Update: Nvidia has contacted us to clarify that beta accounts will automatically roll over to a free account, not a Founders account. However, beta members, like all users, can also upgrade to a Founders membership, which comes with a 90-day free trial. As of this morning, GeForce Now, Nvidia's cloud gaming service, has officially ended its beta testing. If you would like to try out Nvidia's remote rendering on your games, you can do so for free. We have done some additional testing and feel that GeForce Now is what Stadia should be.

There are two tiers of membership: Free and Founders. Free memberships have no special benefits and are limited to 60-minute play sessions. Once the session is over, you can resume immediately, but you may have to wait your turn.

Founders members (paid members) have access to RTX ray tracing in the cloud, so if you are still using a GTX 1050 Ti but want to see what all the ray tracing fuss is about, it is available for $5 per month. (Wolfenstein: However, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Metro Exodus, and Deliver Us the Moon are currently the only four RTX-enabled GeForce Now games). A paid membership expands play sessions to six hours, allows you to skip ahead to free players in the session queue, and comes with a 90-day free trial period (for a limited time). The $5/month fee will be fixed for one year.

How well GeForce Now works will ultimately determine how we feel about it (we tested it almost a year ago, and things may have changed since then), but on the surface it is a much better offer than Google Stadia. Stadia costs $10/month and does not yet offer a free membership option. Also, Stadia's servers utilize AMD graphics cards, which do not currently support ray tracing.

Most importantly, playing a game through GeForce Now does not require purchasing another version of that game. Currently, it supports more than 100 games, but the lack of some of the more promising games, such as Control and Red Dead Redemption 2, leaves something to be desired in that regard; it's still better than Stadia, and it's still a little more powerful than Stadia, but it's not as good as Stadia. However, GeForce now saves your username and password, so you don't have to log into your Steam, Epic, or other accounts every time.

Another way GeForce Now outperforms Stadia is in platform support: it can now stream to PC, Mac, Android phones, and Shield TV; GeForce Now will add Chromebooks to this We plan to add Chromebooks to that list. At a news briefing, Phil Eisler, VP and GM of GeForce Now, said that support for more Android TV devices will be offered in the future and that Nvidia is working with Razer to integrate GeForce Now with its mobile controllers stated.

Broken down this way, GeForce Now seems like a much better option than Stadia, even if the latency is ultimately the same. However, the disparity in play sessions between free and paid members may be an issue. Free members can re-cue after an hour has passed, but how long they have to wait before getting back into the game depends on how many paying members are currently online.

If wait times get too long, Eisler says Nvidia will increase server capacity to reduce wait times. He does not expect a big rush right out of the gate.

Perhaps the one thing that will annoy free users will be the pop-up notifications that tell them how much time they have left before their session ends; according to Nvidia, users will be notified "when they have 40 minutes, 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes, and 5 seconds left." This would occur for both memberships on all platforms. For free members, the first pop-up appears 20 minutes into the session. PC users will also receive a persistent warning after 10 minutes.

These pop-ups seem intrusive, and the one-hour free session limit makes it difficult to play multiplayer games like Overwatch or League of Legends, or games that cannot be saved at any time. We will see how this plays out in addition to the latency test, but this is one area where Stadia has an advantage in that there is no session limit.

Also, last night I took a peek at the Founders version of GeForce Now on PC and the highest resolution I could set for any game was 1080p, even if I was playing on a 4K monitor; Stadia may not be able to achieve 4K on PC yet, but it is possible on mobile and TVs, it is possible.

To get started now with a free or Founders account, see the system requirements:

Stay tuned for our GeForce Now review and latency test later this week.