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Old August 29th, 2020, 11:33 PM   #1
Alex
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Nvidia Geforce Now - Wow!

These last few months have had some challenges, he says understatedly, but one of the less critical ones has been working out all of the various IT concerns of a family now running our lives remotely, from school to work to essentially most everything else. Couple PC rebuilds, and a search for a cheap macbook pro for our oldest has been fun to sort out. He's getting into coding, and the 2011 MacbookAir and 2006 Core 2 Duo were not cutting it. The 9 year old Mac can't run current OS, and while Win10 ran on the ancient desktop just fine, him trying to use it for Unreal engine development was getting silly (multiple minutes for something that should happen in seconds, benchmarks have our primary computer as 36 times the processing speed of the one he's struggling on).

But I didn't relish buying a new setup for this either, as this felt more like a $500 problem than a $2000+ problem. After narrowing the search and looking out on craigslist, came across what I wanted - a MacBookPro 15", new enough to run latest OS, I7 quadcore, and old enough that it still had an upgradable SSD. 1 TB SSD went in easily, 3x as fast as the original, and then a quick dual install of the latest Catalina Mac OS and Windows 10 Pro (just transferring the license from the ancient desktop). Kid's happy, mom's happy (she was pushing for a new machine for him), and I'm happy it worked out. The older Air got completely wiped, and then had Zoom and Office 365 installed, for a backup machine when our youngest might be visiting his "pod" for school groups. I cannibalized the memory, the SSD, and some add-on cards from the PC - and found a local electronics recycler, also dropping off an ancient laptop from the late 90's as well after wiping it too.

But even though his new setup is much faster than what he was using, it's still just a laptop, and even running games like Fortnite isn't great: 20-25 FPS at medium settings, not fun enough to use instead of a basic console. I came across some folks talking about GeForce Now, and I was curious to try it out. The concept is straightforward, even if the implementation must be quite complex. It's essentially gaming in the cloud. The local device here in the home no longer has to run any of the more intensive graphical calculations, and it is just used to show the screen output of cloud servers that are running equivalents of extremely powerful graphics processors. So a low to mid range machine, can act as the most powerful setup - it's just done over the internet. I was skeptical, but thought that his Mac might be a good testbed. Nvidia offers it for free for 1/hour per day, so there's no downside to playing with it.

At first I ran it from the Mac side, and it was not promising. The mapping for the screen res and even the controller, was quite buggy - and it was challenging to even start a game from the main screen. But when I ran it from the Windows10 side, it was a revelation! It boots up faster than on our local fast PCs, the video settings within the game can be bumped all the way up to "epic" everything at full resolution, and everything still sits perfectly at 60 FPS. This can be tweaked if you do prefer to run in 100+ FPS at slightly less than "epic". I ended up paying for a 6 month sub for $25 (total, not per month), it worked so well.

If folks have a low-end machine that they thought was incapable of running more intensive games, and are interested in fixing that for free - this might be worth checking out. Tomorrow the 12-year-old is finally looking forward to playing on his own machine, and wants the two of us to start ganging up on the 8-year-old, who outplays us both by a wide margin in this silly game.
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Old April 5th, 2022, 12:28 PM   #2
CZroe
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Tempted but I can’t even consider building a new PC ATM (still recovering from the tornado and just had a HUGE setback). Filing this away for later.
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Old May 30th, 2022, 08:40 AM   #3
jcgss77
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Xbox has a cloud built in to their Game Pass Ultimate sub, if you have one of those.

I used Progressive Leasing to purchase my current Alienware laptop. They offer a pretty nice deal for the 90 month lease to purchase where you pay the price for the item, and you get to build it to your specs, sales tax, and only $79 for the service. Of course, if you go longer you will be financially raped, but payoff in 90 days of weekly or bi-monthly payments will get you sitting pretty for less than what you pay for in financing charges on any other financing options. And the people that work there are pretty awesome to talk to. Dell and Best Buy both use Progressive.
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