We tested GeForce Now in South Africa — Play the latest games on nearly any PC or smartphone

GeForce Now could be a game-changer for South African gamers desperate to play the latest popular titles without an expensive gaming PC or console.

Rain’s launch of the Nvidia-powered platform is poised to become the country’s first to allow people to stream entire games from the Internet to a computer or mobile phone.

Instead of relying on local processing power, a graphics card, and storage to run a game, cloud gaming services use a dedicated gaming server in the cloud.

While there has been scepticism over the financial and practical feasibility of such services, GeForce Now has been around for eight years — five in beta and another three in general release in other countries.

Offering a cloud gaming service requires the rollout of server infrastructure close to the intended target market — because the performance depends heavily on low latency.

If a server is located too far away from the player, they will experience delays between pressing a button and seeing it registered in the game.

In South Africa, Nvidia has partnered with Rain for its local server rollout.

The mobile network operator sent invites to those who signed up via its “Show your interest” web page in September 2023.

MyBroadband has had some hands-on experience with the service in the past few weeks and found it performs very well on a home fibre connection.

We received our invite to the Rain beta after signing up via the regular link made available to the public late last year.

The sign-up process was simple and required that we pay only R3 to participate in the beta for a month. Users with an active Rain account pay a discounted R1 per month.

Once we were signed up, we downloaded the GeForce Now app and linked the supported game libraries — Steam, Epic Games, and Ubisoft.

Many of the games we bought on these platforms or had access to via a subscription were available.

GeForce Now already supports over 1,500 games, with more added weekly.

We used an Acer laptop and a 250/250Mbps fibre-to-the-home connection through RSAWeb on MetroFibre’s network for our tests.

GeForce Now requires only a 10th of that speed to stream games in 1080p quality, which is the resolution limit for the Priority plan currently in its public beta phase.

This plan hooks the player up with a rig boasting an RTX 3060 graphics card that can support up to 60 frames per second in gaming.

Gaming sessions are capped at 90 minutes, after which you will have to relaunch whatever you were playing — provided all available machines have not been allocated.

This policy is intended to ensure all subscribers get a fair amount of playing time and that players don’t leave their games idling while others could be using a game server.

For the best possible latency, we connected to our home router using an Ethernet cable instead of Wi-Fi.

In the GeForce Now testing dashboard, this connection produced a latency of 17ms between our system and the GeForce Now South African server.

Nvidia recommends a latency of less than 40ms, although it regards less than 80ms to be adequate for using the service.

Therefore, we were well within the parameters for a good gaming experience.

In fact, we found that using a Wi-Fi connection was also a feasible option, although the 5GHz band should be the preferred choice in this scenario, as it offers substantially lower latency than 2.4GHz.

Near-flawless online multiplayer experience

We started by playing a less graphically intensive title but one that requires a low latency to be realistically competitive — hyper-popular first-person shooter (FPS) Counter-Strike 2.

With all graphics settings maxed out, we had no issues playing at the maximum supported frame rate of 60fps on the Priority plan. The actual in-game frame rate was 100–130fps.

In-game latency measured 3–5ms but most often remained steady at 4ms.

We found no noticeable input delay for our in-game actions, with movement and button presses practically indistinguishable from playing off a local copy of the game.

The next game we tried was the Battle Royale-style FPS Apex: Legends.

We once again maxed out the graphics settings. This time, our frame rate typically ranged between 100fps and 120fps.

The latency remained around 4ms throughout most of the playthrough.

Apex: Legends players in South Africa already have to deal with higher latency due to the lack of local servers.

However, there was no perceivable difference between the GeForce Now and local experiences, aside from being able to play at higher settings due to better hardware than our own system.

However, the most serious esports players will consider even the slightest increase in latency to be a dealbreaker.

GeForce Now’s main point of attraction for these gamers will likely be in single-player games with an emphasis on high-fidelity visuals.

A recent example of such a release is Bethesda’s space-based open-world RPG Starfield.

To play this game, we connected GeForce Now to our Game Pass subscription through our Microsoft account.

The support for this feature is not as fully-fledged as the other library integrations, as it necessitates logging into the Microsoft account with every game startup.

A slight slowdown — but no real surprise

In Starfield, it became evident that we were playing with what Nvidia considers an entry-level card for RTX gaming.

With the graphics settings maxed out and rendering at a native 1080p resolution, we saw frame rates hovering at 15–22fps.

Although not completely unplayable, we decided to reduce fidelity slightly to get better performance.

On the “High” profile with native rendering, the frame rate increased slightly to about 20–25fps, and at “Medium”, about 25–30fps.

It should be emphasised that Starfield is particularly demanding on a graphics card, and the performance was to be expected with the GPU we were using.

The game is also very new and has not had enough time to be as well optimised as our other tested titles.

In addition, Starfield is one of just a handful of new premium titles that did not support Nvidia’s performance-enhancing DLSS upscaling from launch.

GeForce Now’s Priority Plan performance was nonetheless better than our laptop’s own GTX 1660 Ti, which was about 3–5fps slower on each graphics profile.

We also briefly tested Starfield on the GeForce Now mobile app on a Samsung Galaxy S22.

In this instance, we experienced a slight input delay, likely due to the Bluetooth connection for our Xbox Series X|S controller.

There were also some graphical bugs, including our entire stream turning black and white.

Due to the issues experienced with the mobile version of GeForce now, we switched back to the laptop.

Alternative history shooter Atomic Heart was the final game on our list.

In this less graphically-intensive single-player title, we consistently achieved 60fps with the maxed-out “Atomic” graphics profile.

Like the other titles, the latency was around 4ms, making input delay a non-issue.

The table below summarises the frame rates we achieved with settings maxed out in the four games we tested.

If it can perform as well as it did during our tests when it officially launches, GeForce Now will be an attractive option for gamers who have some disposable monthly income but haven’t been able to save up for a powerful gaming system.

The main caveat is that you will need an uncapped Internet connection with a speed of 25Mbps or greater.

In addition, it remains to be seen what the pricing of the service will be when it exits the beta.

In the US, the Priority plan is priced at $9 per month, working out to R165 at the time of publication. However, the US gets the latest-generation RTX 4060 graphics card.

Based on code spotted on the Rain website, South Africa might only be getting one additional subscription option — with no free tier available.

The other plan currently shown as a possibility for South Africa is Ultimate.

This will support streaming at up to 4K resolution and 120fps on an RTX 3080 graphics card.

In the US, this plan costs $19 (R349) per month and provides access to a rig with an RTX 4080 card.

Now read: When you can buy the new PlayStation 5 “Slim” in South Africa