A couple of weeks ago I tried streaming a game to my Chromebook via GeForce Now. It worked surprisingly well in some ways but the video quality was bad enough it wasn’t much fun.
The main goal was playing Satisfactory (a first person game but slow, not twitchy) on my Chromebook. I paid for the Priority service, which gives you 1080p @60fps and a powerful enough server. It all worked OK and the experience was nearly seamless. But the video quality was awful. It’d constantly drop down to really blurry graphics. If I sat still and didn’t move the camera it’d look OK but the moment I moved it was awful.
I think it may have been the WiFi I was using. It was good WiFi and speed tests showed 50Mbps or more with low latency. But even good WiFi has some packet loss and that’s the enemy of quality. FWIW performance was better on my Windows machine wired to a fast gigabit fiber. Also pretty good for ethernet + Starlink. But good heavens if a streaming game service can’t work on good WiFi what’s the point?
I was able to improve things on the WiFi a bit by disabling “adjust for poor network conditions”. Before I did that the stream would regularly drop from 1080p as far down as 480p for a couple of seconds. It seemed to run much better locked to 1080p.
I don’t think it was the Chromebook; it looks bad on my gaming PC too. It’s possible paying $20 for the Ultimate service would help things. I’m fine with just 1080p@60 but maybe paying for a better server results in a better quality video stream?
Even on the fast ethernet networks the video compression quality is really weird. Here’s some screenshots comparing the same scene in three scenarios. (Click to enlarge, they are all lossless PNGs). 1080p on the native game (ie, perfect). Then the best picture I could get out of GeForce Now streaming. And finally the worst picture from GeForce Now. Captured by spinning the camera and snapping a photo. The game is not doing motion blurring, it should look sharp. These were all generated on my Windows gaming PC, GeForce Now running in Chrome.
That right image from GeForce Now is just unacceptable to me. And that’s what you see most of the time, when the camera is in motion. The middle one where GeForce Now is doing its best is also not great. I can only think that compressing a video stream at 60 fps with very low latency is hard and their streaming platform isn’t up to it.
FWIW the streaming client seems to use up to 30Mbps for the 1080p stream which suggests it’s very fast compression. There’s options for limiting the bitrate and I tinkered with those but mostly have left them unlimited.
Good things.. The latency is great, even with a 50ms+ lag from Starlink it feels very responsive. I didn’t try a twitchy shooter or anything but it felt like I was playing locally. The user experience is also very simple. It all runs in a browser and you can easily use your existing Steam library (including Steam Sync for save games). The free level is good enough you can see how it works but you definitely want to pay for the $10/mo premium for higher quality. (Not sure the $20/mo is worth the improvement, I didn’t try it.)
BTW there’s precious few docs. Press Ctrl-N for streaming performance stats and Ctrl-G for the GeForce Now settings.
I dunno, it’s remarkable this technology works at all. Game streaming has worked for over 12 years now! But somehow it’s never quite caught on. GeForce Now solves a lot of problems: easy to use, simple business model without some weird game subscription required. But the video quality was just not good enough, particularly on WiFi.
Nelson's log 
Interesting, thanks for the report!
I’ve tried streaming one game too, Immortality, a year or so ago, on Game Pass, on Chrome in a recent MBP. It was fine, overall a surprisingly good experience. They said their browser streaming was “beta” at that point, and there were a few crashes, but otherwise it was fine. Not a latency sensitive game, and did very different things visually, eg filters to make sections look like old film, etc, so it’s harder to judge the quality exactly, but I didn’t notice as much in the way of over compression or artifacts as you did. Over WiFi, but I probably had a bit more downstream bandwidth than you.