Nvidia and Xbox have turned Steam Deck into a Game Pass beast

I’ve spoken about GeForce Now before. It’s brilliant. Beyond platitudes, even. So good I wonder why more people aren’t talking about it. Nvidia’s cloud gaming platform – which, at its premium ‘Ultimate’ level gets you 4K ray-traced gaming on a high-end PC beamed flawlessly to your home – answers the question of whether cloud gaming can be the future. It can... at least for some people. I’ve got a very beefy Full Fibre internet setup, which helps, and I’ve been taking advantage of GeForce Now’s recent addition of Game Pass titles. Let’s just say that my Steam Deck has never felt more incredible. Rewinding a bit, first. Xbox has offered cloud gaming for a very large portion of its Game Pass catalogue for several years now. What was previously known as xCloud lowkey became Xbox Cloud Gaming (beta, still), and it works, but isn’t brilliant. In fact, it’ll soon be the worst of the major players in terms of quality, despite building on top of the best subscription service. You can use this on Steam Deck, iPads, phones... almost any device if it has support for an internet browser.I used it a fair bit, but I always felt a bit dirty doing so, like I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a relic gaming PC packing a Voodoo 2 GPU. I could feel developers crying as I fought against lag and image breakup in order to rack up some Achievements. GeForce Now has none of those problems. Apart from the odd wifi stutter, it creates the illusion that I’ve managed to get my hands on the world’s most overpowered handheld. Read more