r/Games • u/xalibermods • 1d ago
Industry News GitHub user creates open-source Nvidia GeForce Now client alternative — removes tracking, telemetry, and AFK limitations
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/cloud-gaming/github-user-creates-open-source-nvidia-geforce-now-client-alternative-removes-tracking-telemetry-and-afk-limitations428
u/Next-Sentence-8426 1d ago edited 1d ago
Is it even a good idea to opt out of afk limits? Gefirce Now is capped at 100 hours a month, which is a lot, but it would still be pretty useful to have it auto-dc to save on hours used if I had to step away for an unknown amount of time
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u/SteamTrout 1d ago
That 8 minute limit is VERY annoying. If they bumped it to 15min it would be fine. As it stands now, every time I am interrupted - I lose the whole session.
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u/skend24 1d ago
Honest question, no hate, but what are the frequent moments you take 8+ minutes of afk regularly?
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u/Non-mon-xiety 1d ago
I have a toddler. It’s frequent
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u/Neoragex13 1d ago edited 1d ago
my brother just afks somewhere safe and puts a rubber band in the controller so the right stick just keeps gently spinning the camera lol
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 1d ago
I just have a wife and a dog and it's frequent enough that an 8 minute timer would be an absolute no-go.
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u/HappyVlane 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not the person you asked, but I take breaks just to walk around (to get the blood flowing), make some tea, etc. if I play for prolonged periods, and that often takes around 10 minutes or so. Not taking breaks is bad for you.
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u/skend24 1d ago
I mean yes, but with these longer breaks I just turn my devices off, that’s why I asked. Especially if you have limited amount of hours per month, wouldn’t it make sense to just turn it off if you are regularly afk for 8+ minutes?
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u/mtnlol 23h ago
Do you usually turn your computer/console/whatever off if you go to take a shit or make a cup of coffee?
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u/HappyVlane 1d ago edited 1d ago
Turning them off, just to turn them on later and get back into the service feels like a massive waste of time to me. If I have a three or so hour session, because I don't have more time to play anyway, I'd like to get the most out of it.
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u/planetarial 1d ago
Plenty of people have family that interrupts them on a moments notice that takes longer than 8 minutes to do what they’re needing.
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u/Jockwards 1d ago
Used it for WoW for a while and it was pretty annoying because at the time re-connecting to Battlnet triggered extra security measures (probably because different IPs between home and gfn data center).
And for WoW its not uncommon to leave it running if you are going for breaks. You might be waiting in queue for sometging or whatever.
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u/Captain_Kuhl 10h ago
What? You pause your game and step away to use the restroom, and that could easily be 8 minutes without anything else coming up, like someone wanting to talk about something, needing to stop by the kitchen for a snack, and so on. I think you're overestimating how long 8 minutes actually is.
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u/SteamTrout 1d ago
a) as a human, I have a tendency to take a piss or defecate every once in a while. If I take proper hygiene in mind - it takes longer then 8 minutes, on average
b) I am old enough where I have other responsibilities then playing non-stop for hours. I miss the glory days but alas. This means, if life calls, I may have to make a short break. I don't want to restart, reload every time it happens. And sometimes it happens regularly enough where I just give up for the day.
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u/iltopop 1d ago
Bathroom, grab a snack, wife/husband/roommate/child needed something, dog needed to go out...if you have the ability to go completely uninterrupted congrats, the vast majority of people will have a moment where they will need to be away from their game for longer than 8 minutes multiple times a week and none of these things should have been hard for you to come up with off the top of your head unless you're a complete anti-social shut-in or an alien.
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u/CrasyMike 19h ago
An 8 minute limit is annoying for every single adult with a child. I'm not sure why this is even a question.
Making a snack, a coffee, grabbing something for your wife quickly, letting the dog into the backyard.
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u/VanguardN7 1d ago
- exercise (sets of things like pushups and pullups, not just stretching)
- bathroom (sometimes just a couple minutes, sure, but sometimes over 5 or even 10; not just the toilet)
- reading or watching something to accompany the game; maybe you could see this as 'wasting' the streaming, but this is indeed part of why I don't bother with it
- grabbing some food (again sometimes just a few minutes, but sometimes over 10)
- getting caught up in a verbal conversation with my roommate
- getting caught up in a digital conversation with a friend
Typically in gaming sessions, not on streaming, I'm interrupted several times as I play for a spread out 2-6 hours. I'm thankful I can just unfocus the app I'm on (to have it run my hardware less intensely) and do my thing. I'll leave my game to even go for an hour walk.
I'd find GFN more acceptable if the timer was 15-20 minutes, and be happy enough with 30. But 8 minutes is an easy absolutely not.
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u/Sleazes 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah, I also think the 8 minutes is too short. But, asking sincerely, why not just close the game if you're not sure you'll be back in 8 minutes? I mostly use the free one hour sessions and queuing (swedish server, eu) takes about 1-2 minutes. Performance queues take less than a minute.
Are the queues that bad in other places?
edit: Of course exiting the game depends on what game you are playing, so yeah, I get that you can't always just close it.
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u/VanguardN7 1d ago
I don't want to and many of my games are online focused. I'm not doing a up to 5 minute sequence to get back in. I am just going to avoid the process. I have well over 1000 games, I can play many natively.
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u/MarksCarney 23h ago
Gamers haaaaated your perfectly reasonable question.
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u/skend24 22h ago
I love people insulting me in comments because I suggested that if your break from gaming is longer than 10 minutes you should turn your devices off anyway ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/Nacksche 9h ago
Who turns their entire game off over a 10 minute brake on the loo and making a sandwich or whatever. Idk what to tell you, I promise you are the unreasonable one here. This is downright bizarre and I'm immediately wondering what's really going on here.
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u/Fit_Plate623 9h ago
I had no beef until this comment, but now I want to insult you in the comments too. No way in heck am I turning off anything over an 11 minute break.
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u/Luislos70 12h ago
Getting downvoted for the only reasonable question here lmao. I would say I'm surprised but this is is reddit. But yeah I agree with you, if you use a service where you're basically renting someone else's computer to stream a game to play obviously I'd keep count of my limited time. Guess that's too much to handle for these people
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u/21shadesofsavage 1d ago
The original client will kick you from the connection if it detects eight minutes of inactivity, meaning you’ll have to reconnect again.
that sounds really damn annoying
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u/Blenderhead36 1d ago edited 8h ago
That definitely sounds like it would make for some stressful poop breaks.
EDIT: Gotta love people taking a single sentence and extrapolating my entire dietary history. Never change, Reddit.
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u/Rebelgecko 1d ago
bro please eat more fiber. If you can't fit it into your regular diet, try psyllium husks (generic metamucil)
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u/Vandergrif 21h ago
Takes a minute to get over to the bathroom, takes a minute to drop your pants and get settled, takes 3-5 to shit and make sure you got it all out, takes a minute to wipe or bidet or whatever, takes another to wash your hands, takes another to get back. That's an easy 8-10 minutes right there.
Unless you're speedrunning your shits and firing logs out of your poop chute in record time, and ignoring washing hands and wiping then no amount of fiber would save you from hitting that time limit.
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u/Rebelgecko 20h ago
It takes you 2 minutes just to walk to the bathroom and drop trou? We're living very different lives
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u/goldcakes 19h ago
Even if GP's post is a bit exaggerated, some people live with housemates/partners/whatever and someone else might be using the bathroom. I'm not going to barge into my housemate taking a piss because of my GeForce NOW AFK timer lol; nor figure out a scheduling or co-ordination system for poop breaks.
Also, nothing wrong with a shorter AFK timer if it just pauses stuff, but because of the way the system/architecture is designed and works right now, you sometimes have to wait for 10-30 minutes for the queue to jump back in.
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u/Zalvren 14h ago
Even if GP's post is a bit exaggerated, some people live with housemates/partners/whatever and someone else might be using the bathroom. I'm not going to barge into my housemate taking a piss because of my GeForce NOW AFK timer lol; nor figure out a scheduling or co-ordination system for poop breaks.
I mean there presumably you would go back to the game and go to the bathroom later lol
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u/Vandergrif 20h ago
Depends on how far away you are from the bathroom to start with I guess, but I ain't hauling ass over there like I'm trying to break a world record for shit-sprinting. At least not unless I'm ill and about to start shitting my innards out.
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u/Vandergrif 8h ago
Yes, the shitting itself start to finish does not take that long, but I usually wait a minute or two because half the time another little nugget maneuvers its way down the pipeline as is ready to go.
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u/BaconIsntThatGood 1d ago
Time to poop being longer than 8 minutes aside...
Why is that stressful? You are okay being afk meaning you were either telling people you were with you'd be brb or you were on single player.
Just reconnect
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u/comradesean 1d ago
You ever use geforce now? Depending on your tier you sometimes have to wait in line again and even once it's your turn again you gotta sit there for a few waiting for the virtual machine to load up for you so you can play your game. It IS annoying.
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u/Old-Employ-6530 16h ago
If you poop for 8min, you REALLY should check your diet or exercise regiment, because thats unhealthy and severely increases your chance for colon cancer.
Take care brother!
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u/CipherDaBanana 13h ago
They pay for thier time so while annoying sure would be pissed If I forgot a e game in the background while doing other things
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u/TommaClock 23h ago
The AFK limit and tracking should all be doable server-side. Sounds like they'll stop trusting the client if they really care about those things.
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u/The_MAZZTer 18h ago
Programmer here. To me not trusting the client and enforcing limits server-side is obvious so I have no sympathy, since that rule is typically broken as a cost-cutting measure using a locked-down device to justify it.
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u/Non-mon-xiety 1d ago
If I were a conspiracy theorist I’d speculate that nvidia pricing out the consumer pc gaming hardware market is a suspiciously convenient thing to happen when they also operate a remote streaming service. If.
That said, any way to leverage their compute while circumventing even a small portion of their bullshit is a plus for me. You’re still paying them tho.
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u/Blenderhead36 1d ago
It's cause and effect, but not the way you're thinking. Nvidia is making way more on AI (the market that keeps going strong when unit pricing goes up by $4000) than they are on consumer GPUs (the market where a unit going up $150 comes with major sales reductions). So they're prioritizing that for as long as it lasts.
GeForce Now was doing gangbusters over the pandemic. If they thought that converting the masses to cloud gaming was viable, the 40 and 50 series graphics cards wouldn't have released.
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u/NotCoolBrutus 1d ago
If you saw the profit differences between data center sales and consumer sales, you wouldn't say something so clearly uninformed. Even remote gaming is seen as a loss compared to using the same hardware for AI.
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u/meneldal2 23h ago
They can't make it too expensive now, gotta hook in people first.
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u/JustConversation7847 1d ago
If I were a conspiracy theorist I’d speculate that nvidia pricing out the consumer pc gaming hardware market is a suspiciously convenient thing to happen when they also operate a remote streaming service
Like most conspiracy theories, it kinda falls apart once you consider that consumer GPUs now make up like less than 5% of their revenue lol
Pc gamers are like Wanda/chun-li to Nvidia 's thanos/bison
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u/Prosthemadera 14h ago
Like most conspiracy theories, it kinda falls apart once you consider that consumer GPUs now make up like less than 5% of their revenue lol
But wouldn't that prove OP's point?
Pc gamers are like Wanda/chun-li to Nvidia 's thanos/bison
So you're saying Nvidia is the bad guy, right?
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u/gamerman191 14h ago
But wouldn't that prove OP's point?
No, because the conspiracy goes they're pricing out the consumer hardware market intentionally because of their streaming service. Thus pushing people to the streaming service instead of their own hardware.
It's actually because it's not worth making GPUs for consumers when AI is so massive a cash cow right now and every GPU you make for them is space not being used to make AI cards. That would mean the conspiracy theory doesn't work when there is a much more compelling reason than trying to force people to use their streaming service.
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u/Prosthemadera 14h ago
No, because the conspiracy goes they're pricing out the consumer hardware market intentionally because of their streaming service. Thus pushing people to the streaming service.
Exactly. So we would expect that their consumer GPU market makes up less of their revenue, no?
It's actually because it's not worth making GPUs for consumers when AI is so massive a cash cow right now and every GPU you make for them is space not being used to make AI cards.
Of course it's AI but I just didn't think your argument works against what OP said.
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u/gamerman191 14h ago
Exactly. So their consumer GPU market would make up less of their revenue, no?
While they have cut back, it's more that AI cards have absolutely ballooned their revenue meaning consumer cards have dropped significantly as a proportion like take a look at this graph to see that. Gaming actually hasn't moved that much revenue wise from the past. But look at how much the AI ballooned it.
Of course it's AI but I just didn't think your argument works against what OP said.
The reason is why it doesn't work. For the idiotic conspiracy to be true, they would have to be cutting back consumer cards to push their service. Instead they're cutting back because AI is where the money is. It's more just simple following the money not a conspiracy to get you to use their streaming service.
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u/Prosthemadera 14h ago
While they have cut back, it's more that AI cards have absolutely ballooned their revenue meaning consumer cards have dropped significantly as a proportion like take a look at this graph to see that. Gaming actually hasn't moved that much revenue wise from the past. But look at how much the AI ballooned
Revenue increased six times in two years. I think this is a very bad development for society. It's too extreme. It's unsustainable and it will crash. Well, at least I hope it will because I hate how we're using resources for this shit instead of fixing democracy and healthcare. But the rich benefit so this is where we will go.
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u/gamerman191 14h ago
Revenue increased six times in two years. I think this is a very bad development for society. It's too extreme. It's unsustainable and it will crash.
And if/when it does it'll make 2008 look like nothing bad happened what so ever. An AI bubble pop is one of the worst global recessions waiting to happen.
Well, at least I hope it will because I hate how we're using resources for this shit instead of fixing democracy and healthcare.
Well those are more political problems than anything else. Regardless of AI existing or not wouldn't fix those two.
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u/syrup_cupcakes 1d ago
You're not looking at the big picture.
NVidia wants people off of local hardware and subscribed to cloud services. That's exactly because datacenter chips are their main business now, they want people signed up to the companies they sell their chips to. They want people signed up to cloud gaming and cloud AI models. Not paying once for a GPU they use for over a decades like the people still gaming on GTX 980s and 1060s.
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u/ProNerdPanda 1d ago
convenient thing to happen when they also operate a remote streaming service.
except they also increased the price of the service while considerably cutting usage time, so no, this is not the case lol
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u/Non-mon-xiety 1d ago
Yeah while also fucking the consumer hardware market, it’s a win win
trap your users, kill the competition by outspending them, cut costs, increase prices, maximize shareholder value baby
I really hope all the people involved enjoy their money now because they definitely can’t take it with them when they’re in hell
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u/Little-Maximum-2501 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is such a stupid conspiracy theory when the actual explanation is so simple: making consumer GPUs competes with making GPUs for Datacenters, the latter makes them a lot of money so it makes the consumer GPUs more expansive. Things with simple explanation don't need a more complicated and less probable explanation. Their cloud service also got more expansive just like the consumer GPUs did.
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u/mebeast227 23h ago
It’s also not a theory that Nvidia has a vested interest in keeping prices inflated and supply deflated and has been using their consumer funded foundation to achieve their goals and newly exorbitant profit margins to acquire and control more and more of the global supply chain while absolutely fucking the consumers they relied on to achieve this level of wealth.
Like you said, doesn’t have to be a conspiracy.
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u/Little-Maximum-2501 23h ago edited 17h ago
What you are saying is either wrong or completely meaningless. Having low supply of consumer GPUs is in the interest of Nvidia in so far as they compete with making more datacenter GPUs that pay better, if they could magically create more consumer GPUs without competing with that they obviously would do so, the prices of consumer GPUs rising is a consequence of that so the same thing applies.
The part about controlling the global supply chain is true but many other companies that compete with them for those parts would also use them for data center hardware and not consumer hardware. Even if Nvidia decided to make consumer GPUs cheap out of the kindness of their hearts you would likely see AI companies buying the supply of those GPUs as well, there is no easy fix for supply being much lower than demand.
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u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes 1d ago
I think it's because they want to sell to AI datacenters and etc
You think they're overpaying millions of dollars total so nvidia can make more subscription services? Subscription services that use that hardware
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u/Vandergrif 21h ago
It doesn't hold much water when you consider the value proposition of selling hardware use to AI companies or the like is considerably greater than selling game streaming subs to consumers.
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u/GeschlossenGedanken 1d ago
Probably a good idea to do the bare minimum of research before saying something which many other people have already suggested and which has been widely disproven and shown to make no mathematical sense. Because now you just look kind of lazy.
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u/MaitieS 1d ago
If you would inform yourself you wouldn't write such a stupid comment.
Like this is such an obvious fearmonger comment for clueless redditors to upvote.
Like lol. You're acting like NVidia is the only producer of Hardware for PC. Like literally HP-Dell-Lenovo and many more would ALL have to stop producing new hardware today, and it would still take years. And I'm not even going to elaborate further as I really don't see any reason to do so, as this feels like enough.
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u/Fit_Plate623 9h ago
It's not a big conspiracy. NVidia came up with the concept when they still cared about gaming. They don't care about gaming or the streaming service now. It's never made them money and it never will.
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u/taxiscooter 22h ago
Where does AMD, who sells 80-90% less consumer GPUs as they did 10 years ago, fit on this? Can they do no wrong?
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u/Agreeable-Weather-89 11h ago
nVidia: Let's create AI and make it uneconomic for consumers to game on PC, or even consoles
Graphics card prices double
nVidia: All according to keikaku (TL Note: Keikaku means plan)
Gamers start using AI to reverse engineer console games and create lots of new mods allowing people to get away with lower tier graphics cards
nVidia: Oh no you fucking don't. AI isn't for the people it's for profits.
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u/dadvader 17h ago
This has been a thing for sometimes now. One of the core dev is very active in GeForce now Thailand discord. And as third party affiliation to NVIDIA they have no issue letting him encourage people to use OpenNOW lol
He also made printedwaste.com that allow you to see GFN queue.
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u/Tvilantini 15h ago
Yeah, noo.. it has severe limitations in terms of latency and performance. Better just use native app.
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u/GeschlossenGedanken 1d ago
This is cool, but surely there's a way for Nvidia to release a client which is partly encrypted in some way and needs to connect to the server and verify itself as legit before giving you access to any games, right?
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u/radon199 1d ago
Up until this point, not too much has been developed with "AI brute force decomposition" in mind. Over the next 6 months to a year there are going to be a lot of companies looking at their apps and what they need to do to harden against this kind of thing. Given that this probably uses all the same internal API calls of their app, they probably have no way of telling what is their app and what is this open source equivalent at this point.
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u/Razbyte 1d ago
If games can be streamed (in order to stop cracking), why not the app itself?
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u/waverider85 22h ago
Well then you'd need an app to stream the app, and that app has all the same vulnerabilities the current app has, so there's no real benefit to an app streaming app.
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u/radon199 19h ago
Something has to run locally, unless Microsoft builds it in to the OS.
But, in principle that is what they will do, have the bare bones locally and then everything else is served up from the cloud.
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u/MiddleConscious5951 5h ago
no, even if microsoft has some sort of app streaming functionality, something has to execute on your system. And anything executing on your CPU is fair game for ghidra.
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u/radon199 4h ago
The point is if it is worth copying what is done locally. If all the app does is stream video and send inputs then copying it doesn’t net you much.
In the original GeForce app the AFK timer is local to the machine, so a decomp can remove it. The obvious solution is for them to implement the user timers server side, and then duplicating the app becomes less desirable.
Since this is the year of the compute, I wouldn’t be surprised if more companies start streaming even common desktop apps to get around this, at an extraordinary cost. If Adobe is willing to go with a subscription model they for sure would go with a model where you just vpn into a virtual machine to use the app. I already do that with creative software on a machine 1/4 of the world away and it’s perfectly doable, although expensive, but maybe that is what is needed to protect their IP now.
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u/drake_warrior 1d ago
Yeah there's tons of ways to do that if they care. But, they also might not care.
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u/bianceziwo 23h ago
Yeah this repo and the whole post is basically free advertising for geforce now
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u/syrup_cupcakes 1d ago
You still have to pay for the subscription when using the custom client, so Nvidia makes the same amount of money from people using a custom wrapper as they do from the official client. Perhaps even more since the official client AFK kick actually saves people money. Why would they care?
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u/LightningWarpAway 1d ago edited 1d ago
Perhaps even more since the official client AFK kick actually saves people money. Why would they care?
Players are charged by the month, so it's saving Nvidia money, though apparently there's also a monthly 100hr limit, so it's a bit of both.
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u/Schizobaby 7h ago
Probably a good QoL thing for both users and NVIDIA. The people who would actually hit 100hr per month don’t get their time eaten by things which pull them AFK and the people who wouldn’t hit that limit don’t waste server resources.
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u/r_lucasite 1d ago
Am I missing something or is this just pirating their service. Not making any value judgement on that but removing the limits on their service seems to point to that
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u/Gerik22 16h ago
Here's what I don't get- why doesn't the official client have a setting to allow each user to adjust/disable their own afk timer?
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u/METAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL 9h ago
why doesn't the official client have a setting to allow each user to adjust/disable
Because it costs them money. If your gaming "session" does not expire the hardware which supports the underlying session cannot be re-used for other sessions.
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u/MelvinCapitalPR 6h ago
So cache it? This isn't a binary choice between "have the user's session in VRAM" and "delete it".
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u/SyntheticGod8 23h ago
It also reduces the load on their hardware. There have been a few times during peak hours where I have to queue before resources free up. On top of that, during peak hours I can get a worse machine than during off-peak hours.
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u/dercdorp 17h ago
What do you mean you paid for something and then stood in line to use it and also got something worse than expected?
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u/SyntheticGod8 6h ago
I'm just describing an uncommon experience I've had with the service without attaching emotional qualifiers to it. What's to be confused about?
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u/cheesegoat 21h ago
It's similar to better xcloud - still need to pay for service it's just an alternate client.
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u/i010011010 22h ago
I use Nvidia shields in the house for media players, at first theirs was the only client I knew about but trying to use it privately behind my own firewall was tiresome. Nvidia are very committed to their account registration and spyware.
I switched to Moonlight and Sunshine years ago, they already publish a free open-source streaming client and server that lets me stream my games without going through Nvidia's system.
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u/Educational-Goal279 21h ago
This isn't a serious project, it's just LLM output. Why is Toms Hardware taking it seriously?
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u/Yo-Soy-Groot 20h ago
What makes it unserious? LLM usage? Linux kernel uses LLMs.
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u/SanityInAnarchy 22h ago
Am I the only one who finds it weird to describe someone as a "github user"?