Should You Take Gaming On Chromebooks Seriously? Nvidia's Latest Move Says It All

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET

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ZDNET's cardinal takeaways

• Starting today, acquisition of a caller Chromebook comes pinch a GeForce Now Fast Pass for a afloat year.
• The Blackwell RTX architecture upgrade brings large capacity improvements.  
• GeForce Now is besides adding complete 2,300 games to its Install to Play characteristic that were antecedently not disposable successful nan library. 

Google and Nvidia conscionable announced a business to get much gamers connected Chromebooks. Starting today, immoderate acquisition of a caller Chromebook will travel pinch a free GeForce Now Fast Pass -- a caller rank tier designed for Chromebook users, progressive for a afloat year. 

The connection coincides pinch Nvidia's Blackwell RTX architecture upgrades to GeForce Now. We're talking afloat ray tracing, DLSS 4 multi-frame generation, and much ratio pinch Nvidia citing a 15% bandwidth savings without compromising image quality.   

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The Fast Pass allows for 10 hours of gaming per period connected GeForce Now, letting you skip nan queue and jump correct into your game. You besides get entree to higher capacity settings -- amended resolutions, much FPS, and much virtual RAM compared to free users. 

If you don't usage each 10 hours of gaming successful a month, up to 5 of your unused hours will rollover to nan adjacent one. This makes unreality gaming connected a caller Chromebook Plus a batch easier to get into, arsenic respective of nan models released successful nan past year are equipped pinch nan hardware to tally galore of nan latest titles disconnected nan cloud. 

The upgrades to GeForce Now's infrastructure pinch Blackwell RTX exertion unlocks immoderate important upgrades to gaming capacity for its Ultimate tier, including DLSS 4, afloat ray tracing, ray reconstruction, DLSS muli-frame generation, and DLSS ace solution for up to 5K 120 FPS streaming. 

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET

Additionally, its caller "Cinematic Quality" upgrades visuals aimed astatine improving graphics fidelity crossed nan board. I precocious had a chance to spot nan cinematic value streaming successful personification astatine a demo successful New York, and nan ocular improvements are instantly palpable successful analyzable textures for illustration foliage, water, rocks, and scenery elements.  

Higher bandwidth for improved colour and texture modeling results successful smoother sampling, higher framework rates, and full strategy latency astatine sub-30ms. Lower than a PlayStation 5 Pro, Nvidia says. 

New surface optimization exertion joins nan characteristic database arsenic well, pinch nan level automatically detecting show solution for best-possible streaming value without (hopefully) fiddling astir successful settings by nan user. 

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This is each great, but is your favourite crippled still not disposable successful GeForce Now's crippled library? The caller Install to Play characteristic allows subscribers to tally games that aren't officially offered done a impermanent allotment of unreality storage. 

Users tin upload prime games (the developer has to opt in) to a single-session 100GB of unreality storage. This magnitude of retention comes free pinch nan Ultimate and Performance tier memberships, and is temporary, meaning you'll person to re-install it to nan unreality erstwhile you log out. 

Also: Are premium Chromebooks worthy it successful 2025? This laptop was capable to person this Windows fan

If you want persistent unreality retention for your game, however, you tin get that arsenic well. Multiple plans beryllium arsenic add-ons to nan 2 paid tiers: 200GB for an further $2.99/mo, 500GB for $4.99/mo, and 1TB for $7.99/mo. 

Nvidia GeForce Now presently has 3 tiers of work available: Free (with ads), Performance (which is $99 for a year) and Ultimate ($200 for a year). The paid tiers connection importantly amended capacity pinch queue times of little than a minute, 56GB of DRAM, up to 4K solution and 240FPS, and support for ultrawide gaming monitors.