call of Duty Warzone with GeForce NOW from their Xbox consoles.
This is surprising, to say the least. GeForce NOW is, after all, a competitor of sorts for Game Pass Ultimate, which includes the streaming feature based on XCloud. However, GeForce NOW is verifiably superior, offering peerless streaming quality with support for 4K resolution, HDR displays, up to 240 frames per second, integrated Reflex and G-SYNC technologies, and support for ray tracing/DLSS, depending on the tier used. XCloud, on the other hand, is still limited to 1080p (Full HD) resolution and 60 frames per second. The difference is largely due to the server hardware used in the respective configurations. Whereas XCloud servers are based on Xbox Series X specs, GeForce NOW’s Ultimate tier runs on RTX 4080-class hardware, which is estimated to be five times as fast.
Is this a sign of Microsoft yielding to NVIDIA’s superior service and stopping investments in its own streaming technology? It’s too early to say at this point. We’ve reached out to NVIDIA and only got a ‘nothing to share at this time’ response, which suggests an announcement might be on the way. Until then, stay tuned.
