Summary
The big boom of game streaming services has come and gone, with companies trying the concept out and experiencing various degrees of success (or failure). NVIDIA’s GeForce Now is among the most popular, if not the most popular right now, and it’s making its way to one of the most popular gaming handhelds—the Steam Deck.
NVIDIA has officially released a native GeForce Now app on theSteam Deck. The GeForce Now app, just like it does on all other platforms, gives you access to over 2,200 supported streamed titles. These games are sourced from major digital storefronts including Steam and the Epic Games Store, among others. Of course, you can already play many of those games on your Steam Deck, but streaming games on this hardware provides a series of advantages. For one, the Steam Deck’s specifications mean you might be limited in terms of graphic output for some games, and you have to run games within the constraints of your hardware.
By streaming games, however, you don’t really have any hardware constraints since you’re not actually running the game on your hardware. The service allows for streaming at resolutions up to 4K and frame rates up to 60fps. Of course, the Steam Deck’s screen is 1280x800, so you can’t really run any games in 4K in portable mode, but you can drive an external display from it. And for supported titles, features like High Dynamic Range (HDR), NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 (Deep Learning Super Sampling), and Reflex technology are also available, making your games look as crisp as they can possibly be.
Because the games are rendered in the cloud and streamed to the device rather than rendered on-device, the computational load on the Steam Deck’s internal hardware is substantially reduced. NVIDIA claims that this can result in up to 50% more battery life compared to running games natively on the device. This increased efficiency could allow for longer gaming sessions while on the go. Provided you have a connection that’s stable enough to sustain a streamed gaming session, you could get a lot more juice out of your Steam Deck. In my opinion, the problematic part would be actually securing a stable, fast Internet connection on the go—you won’t be able to stream games from a plane, for one.
GeForce Now for the Steam Deck was first announced during CES 2025, and we’ve waited a few months for the final release, so it’s nice to see it finally out now. You can install it on your Steam Deck now and check out all the games you want. Maybe you could even compare how a game runs natively versus how it runs streamed?
