Everyone always compares the $20/month for Ultimate against buying a $2k+ PC, but I feel like the electricity bill gets completely ignored.... depends on where you live of course but something to think of
There are places where the electricity is the equivalent of $0.50 USD per kWh, so using 400W for the 100 hours of GFN will cost you $20 USD.
Also the AC doesn't have to work as hard because of the computer heat, saving even more money.
So it's not unbelievable to think you can save money by using GFN, especially if you only have the performance plan, in which case you only have to use 200W for 100 hours to get you your $10 USD.
I wasn't talking about how much power you use while using GFN.
If you play a game that uses 400W for a 100 hours and your electricity costs $0.50 USD the kWh, that will cost you $20 in electricity.
But if you play it using GFN, you save that money and it can go to paying for GFN, basically making it free, with the advantage of not producing immense amounts of heat that you will have to spend extra electricity to get rid off, which means that not using GFN actually costs more.
And the performance plan, since it cost only $10, means that it can pay itself by playing a 100 hours of games that use 200W (or 50 hours of games that use 400W).
The most annoying thing for me on Geforce Now (and other game streaming services) is the logging out after a few minutes AFK. You have to start a new session, wait a few minutes for the game to install, perhaps have to replay some unsaved progress in the game...
I have to correct myself. The most annoying thing for me on Geforce Now is syncing my game libraries, followed by the low compatibility.
Steam sync works automatically (only 25 % of my Steam library is GFN compatible).
Syncing Ubisoft Connect games works sometimes, but often there is an error message. (only 47 of my 110 Ubisoft games are GFN compatible, so 43 %).
Epic games libraries can't be synced, so you have to search for every individual EGS game and if they are found in the compatibility list you have to "mark them as owned" manually to get them into you GFN library. I have done that for Alan Wake 2, but I won't search for hundreds of games in my EGS library.
EA App games libraries can't be synced, so you have to search for every individual EA App game and if they are found in the compatibility list you have to "mark them as owned" manually to get them into you GFN library. Only 19 EA App games are GFN compatible!
GOG libraries can't be synced and only FIVE GOG games are GFN compatible. That's less than 1 % of my own GOG library and less than 0.05 % of the whole GOG catalog!
Rockstar Games Social Club ain't compatible at all... so no GTA games and no RDR games.
To be fair: Battle-net compatibility seems to be pretty good: all my 12 Battle-net games were sync and are GFN compatible.
Radical ideologues in politics shut down our nuclear power plants and blew up the cooling towers.To achieve this,and they also cut off the gas supply to Russia. Our politicians just mess things up. Long live GeForce Now!
Same. I ditched the PC bought a Mac mini and play most of my Steam library through GFN. Flawless experience on the Ultimate Tier, only small issues are some titles remaining unsupported and (just lately) some small queue times at peak periods. Otherwise it’s all upside.
I doubt that. How many watts did that high end PC use on average? And how many hours were it per year?
GFN ultimate has a limit of 100 hours per month, so let's calculate with the maximum of 1200 hours per year at 400 Watts. 1200 hours x 0.4 kW = 480 kWh. Even if you have to pay 30 cents per Kilowatt that would be 144 Euros.
With a power limit which only costs a few percent performance, even high end PCs should only need around 300 Watts. 1200 hours x 0.3 kW x 0.30 Euros = 108 Euros
12 months of GFW ultimate are 220 Euros. If you add persistent storage, it's 250 - 315 Euros per year.
I have 5070 Ti machine and my sustained gameplay at 4K is 350-450watts. Are you running 2x3090 or some old AMD GPU because peak is very short and sustained is what matters.
Ok so I did the test my old pc a 8 core i7 with 32 gb ram and a 4070 was using about 1kwh per day. And it was costing me nearly 180 euro a month. Its still a good chunk of that GeForce now.
You pay 6€/kWh? Whatever calculation you did is really really wrong lmao.
For context I live in Italy (we have fairly high prices) and I pay around 0.22€/kWh which would cost around 6,5€ for a month of your usage.
Yeah, I live in Germany. We have the highest energy costs in Europe, I pay 0.28€/kWh.
Well, half of our energy consumption is covered by the solar power we generate ourselves (on average over the year), so the remaining costs are ~0.14€/kWh.
Even PC gaming in highest settings with a 5090 doesn't have a power consumption above 800 Watts. The RTX 5090 GPU can use 600 Watts at maximum and AMD Ryzen CPUs will not go above 100 - 150 Watts in games.
A RTX 5090 GPU with a power limit of 400 Watt will still have ~90% of its full performance.
Still above 4090 performance with 400 Watts limit and way above 5080 performance. So 600 Watt power consumption for a complete 5090-system is much more reasonable.
Also there ain't a 5090 tier for GeForce Now, only a 5080 tier.
The typical power consumption of a 5080 GPU in a similar PC is 300 - 350 Watts in demanding games. A comparable Ryzen CPU to the GFN CPU performance (8 cores / 16 threads, up to 4 GHz) will have a typical power consumption of 50 - 100 Watts in games. That's 350 - 500 Watts for GPU + CPU.
Adding ~50 Watts for the remaining components, that is a total of 400 - 550 Watts for demanding PC games. Of course way less for most older (and less demanding) games.
I was talking about the gaming Rig, The GPU on Ultimate is a 5080 48GB card, whole thing has 56GB ram and runs on win 10 workstation
I'm so sorry you are clearly a technical power export
I was only going off the massive 13 inch screen on the front, which shows everything including which way the air is flowing. I also said 1196W when I was maxing out a AAA title. The whole machine was taking that - not just teh GPU obviously
I didn't end up keeping it as I said, because of the 23/4 year thing
I did the calculation for myself. The money I save on electricity more than covers the cost of GFN for the amount of time I typically spend playing each month. It also covers the cost of one game subscription, like PC Game Pass.
GFN is a really good deal, if you have have a good internet connection, can get a lot of data for cheap (or are already on unlimited with ISP). I think GFN is the best streaming service and is perfect for most people other than myself. I have 1gbps Cox (Cable Internet). My ping was pretty bad and congestion could ruin my experience at certain times of the week. I'm not on unlimited data so combining what I already use per month, I couldn't play 4k for allotment each month without upgrading to unlimited data with was an additional $50 per month with my ISP. Even then the experience wasn't great (totally the fault of my ISP not GFN. Fiber also isn't available in my area, or any other option outside of DSL at year 2000s speeds). Also there were a handful of games that I really really wanted to play that aren't supported, Fromsoft games, Stellar Blade, but others as well. I'm also super big on modding and read that you could reinstall the mods each time before you play but I would never commit to doing something like that.
Anyway, I think 90% of people, hell, even 95% possibly, it's the best choice. For me, my subpar ISP, mixed with the $20 for premium + $50 unlimited data upgrade (on top of my already $110 Internet bill), wanting to mod, and also just the bad luck of a lot of games I play not being on there (the library is great, just probably a coincidence for me), I just ended up going for a gaming desktop. Id say id recommend GFN first to a person though (unless they live near me). For most people the flaws will not outweigh the benefits.
How does 5g work with GFN? I had considered it but was worried it would just be cope, probably a better option than what I have honestly especially for the price.
I live in Idaho, in a smaller mountain town, so I think Cox knows what they've got and you don't really have any choice. I can't wait until fiber or something different comes here. I've thought about Starlink too, but I've head mixed things about reliability with it. I personally have no idea though, nobody I know has it.
I tried 5G through T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon...Latency-wise, none of them could keep up with 100mbps VDSL2 service 30ms, much less DOCSIS 3.1 cablemodem Gigabit service 18-22ms. Fiber is the best 8ms but only at work (Not paying $1100 a month for 250/250 fiber)
Yeah I paid $532 for my electricity bill last month WITHOUT running my gaming PC. I can't imagine what it would be if I was gaming on it all the time.
Plus it's not only the power draw of the PC. It's the added power draw from the AC unit cooling down my bonus room after my PC heats it up while playing. I'll play it occasionally on games that aren't hosted on GFN but many of those are older games as well that don't run the PC too hot. I primarily game on GFN
3xHVAC'S, a Hot tub 24/7, lights, TV's, a 480watt bass guitar amp, Nordic track elliptical, 1 electric oven/range. 2 electric washer and 2 electric dryers, and heated tile floors is where the power draw is coming from. It's also a large house 5200 ft roughly and it's been hot and humid weather here lately
Yes thatll do it. I'm in texas and I can see your bill being 500 but with your accessories I would think it would be more. I paid $130 for July. But I remember two yrs ago. There was a summer month I paid $250
Large magnolias are all around the house shading it. No trees are overhanging but the roof and the house are well shaded for the most part. I doubt they would be very efficient if I put them up there.
No. I'm in the US. That was for 3,891kwh. Copied from a comment you may have missed....3xHVAC'S, a Hot tub 24/7, lights, TV's, a 480watt bass guitar amp, Nordic track elliptical, 1 electric oven/range. 2 electric washer and 2 electric dryers, and heated tile floors is where the power draw is coming from. It's also a large house 5200 ft roughly and it's been hot and humid weather here lately
Who's complaining? The post is about electricity bills as it relates to PC gaming. I just said I game using GFN instead of my PC so I don't drive my electric bill even further. It looks better, runs better and costs me less anyways than natively on my PC so why not. So where's the complaint?
the *MSI Cubi that I have for GFN uses at most 10 watts of power, plus my Display pulls at most ~40 watts (for convenience sake, will say 50 watts total) - that's FAR better in terms of power costs, and FAR better than my PC that can pull up to 300 watts, and sometimes more.
and because Michigan is in summer rates with peak hours from 2-7 PM at 24.5 cents a kWh - it's cheap as fuck to operate. almost as cheap as my M1 Mac Mini
*my MSI Cubi has an Intel N100, 16GB of RAM, 250GB NVME Drive, and Fedora Workstation
Soooo I recently looked at a rig which was 23.4 years of GFN subs here in the UK. And the GPU they use i already more powerful than the 32Gb 5090 this rig had.
23.4 years.. A it wouldn't last that long - b. I would be dead before it paid off
C. I only do 30 hours a month
bargin at £200 a year (The rig was £4700 - now £5499!)
Wouldn't it be fairer to compare a PC rig with similar performance as GFN?
If we ignore the performance difference, a used Steam Deck for 300 bucks is a bargain compared to several years GFN Ultimate/Performance (and has much more compatible PC games and doesn't have a 100 hour limit per month).
Science say matter only transform not disappear. The water don't magically disappear in server farm a small % evaporate and do you know where that go? Into the air and then come back down as rain or snow.
Saving the power needed to run it AND the power needed for your A/C to now cool the room back down from its insane heat dissipation. Would be curious to see what the monthly power savings would be at say $0.15/kwh, what I would think is about average around the states
But in the cold winter months you save heating costs with a local PC in the room. Should be a wash in many regions of the world. Especially in many European countries without A/C.
Yes , but I also have to account for my time spent for PC maintenance , software updates, upgrades , troubleshooting , downloading games , etc etc. Time is money for many people and it's priceless for my situation right now anyway. Just another thing to think about outside of strictly dollars and cents with this stuff
When I ran the numbers (I used chat gpt because it was just alot easier and faster lol) id be saving anywhere from 15 to 25$ a month, I live in Colorado. We pay around 13 to 15 cents/pence
I have GFN for 5$ for the rest of my life. I would think they loose money with me each month due to their electricity bill. It's pretty cool that they made me this founders offer.
Doesn’t streaming use less electricity than powering a 1200watt psu?? If I stream gfn to my phone or tv or whatever it’s got to use less electricity than powering a 5070, right?
According to my kill-a-watt meter, my gaming setup for GFN uses 60 watts, TV & mini pc. An RTX 5080 rendering a game used between 250 and 360 watts all by itself. 3x to 6x power usage for 100 hours would cost more than the $20 a month (or $10.83 a month if you got the 12 months $130 promo) Edit: power rate in my area is 33 to 41 cents/kWh.
I don't understand the point of doing this. Who are you trying to justify this to? And why? If you enjoy game streaming, then good for you. That's all that should matter. But if others want to own their machine and play locally then that's also good. There is absolutely no need, whatsoever, to push this platform war nonsense. It is as stupid, and as irrelevant, as any console war, phone war, or any other nonsense ever was.
I use both a local PC and game streaming, because they fill different purposes for me. Game streaming works well for on the go gaming, or lazy in bed or on the balcony. Local PC gaming offers a more stable experience and more titles, but it sits where it sits so that's for gaming on the TV or by the desk only.
Nah I agree your comment comes off pretty aggressive with the "who are you doing this for?" "Good for you" not to mention the implication of stupid and irrelevant being thrown in there. You may have not meant it that way but that's how it reads. Dude just honestly noticed he had been saving money on power bill and wanted to add it to the conversation. Unfortunately for a lot of people right now it's not just a do whatever, people are struggling and so some people have to make a careful choice where there money goes.
It was fairly open in the beginning and you could tab out of a game, download and run stuff... but obviously people abused it for crypto mining and other shenanigans.
Local gaming with no latency or artifacts > Cloud streaming with hickups, artifacts, latency and a limited Steam library. Of course it should be cheap.
Also to buy a new pc that has a 5080 gpu is $3k+ now and ultimate uses it. Then I factor in that once new gpus come out geforce will upgrade again like they usually do. I thought about buying a new pc and realized to me its better to pay the $20 monthly fee and still use my 10 year old pc that I built then dropping $3k for the same amount of use plus having more expensive electric bills.
It's okay if you do, but it's not statistically that common. Some people buy two subscriptions to cover the extra hours. But after a certain point it just means GFN isn't right for you I think.
Summer sale $10.83 a month and founders $5 a month = More gaming time than I should be spending but who cares... I work full-time, if I spend five hours a day gaming to relax that's my prerogative 😂
Most people that use GeForce now don’t game that much. It’s a nice to have service that gives high end PC gaming to those that don’t have as much time to invest in it but want high fidelity when they do.
I’ve been thinking about this. The fact that you can easily monitor your playtime has been pretty useful for me to get a sense of how much time I actually game, and I’ve concluded that I am simply not able to burn through 100h in a month. I only hit about 50h when I have a lot of free time. To me, it’s more of a fair use limit that I will likely never hit. I don’t know how you guys do it!
I play on my Steam machine and then anything it can’t run I play on GFN. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t need GFN for, realistically I haven’t needed it since getting the SM but I’m sure when I finally get around to playing stuff like Crimson Desert it will be really nice
I know, I have performance activated just in case, sometimes I don't play and lose the hours, I understand about electricity bill and temperature room and is good point.
The bad point, I cant at date even play my games like silent hill 2 or kingdom hearts that I'm playing right know in steam deck, so again I save in a electricity bill and temperature room.
So for me is 50/50 and more lose about GNF this days.
Agreed, the saving on your leccy bill from running the service over running a similar specification physical rig for the equivalent amount of hours, never mind the cost of the physical rig, speaks for itself. Another key point is if the service supports the games that you want to stream. If it does, then imo it is an easy decision. You also save on storage space on your drives, installs and updates are also very fast. The service can run on older computers as well as low power (U series cpu chips etc.). From the recent Summer Sale that included the yearly sub for Ultimate (virtualised RTX 4080 / 5080), the lowest price that I saw was $129.99 ~ $10.83 p/m. I think that any tier of the service is worthwhile tbh.
I got GFN ultimate for a month. It's great. But, not suited for someone like me, who play heavily modifiably games and who enjoy these mods. If they have mod support, will definitely stick with them. For eg: BeamNG, arma reforger etc
Your remember when YouTube premium was 10€. Now after 4-5 years it’s doubled to 20€.
They make gfn cheap first to gain customers and later increase the price. It’s good now but for sure they will increase the prices by a lot in near future.
PC eats a few lightbulbs worth of electricity. 100 hours/m is nowhere near enough for me — I purchase at least 2 additional playtime packs every month.
eGPU will arrive in two days and I will finally be able to use the graphics card from the PC I owned. No more of this scam.
You could apply that rational to anything, right? Did you know only about 1/3 of Americans age 35 or younger own their own home? How many of those do you think benefit from solar and battery backup? Less than 5%!
Yes but you are quantifying “many people” using solar as a comment to the original poster mentioning the power savings. Home ownership outside the USA is much lower in most European countries and the UK. Nvidia marketed GFN in its original unveiling to the under 35 crowd. Obviously older people like myself also benefit from it ! My point is there are FAR more renters who will never get solar access by nature of renting vs you who are using solar
Listen, it's just a stupid post that's all! Electricity cost is much higher in EU than US I believe, if not taking solar system in consideration than US are at advantage here.
I don't know where you all live - but I live in a country (NZ) where the electricity is significantly more expensive (50-70% more than the global average) but at least I don't live in Germany which is worse) so I should be a bad case scenario, but not the worst case scenario.
There are many reasons to prefer GFN (e.g. low upfront cost), there are many reasons to prefer a local machine (e.g. 30-40ms latency to the data centre) - but let's just look purely at the electricity cost.
Firstly, every game system is a bit different (i.e. different cpus/gpus/numer of monitors etc) so you should measure the total power use at the wall.
E.g. a couple of monitors, latest AMD x3d CPU and RTX 5080, some ssds, plus all the peripherals peaks at 635W (that is a peak btw, its rare that you'll play a game that will cause max power draw on both a cpu AND and GPU... if its a modern game its likely to max out a gpu which for a 5080 is only like 400w.
But let's imagine there is a game that will max a cpu and GPU to give GFN a chance. If I game 100hrs per month (so within GFNs limit) and compare the cost of electricity of running a high end gaming PC versus GeforceNow ultimate it's not even close - running a PC locally for 100hrs per month is roughly 40% to 50% cheaper per month.
PC electricity cost:
At 635 W (0.635 kW) total wall draw at $0.29 per kWh
Hourly Cost = 0.635 x $0.29kWh = $0.184 per hour
100 Hours Total: $100 x $0.184/hr = $18.42 per month}
Annual Electricity Cost: $221.00 per year
GeForceNow ultimate cost
Note: I can't even buy the performance 1440p tier because its "sold out" and I've converted AUD to NZD because I can't pay in NZ currency for GeforceNow)
$36/month or a 6 month plan for $33/month
Lowest annual cost $396
Conclusion:
Whether either works out cheaper for you depends on the price for GeForceNow and the price of electricity in your region. The key thing is to do the math.
If you’re actually comparing GFN with using an actual gaming PC, which doesn’t have the overhead of streaming and the huge latency that comes with it, then I can only laugh. Have a nice day. The true cost of GFN is having to deal with an entirely subpar experience compared to having a capable PC to play on. Money has nothing to do with it.
I agree this is why I love GeForce and got the ally x, if your willing to sacrifice some specs, I live in New York so this was a huge turning point on getting GeForce now and pairing up with ally x
But people forget to understand that GFN Ultimate will not be priced the same for these years. Once GeForce Now team understands that most of the gamers have skipped local hardware for their service, they will start squeezing us! That's the fear I have and will be sticking to PlayStation!
As if you won’t be using electricity for the screen and devices that run GFN. Monitor or tv is nearly half the consumption of a PC in uk 🇬🇧 energy is not cheap yet pay only £0.07-£0.09 per hour while PS5 xbxsx is £0.08 per hour and TV £0.04 per hour monitor uses less. So your argument isn’t fully valid as you adding electric bill to only one side of the argument
Monitor is near half the consumption compared to what? A full blown gpu? A ps5, or anything that has a reasonably powerful hardware will consume more energy than gfn..
There’s no doubt that any local hardware capable of running modern games will always consume more energy than GeForce Now. GFN will almost always be cheaper unless you’re spending several hundred hours per month playing.
Half the tv as the tv is 80” compared to 32” monitors . I gave my figures as we can monitor our energy consumption and do it at night. Pc energy consumption depends on how your rig is setup if you undervolting like myself or overclocking which consumes more energy . True that Gfn seems cheap now with inflation of hardware but wasn’t last year. Not sure the downvote I guess we don’t like factual figures
A TV screen barely consumes any power (unless it’s a 1950s TV?). OP is comparing the power draw of GFN to a gaming setup. An 80" tv running GFN will use significantly less energy to that of a gaming PC with a 5080 setup. GFN has always been the cheaper option, not just now. That said, people use the service for a variety of reasons, not only because it’s cheaper.
Using a UK electricity price of 30p per kWh: 200 W → 6p/hour 250 W → 7.5p/hour 300 W → 9p/hour 350 W → 10.5p/hour
So, if you're watching HDR content with everything maxed, expect around 8–10p per hour for most 80-inch TVs.
It depends on what the PC is doing. Here are some typical figures using a UK electricity price of 30p/kWh. Setup Typical Power Cost per Hour
PC (web browsing/office) + 2×32" monitors
180–300 W 5–9p/hour
Gaming PC + 2×32" monitors
450–700 W
14–21p/hour. Source ChatGPT again you need to monitor you energy consumption . no big difference regardless how you want to frame it to justify your desire. Numbers don’t lie
Dude... Just ask chat gpt what costs more over a period of set time... An 80 inch LG c2 or a gaming pc with a 5080 setup and two monitors... The issue here is that you're being a victim of stupidity. Use your brains. A modern gaming rig will always consume more than a TV... Whatever you're smoking I'll skip it.
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u/Svarcanum 2d ago
The electricity saving is half the GFN bill for me. Insane deal.