Still, the Venn diagram of potential GeForce Now users seems slim. With GeForce Now, $8 per month gets you a Netflix-style grab bag of streaming games, but you can purchase others a la carte. (It’s unclear whether this crossover support will apply to games purchased on Steam and activated on Uplay.) Nvidia has also enlisted Ubisoft as a partner, so in the coming months, certain purchases through Uplay will sync to GeForce Now, and vice versa. The catalog continues to grow, the platform now supports multiplayer, and the server-side processors have become powerful enough to supply 1080p, 60fps gaming across the board. To Nvidia’s credit, GeForce Now has made strides since the service launched in October 2015. Stuttering also becomes a problem if your Shield isn’t getting ideal Wi-Fi reception, so an area that works fine for streaming video might still be troublesome for GameStream. The difference is most noticeable with mouse-and-keyboard input or with shooters that require pinpoint accuracy, and even an ethernet connection on both ends doesn’t completely eliminate latency.

I’ve used GameStream for years on Nvidia’s Shield Portable and first-generation Shield TV, and while the experience is passable overall, it does introduce a small fraction of a second of input lag, even under the best network conditions. Just don’t expect GameStream to fully replace native PC play. The Shield can stream Steam’s Big Picture mode to your television. So if you have a 4K or 4K HDR television, a supported graphics card (GeForce GTX 10-series for HDR, many more for 4K), and strong enough network conditions, you might get a better picture than on the ancient 1080p monitor connected to your desktop. GameStream also supports UltraHD streaming. Launching Steam Big Picture on Shield gives access to your entire Steam catalog, and you can add launch shortcuts for any other game through GeForce Experience, Nvidia’s companion software for PCs. Although GameStream officially supports just a subset of PC games-they’ll appear in Shield’s GameStream menu, and on the Shield home screen once you’ve played them-there’s technically no limit to what you can run.

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