Nvidia and Valve want Team Green's GeForce Now streaming service to work better on the Steam Deck for those who enjoy cloud gaming on handheld (and yes, there are reasons you might want to, we'll get back to that). ).
As reported by PC Gamer (opens in a new tab), this comes from Andrew Fear, who is a Product Management Manager for GeForce Now at Nvidia, telling our sister site: "Today there is no native app on Steam Deck. Please use a Chromium browser for this to work. I'd say Nvidia and Valve, I think we're both interested in doing better. But we don't have any announcements about a native app coming to Steam.
As Fear notes, now if you want to stream games via GeForce Now to the Steam Deck, you need to do it in a Chromium browser (like Google Chrome or Edge).
However, as you might guess, running in a browser isn't the best experience for GeForce Now - it makes certain things very clunky, especially the interface and game controls, and a native app would be a huge step forward for the Steam Deck. . .
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The downside here is that Fear's claim is very vague. Saying that Nvidia and Valve want to make GeForce Now a better Steam Deck experience, there's no suggestion how that might come about, and besides that, the clarification that there's no native app in the works doesn't sound entirely positive. It's just a hint that things are going to get better, rather than anything remotely specific.
While it's nice to see this dialed in, there's really nothing exciting right now. If there's ever going to be a native Linux app for GeForce Now, well, we're not sure, let's just say. It's a minority gaming platform, to say the least (one with four percent of each and every player on Steam in Valve's latest hardware survey), and except for that Steam Deck (which runs Linux, SteamOS to be precise). ) truly becomes essential in the future, it's probably not worth it in terms of the development time and cost required now.
Why do you want to stream games via GeForce Now to Steam Deck? Well, for starters, it's a way to save battery life, as running GeForce Now in the browser is much less taxing than getting the Steam Deck to run certain games natively. Demanding titles can totally destroy your handheld battery, of course, while GeForce Now streaming can give you multiple hours of playtime (supposedly on the order of 5 hours, based on reviews we've seen).
También deja jugar ciertos juegos que non son compatible con Steam Deck y no se pueden ejecutar en lo más mínimo. This includes games with anti-tram pad functions that do not work well with Proton's compatibility capability on the Steam Deck. Also, besides non-working titles, there may be other games that have issues or run sub-optimally on the Deck, and streaming those could also be a much better experience (while saving the battery).
The downside to streaming, as always, is that the smoothness of the game you'll experience depends on the speed of your internet connection.
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