When a couple of companies started trying to pitch me on gaming Chromebooks, I scoffed. But after seeing GeForce Now Ultimate with Nvidia Reflex, I’m not laughing anymore.
When gaming Chromebooks were announced back in October of 2022, you’d be forgiven for cocking you head to the side and looking puzzled. We were right there with you.
In fact, our own Christian Guyton wrote just a month ago that gaming Chromebooks were, well, a bit of a con that were promising way more than they could ever really deliver.
That might have been the case in early december, but after getting a hands-on look at the latest GeForce Now Ultimate Membership tier at CES 2023, I’m no longer convinced he’s right. Not only should gaming Chromebooks be taken seriously, I’m here to tell you that they have a wide open runway for success.
My experience with Nvidia GeForce Now has been limited, I will admit. When it comes to PC games, I like playing on the best gaming PC I can, or — barring that — the best gaming laptop. I want powerful enough hardware to drive high frame rates at a respectable resolution with high-quality visuals — and I don’t have time for lag.
Years ago, I experimented with Playstation’s streaming service, Playstation Now, on the PS4 and lets just say that I wasn’t exactly impressed. This was ages ago (and I’m sure the PS Now of today is great), but it was enough to turn me off to game streaming for good. Or so I thought.
Nvidia’s own GeForce Now gets pretty respectable reviews, but it hasn’t been the kind of service that was able to really replace traditional gaming hardware, something Nvidia itself acknowledged when we spoke this past week at a demo at CES.
The key problem has been system latency, which is the time it takes for you to push a button or otherwise provide input on your controller or mouse and keyboard and have that input reflected in the frame on the screen.
