Hardwired
In Hardwired, AC Senior Editor Harish Jonnalagadda delves into all things hardware, including phones, audio products, storage servers, and networking gear.
I don’t really need cloud gaming; I have a gaming rig powered by an RTX 4090, and my wife has her own gaming machine with an RTX 5080. But with a toddler in the house, it’s just not feasible to get any gaming time, and while my wife manages to play Valorant for a few hours a week, the only game I played to any meaningful extent in the last year is Balatro.
This is where a service like GeForce Now comes in handy. At the outset, cloud gaming is all about convenience; you don’t have to worry about hardware or configuration, and you can just focus on the game itself. While Microsoft has its own take on cloud gaming with Xbox Game Pass, I like what NVIDIA is doing with GeForce Now a lot better — the service lets me play my own games on the cloud, and that’s just great.
NVIDIA is on a mission to bring GeForce Now to as many platforms as possible. It’s now available natively on select Amazon streaming products alongside Samsung and LG smart TVs. What I particularly like is that there’s a native Linux app, and the timing couldn’t have been better; I’m getting increasingly frustrated with Windows (I just can’t stand Windows 11) and have been mulling a wholesale switch to Ubuntu.
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.
