GeForce Now on Steam Deck is perfect as new releases send me into framerate hell

Valve’s Steam Deck is an amazing piece of kit, but it isn’t that powerful, at least anymore. On launch, the plucky handheld that could was able to play pretty much anything you throw at it, but as the generation has gone on new games like Final Fantasy XVI, Space Marine 2 and even Hogwarts Legacy show the system at its weakest.

Relying on AMD’s rough FSR reconstruction from very low resolutions, new AAA games on Steam Deck look awful in motion. Some games—such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora—struggle to run at all. This isn’t bad for the Steam Deck, it’s fine, it was never meant to brute force its way through games that bring even PS5s to their limits, but there’s still a solution.

GeForce Now on Steam Deck, oo la la

With the release of Final Fantasy XVI’s demo earlier this year, it was clear that the Steam Deck was going to be unable to play the game at a performance level I could enjoy. Long loading times and huge lurches in framerate made it pretty unsightly and, as a game that revels in cinematic flair, I didn’t want to play it in a suboptimal way.

Thankfully, Final Fantasy 16 was added to GeForce Now, Nvidia’s cloud gaming service that I’ve previously had mixed experiences with. After saying “screw it”, I dived in with GeForce Now and after fifteen hours with Square Enix’s incredibly heavy PC release, I’m having a blast. Of course, that is dependent on the times when my internet connection is willing to play ball.

Without trying to sound like a sponsorship, because this isn’t, GeForce Now allowed me to push the visuals of FF16 as far as I wanted, albeit stuck at the Steam Deck’s 800p screen resolution. Using the service’s quick-and-easy Steam Deck installation tool, I was able to jump into FF16 in minutes. It played great, mostly sticking to its 60fps target, but dropping in both frames and image quality whenever Britain’s notoriously rough Virgin Media internet decided it was having a strop.

Nevertheless, GeForce Now is a great deal better than it was last time I used it. Over the past few days, I’ve been enjoying Final Fantasy XVI with minimal input lag, Alan Wake 2 with its stupendously good path-tracing and even a bout of Destiny 2, a game that is unplayable natively on the Deck.

It’s not perfect

Of course, with any cloud gaming service, your mileage may (and will) vary. However, in my experience, it trounces Xbox Game Pass’ long wait times and spotty connection and the less said about Amazon Luna the better. Nevertheless, there are some issues with games on different storefronts opening properly—mostly Epic—and you do have to own the games on your account to play them.

There’s also the fact that there is a time limit attached to your gameplay. Maxed out at 8 hours for Ultimate subscribers, it’s a time limit I’ve personally never hit, but it’s one that could annoy some players. With that said, eight hours of pretty solid gameplay in most areas of my house—not the bathroom—is good enough for me.

For me, GeForce Now is a great addition to the Steam Deck. If a game I really want to play is too big for Valve’s little-ish handheld, I am more than comfortable playing via GeForce Now. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough, and that’s just fine.