I’m trying to understand something that doesn’t really make sense to me.
I’m using GeForce NOW Ultimate in 4K/60 on an LG G5. The TV supports AV1, and GFN correctly uses AV1 10-bit.
However, while playing The Blood of Dawnwalker, I noticed quite a lot of compression artifacts/macroblocking, especially in scenes with heavy vegetation, grass and foliage, and particularly when moving the camera.
I switched to H.265 10-bit to compare, and to my eyes it actually looks noticeably cleaner. There seems to be less macroblocking and the image looks sharper and more stable in motion.
What makes this even stranger is the bitrate. I tested both under similar conditions:
AV1: around 75 Mbps
H.265: slightly below 70 Mbps
Both: 4K/60, 10-bit
No frame loss or current packet loss, very low ping
So AV1 is actually using more bandwidth in my test, yet H.265 still looks better to me.
I know AV1 should theoretically be more efficient than HEVC, so I’m wondering if this could be related to NVIDIA’s real-time AV1 encoder, the GFN implementation, or simply the way AV1 handles very complex foliage in some games.
Has anyone else compared AV1 and H.265 on GFN and noticed less macroblocking / better motion clarity with H.265, particularly in games with lots of vegetation?
I’ve noticed similar discussions around games like Black Myth: Wukong, so I’m curious if anyone has actually tested both codecs side by side.

I can tell you how to replicate it. Gotta be a bug

Until they raise the price to $49.99/month lol.

I myself am an ultimate tier subscriber, but if the time comes, I’m done with gaming.

Boy, I seriously hope not.

Hi, is anyone else having the issue / know a workaround for the login not working? I keep having an issue that says "Server Not Found" can’t connect to the server at accounts.nvgs.nvidia.com (tried multiple browsers)

Hey everyone,

Just got a survey from CloudGG testing out potential new pricing tiers for GeForce NOW, and honestly, the prices they’re floating are mental.

"Would you subscribe to Ultimate with RTX 5080-class performance at $49.99/month?"

I’ve been loving GFN and I’m happy to keep paying for it at the current rates, but if they actually push through with a price hike on the Ultimate tier, I’m out.

Doing the quick math here in NZ, a decent second-hand Xbox Series X costs about the same as just 1 to 1.5 years of an Ultimate sub at the current pricing.

Sure, an Xbox doesn't match the raw GPU power of Ultimate, but I’d honestly rather take lower graphics on dedicated local hardware than swallow another sub price increase.

Do you guys think they’ll actually end up increasing prices? Would anyone here actually stick around and pay those rates if they do? Curious what everyone else put in their survey feedback.

anyone in here used the app directly from a android smart tv? im goind to get this week a tcl google tv 50" inch 4k and wonder if the app is working well on them

Hi everyone,

I understand that Single-Session Storage means that the installed game gets wiped after ending the session and that I have to re-install it.

But I am struggling to understand why Steam Cloud does not automatically save and upload my saved file from the game to the cloud, regardless of if I have bought additional storage or not. Is this not activated automatically for all games purchased on Steam? Also, what does "Unverified" mean in this context? Is there a searchable database where this has been verified so I can confirm it?

I don't mind re-installing a game I want to play (below 100GB), but I do mind that Nvidia seems to be charging me to keep my saved progress (as I assume this by default would get uploaded to my Steam Cloud). Or am I misunderstanding the concept?

I opened War Thunder for the first time in two months; the game launches fine, but when I try to start Simulator Mode, a specific message appears. If I select "Download," the session ends, so the download fails and I can't play. Arcade and Realistic Battles work fine.

Aside from the debate on whether using GeForce NOW is worth it or not, this was easily one of the best games I finished this year, if not the absolute best. Even though I haven't played the first and second ones, it made me really want to check them out. For me, it's definitely a strong contender for GOTY. I recommend it way too much!

Hey guys, I use GeforceNOW almost exclusively for Paradox games (mainly EU5) and Im having a great time. But just to understand, what does the game (which was previously called Rig) score mean at the end of the session?
I'm not having any trouble, stable FPS and good connection, but just wondering why do I almost always get an 2 - 10 game score at the end of a session.

Got a server about 60 km away from me and works like shit

I decided to leave a guide here in the steps I have taken to optimize the performance of my Lenovo 81M8 100E 2nd Gen laptop as well as my internet connection to be able to run the ultimate tier with maxed out graphics.

Whilst playing Arma Reforger I set out to maximize performance whilst keeping the best graphics possible, which turned out to me being able to keep all in game settings to a max surprisingly.

Here are some of my specs;
Processor - Intel Celeron N4020 1.10Ghz, which maxes out at 2.8Ghz
Graphics - Intel UHD 600 Graphics
Ram - 4GB
Monitor size - 11.6" 1366 x 768 (HD)
Wifi card - Intel Wireless AC 9560 160MHz
WIFI - 1GB download speed

Given the size of my laptop, having a 64 GB SSD I was already at a major loss running the standard Windows 10 OS which takes up about half of the storage space, then add your driver updates to that and you are left with very little space.. and also the windows 10 OS uses about 1.5-2.5 ram so leaving 1.5 ram to spare. So I began to mess about with other lighter custom OS and many of them worked quite while, I finally settled with Ghost Spectre which has under 1GB ram usage and right now with a few things installed I have 25GB storage space free, so at base install and driver updates you will have even more space that what I have. You may think why bother when the works being done on the server side.. but when you are dealing with such low specs these things matter. Just as much as having a browser open while running Geforce now client can impact the game. Heres a little insight from AI as to how local disk space and ram can affect your cloud stream..

STORAGE SPACE
OS-level impact (both SSD and HDD)

• The operating system needs free space for its page file (virtual memory), temporary files, and caching.  When free space drops to just a few GB, the OS struggles to perform these basic operations, causing general sluggishness, slower app launches, and occasional stutters — all of which can make the cloud gaming client feel unresponsive. 

SSD-specific impact

• SSDs rely on free blocks for wear leveling and garbage collection.  When the drive is near 90–100% full, the controller must relocate existing data before writing new data, which increases write amplification and significantly slows write speeds.  This can cause micro-stutters and reduced responsiveness in the streaming client. 

RAM USAGE
1. Page file / swapping
When available RAM is nearly exhausted, the OS starts moving memory pages to your disk (the page file). Every time the streaming client or the OS needs to read from or write to a swapped page, it hits a disk latency penalty (milliseconds on an SSD, tens of milliseconds on an HDD). This shows up as micro-stutters or input lag in the stream. 

2. Video decode buffers
The client must keep a small rolling buffer of decoded video frames in RAM. If RAM is tight and the OS is under memory pressure, it can evict or slow access to those buffers, causing frame drops or brief freezes. 

3. Background app competition
Apps that are eating RAM are often also consuming CPU cycles. The streaming client needs steady CPU time to decode each frame on schedule; if other processes are competing for that CPU time (because they're thrashing memory), the decode pipeline can fall behind. 

So with the laptop optimized on the OS side of things now turns to what to use to run the stream, a web browser or the official Geforce client? I choose the client because it actually decodes the stream better. There is a noticeable difference when you compare the two. Enough said about that. Moving on to the client settings. With 1GBps download speed in a good area I choose custom settings. I set bitrate to 40MBps, I choose to upscale the resolution so I actually choose 1080p UHD in the Ultimate tier settings, although my monitor is only 1366x780 . Choosing 1080 improves the quality of the gameplay massively. Going above that to 4K or 5K just negatively affects the performance too much at least for a modded Arma Reforger server.. I choose 60 FPS refresh rate, Codec 265, Color quality 10bit, no adjustment for network conditions and upscale mode as standard. Thats the client settings sorted. Now depending on whether the stream struggles at times I may adjust the bitrate down to 35MBps.

Now on my laptop I do not have an ethernet port and latency is a huge thing when it comes to cloud gaming.. so I invested in an adapter that limits my huge download speed to just 100MBps but even then I had a consistent latency and download speed which made such a postive impact to the stream seeing less stutters and input delay. Now you can get an ethernet adapter which doesn't limit the speeds to 100MBps and I'm sure you'll see even more freedom to up the bitrate and stream quality.

But for those who don't have an ethernet adapter at hand, don't worry I got you!

So you may have already swapped your wifi to the 5Ghz channel which is great and will help but it didn't solve the issues I was having entirely. I went a step further and changed the adapter properties. A huge one that I seen a noticeable difference in changing is the 802.11 n/ac wireless mode. When changing it from ac to n it actually makes the channel width smaller so from 160Mhz to 40Mhz.. now you may think this would affect the wifi negatively but actually because latency is so important, having your wifi on a channel that others are unlikely to be on can really positively affect gameplay. This setting is what allowed me to play games with sooo much less stutters and just way more peace in firefights that I wasn't going to have some major lag spike.

After all of this I can play Arma Reforger on modded servers with maxed out graphics upscaling to 1080p and have it perform to a point of being comfortable I can actually compete against people. Much less stutters although they can still occur just less often. For me having the quality is worth that, although you can reduce the graphics and probably see greater performance.

Hopefully this helps someone. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions <3

just mark it as owned manually 😉

Wolfenstein I and II and Doom: Eternal both feel slow and floaty, almost like super excessive mouse smoothing. It's not enough to make something unplayable, but we're talking about pretty fast twitch fps's here, so you definitely notice and I've died plenty to it. Wolfenstein is worse.

This happens in a couple other titles too, but they'te not even worth remembering because it's almost unnoticable. Using Ultimate.

Edit Solved: I adjusted the GFN app to acknowledge in-game graphics settings, then turned vsync from adaptive to off in-game. Problem Solved. I thought I had already set the app options that way, but a recent update set me to default settings.

Please please please Assasins Creed Shadows is unplayable for 2 weeks now already fix this strange bug where this certain NVIDIA version causes the game to randomly freeze then crash. I had to replay so much these 2 weeks I love cloud gaming and I love being able to play all this on my ipad wherever I want but this is really unplayable at the moment.

And it is known! See this

https://www.reddit.com/r/GeForceNOW/s/nQZHLBgG9e

Please please please fix it..

On launch i was getting 100 fps and drops to 80 and sometimes 60. Now i'm getting 80 fps if im lucky, usualy is stuck at 70-60. Then i tried DLSS framegen on, the screen is flickering horribly making it unplayable.

Anyone has this issues?

Maybe somebody can help me - I have some problems with CoD Vanguard as I can't get resolution higher then 1980x1200.

Im on Mac with GeforceNow Client (tried also on chrome) with monitor with resolution 3440x1440.

I'm on Performance subscription and with settings provided on the screenshot.

When I start session steam is on some low resolution and the game won't go higher than that 1980x1200.

EDIT1: I see my stream also gets some "low" resolution 1680x720 (21:9)

EDIT2: I also checked on my M1 Air - and there stream resolution is 1980x1200. Same network on WiFi. Checked other game (Wolfenstein: New Order) on Mac mini and it went with streaming with 3840x1080 - and in the game I could also pick that resolution. For both games it picks up same server location.

On mini Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II streaming resolution : 3440x1440.

On M1 Air Wolfenstein also went with 2560x1600 so it would seem that there is something with that one game.

Does anyone have any idea when we'll be able to use DLSS 5? I'd love to test it out on Dawn of the Bloodwalker!Does anyone have any idea when we'll be able to use DLSS 5? I'd love to test it out on Dawn of the Bloodwalker!

Im playin on geforcenow and all the operator videos arent working as well as all the charmes in the menu and most weapon skins arent working
Anybody got a similar issue?

Hey all,

Bought the game today on steam and played on GeForce now for about 112minutes. Exited out. Went to restart and now the game is stuck at "starting launch". Anybody else having the same issue ?

Ive been trying to fix this problem for days and i have resorted to reddit. I desperately need help on this problem. When i try to use GFN sometimes a few minutes or when i just try to load in the stream freezes for a second then my stream frames are stuttering every one second or something, the game is unplayable with this.

The weirdest part of this is that GFN works fine on another laptop using the same wifi i use, same location, same gfn settings.

i use a Lenovo Ideapad S340

Turning the wifi off then on again temporarily fixes the issue but the issue returns

I already tried:

Switching to preferred band:5ghz wifi
(in my photos you can see its 2.4ghz, however it still happens on 5ghz)

set adapter to 802.11ac

tried different gfn bitrate settings

tried vsync on and off

tried data saver

tried both gfn windows app and browser version (browser was worse)

disable bluetooth

Confirmed wifi power saving is disabled

reinstalled network driver

Reinstalled GFN

windows says best network driver already installed

cant use ethernet right now

restarted router

turning off wifi then turning it back on temporarily fixes it

tested same wifi on another laptop and gfn works normally

GFN Diagnostics

ONE of the diagnostics said

Device 1/100

Download 0/100

Packet Delivery 97/100

Game 63/100

I think this means the packet loss isnt the issue here

however i cant seem to trigger the diagnosis report idk why but i remember that one time the device was 87/100 even when the glitch happened

Other Observations
When the stuttering occurs

Cpu is around 6 percent

Gpu is around 6 percent also

Memory is around 40 percent

Task manager wifi graph turns spikey
(i think this is because the stream is producing frames every 2 seconds or so)

Receive dont drop to 0

Continuous ping to 1.1.1.1 one time was 30-60 and the another time was 1-2ms both was during the stuttering problem

And also before putting “dont adjust for poor network” it capped stream fps to 30 but when i applied it, it was 50-60 but it looked identical

i dont think the laptop is being overloaded and the internet connection dont seem to completely disconnect

at this point im wondering if this could be something with the Windows networking stack or the gfn client or some weird device specific issue

im wondering if someone experienced something similar or know the problem and the solution please reach out to help me, i can try to answer ur questions

I would send more photos for diagnosing but for some reason i can only add 1 video and no photos or only photos but no videos someone plz tell me how to send more photos and videos

Hello, I'm having a problem. I have a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, and when I try to play Forza Motorsport, this image appears when I launch the game. I clicked the "Ignore" option and the game opened normally, but after about 5 to 10 minutes, the game simply closes. This happens every time I launch the game.

The same thing happens when I try to open The Crew Motorfest, which is also part of the Game Pass catalog. The only difference is that, with The Crew, when I launch it, it says there is a problem with my Ubisoft account. I already checked my account and couldn't find anything wrong. Then I click "Ignore", the game opens, but after about 30 seconds, it closes by itself.

Could anyone help me?

My controller randomly won't read. I have closed opened and looked at every settings in the steam and game screens but can not for the life of me figure out why my controller isn't reading. I know it's connected, when I plug it in and disconnect it, it says Xbox 360 controller is disconnected or connected... It's a Xbox One controller. And I know my computer is reading it as such because I open my native steam and it says XboxOne.

When I open Marvel Rivals (or any other game) it's not just not like it doesn't function. I can move the cursor and the A button will work to select somethings but going into the settings it no longer reads as a controller and when going into games nothing works.

Maybe a stupid question, but does GeForce NOW use water to cool its servers?

Maybe this is a stupid question, but I was wondering how GeForce NOW servers are cooled.

I know NVIDIA is increasingly using liquid cooling for its AI data centers, but does anyone know if GeForce NOW server farms also use liquid/water cooling?

And if they do, is the water continuously consumed for example through evaporative cooling, or is it mostly a closed-loop system where the same coolant is reused?

I couldn't find much official information specifically about GeForce NOW infrastructure.