Hardwired
In Hardwired, AC Senior Editor Harish Jonnalagadda delves into all issues {hardware}, together with telephones, audio merchandise, storage servers, and networking gear.
I do not really want cloud gaming; I’ve a gaming rig powered by an RTX 4090, and my spouse has her personal gaming machine with an RTX 5080. But with a toddler in the home, it is simply not possible to get any gaming time, and whereas my spouse manages to play Valorant for just a few hours per week, the one recreation I performed to any significant extent within the final yr is Balatro.
This is the place a service like GeForce Now turns out to be useful. At the outset, cloud gaming is all about comfort; you do not have to fret about {hardware} or configuration, and you may simply give attention to the sport itself. While Microsoft has its personal tackle cloud gaming with Xbox Game Pass, I like what NVIDIA is doing with GeForce Now so much higher — the service lets me play my very own video games on the cloud, and that is simply nice.
Linux gaming in general is much better than it was even a few years ago, and having a utility like GeForce Now available natively makes all the difference. In addition to expanding availability to other platforms, NVIDIA added flight stick integration to GeForce Now, and that is intriguing in and of itself when you consider the fact that the game itself is being streamed via a remote location.
At CES 2026, NVIDIA showed off Microsoft Flight Simulator running on GeForce Now, and I was able to use a Logitech HOTAS to control the demo. While I’m abysmal with a flight stick, I at least noted that the input was near-instantaneous, and at no point did I feel that the game was being streamed via the cloud. More than anything else, this is what makes GeForce Now stand out.
The second part of the puzzle is availability; GeForce Now is available in over 60 countries globally, but there’s an India-sized hole that NVIDIA is looking to remedy. The service was meant to debut in India last year, but that has been pushed to sometime in 2026, and with NVIDIA hosting the service on its own, I can’t wait for it to become available. Microsoft rolled out cloud gaming in the country a few months ago, and with NVIDIA’s imminent arrival, gamers in the country will get more choice, and that’s always a good thing.
In my usage, I prefer GeForce Now as it lets me play the games I already own. I have an extensive catalog of Steam games I didn’t get around to playing, and I have over a hundred titles on Epic I didn’t even bother installing until now. Having the ability to play those games on any device is just convenient, and GeForce Now has the best image fidelity thanks to its use of custom RTX 5080 to power it. Now I just need to wait for the service to launch in the country so I don’t have to use a VPN tunnel to play my games on the cloud.