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GeForce Now, Samsung leaks galore, and more tech news
Your tech digest, by way of the DGiT Daily newsletter, for Wednesday, February 5, 2020.
1. NVIDIA GeForce Now: Stadia’s older, better rival launches
NVIDIA GeForce Now is a game streaming service much like Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud. Connect to the cloud and game, without needing the latest hardware. Stadia launched a few months ago to weak reviews. (I paid up for Stadia, and I don’t use it much.)
But, GeForce Now is officially out of beta and open to all, with no more waiting lists or technical exclusivity.
- Right now, anyone can sign up and start playing games at no cost.
- So, why would you? Well, it’s free.
- You can join and play (most) games you already own from services like Steam and free-to-play games like Fortnite (which remains so much fun, by the way).
- The free period is capped at a limited one-hour session length, which is ideal to test how the streaming works in your home or wherever you game.
- And if it’s looking good and you want to play for more than one hour, as an introductory special, NVIDIA is offering its premium subscription at just $4.99 per month for 12 months, with a 90-day trial period.
- That price will last throughout 2020.
What’s good?
- In a blog post from NVIDIA announcing the launch, which features a load of delicious shade-throwing at Stadia, the company details its pricing and compatibility.
- It’s good for PCs, Macs, Android phones, and NVIDIA Shield devices for now.
- Note not all games on Steam, Uplay, Origin, Epic Games Store, Battle.net, and so on, will work: not all publishers allow NVIDIA to host their games, like Rockstar Games and Square Enix.
- A key point: if you buy more games, they’ll remain yours since they aren’t locked to a standalone platform like games bought in Google Stadia. Taking your game library with you is a big selling point of Steam, and that remains part of GeForce Now’s offering.
- As for how it all works, setting your games to highest-quality in GeForce Now suggests an estimate of 15GB per hour of bandwidth, on par with Stadia.
- Add in that every supported game uses its service’s cloud save feature and you have yourself what outlets are calling “a stunner” and “unmatched”.
- They might be right.
- More on what GeForce Now is here.
2. WHOOPs: Samsung confirms Galaxy S20 name and design on its own site (Android Authority).
3. Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus leak compares it to original Galaxy Buds: $149 vs $129, but loads more battery life and speaker additions (Android Authority).
4. LG and ZTE pull out of MWC 2020 due to coronavirus threat. First of many? Also, there’s a “no handshake” policy in place (Android Authority).
5. Following on from yesterday’s main story about YouTube’s earnings, YouTube pays out about half of its revenue to creators, but a large portion goes to the top one percent. And creators now want more (The Verge).
6. Dyson reveals patents for headphones that purify air around you (Bloomberg).
7. Someone used neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4K quality (Ars Technica).
8. The app that broke the Iowa Caucus: slapdash software engineering, procurement, and deployment (New York Times).
9. The New Formula E Car is here (Jalopnik).
10. Doing Western students’ homework is big business in Kenya (pri.org)
11. “What are great questions to ask your interviewer at the end of a job interview?”(r/askreddit).
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