Taking advantage of high-end NVIDIA GeForce RTX hardware with support for ray-tracing. Being able to say 'hey I already own that game on Steam' and then being able to stream almost immediately. Geforce NOW is cloud-based PC gaming done right. And it's available, err, now in many regions (not ANZ). With its competitive price-point of $4.99 USD a month it positions NVIDIA as a serious force in the upcoming cloud gaming wars.

Which, for those of us in Australia, may just be spectator sport as we see Stadia, GeForce NOW, Project xCloud, and whatever Amazon has cooking arm-up and take part in digital conflict. GeForce NOW's pitch is kind of brilliant, in that it is what you expect a streaming platform to be. But, unlike Stadia, doesn't lock you into an ecosystem and also lets you connect to existing PC digital game stores. A smart move because with the likes of Uplay, Origin, Steam, Epic Games Store, and so forth - the last thing required in 2020 is a new storefront to buy games.

The power to play PC games anywhere, on any device — even the billion devices that aren’t game ready. You’re upgrading to a state-of-the-art gaming rig by virtually adding a GeForce graphics card to your PC, Mac, SHIELD or Android phone.

Just like the PC, GeForce NOW is an open platform. It’s powered by our world-class GPU architecture and uses our Game Ready Drivers for the best performance. And, because these are real PC games, GeForce NOW gives you the precision of keyboard and mouse gaming, as well as optimizations for game controllers.

It’s an opportunity for you to connect to the millions of gamers online and join your friends in your favorite PC communities. Most importantly, it instantly connects you to the games you already own on the digital game stores you own them on, or the latest free-to-play game everyone is playing.

The benefit of a service like this, especially for PC is that drivers and patches are all handled automatically, and you can begin playing with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER like performance. In a perfect world, with super-fast internet, this makes the prospect of playing something like Cyberpunk 2077 on a number of devices - a dream that could very well be a reality for some. And all without the need to upgrade your rig.

After an extensive beta period GeForce NOW is available in version 1.0 form - and at $4.99 USD per month (with the first three months free) it really does put Google's Stadia in a tough spot, value for money wise. Of course not all games available on Steam and Uplay are a part of the GeForce NOW library, but NVIDIA will be working with publishers to bring more and more as time goes on.

For more info - head here.