I Used NVIDIA GeForce Now for Over a Week in India — Here's the Honest Truth

For the last week, I have been playing Resident Evil Requiem with Path Tracing, Forza Horizon 5 on the Extreme preset, and Final Fantasy XVI on an RTX 5080 that’s sitting in Mumbai, from my modest setup in Delhi, with a maximum ping of 43ms. That’s because I had Early Access to GeForce Now, which, as of 16th April, is available in beta for people who have signed up.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Cloud gaming has been "almost there" for years. Google Stadia promised us the future and quietly shut down. Xbox Cloud Gaming exists but caps out at 1080p 60fps and never quite felt like a real PC gaming experience. So when the green gang started teasing the rollout of GeForce Now in India, I kept my expectations in check. After a week of actual use, though, I'll say this: the skepticism was worth having, and the service earned its way past it.

GeForce Now India Pricing and How to Access Beta

If you want to understand how to set up and check the pricing across tiers, I would guide you to one of our articles that covers everything in detail.

But what I'll say here is that I was on the Ultimate tier, which, per NVIDIA's introductory price, is Rs 1,999 for 3 months. That means this will cost you Rs 666 per month to play games on an RTX 5080 GPU. I think the phrase "value for money" is an understatement here. To put it in context, I pay for PlayStation Plus Extra, which costs roughly the same amount for three months. But to actually use it, I also need to own a PlayStation 5. With GeForce Now, the screen you already have is enough. Yes, you need to own your own games, but buying a few titles on Steam is not the same conversation as buying a console.

That said, as mentioned above, this is an introductory price. It's definitely going to settle in once the honeymoon period fades away, but for now, there's no concrete date. NVIDIA is testing the waters, probably letting people get comfortable with the service before it returns to its natural pricing. What gives me some hope is that in the US, they charge $20 for a single month — roughly what we're paying for three. If NVIDIA is serious about the Indian market, and the Mumbai server investment suggests they are, I'd like to think the localized pricing sticks around in some form.

The Setup Process

The setup process is about as straightforward as it gets. The GFN app is available on Android, PC, and macOS, so most people are covered with a native install. iPhone users are the exception. On iOS, you have to go through the web app instead.

You log in using the email ID linked to your NVIDIA account, and you are pretty much in.

From there, you pair whichever storefronts your games live on — Steam, Epic Games, Ubisoft Connect, Xbox — and your library shows up ready to go. The whole thing took me a few minutes and required no technical know-how whatsoever.

I ran into two annoyances during my time with the service, and both came from Steam. It kept prompting me to log in repeatedly when I tried to launch a game, which was mildly frustrating, but it was a one-time issue once it finally accepted the credentials. The second issue was more disruptive — Steam would occasionally boot into Big Picture mode and ask me to hit Play again, even though I had already launched the game through GFN. Every other client, Epic, Ubisoft Connect, and Xbox, behaved without any fuss.

Before you jump into a game, I'd suggest running the built-in network test first. It gives you a quick read on whether your connection is stable enough for a smooth session. Once that checks out, you can head into the settings and customize the experience to your liking.

There are preset modes to choose from — Balanced, Data Saver, Competitive, and Cinematic. Cinematic, as the name suggests, pushes for higher visual fidelity, while Competitive prioritizes frame rate over everything else. If you want more control, you can also manually adjust the bitrate, resolution — which goes all the way up to 5K if your display can handle it — frame rate, HDR, VSync, and more. On the data consumption side, NVIDIA says 1080p can use up to 10GB per hour, while 4K can go up to 15GB per hour, though this varies depending on the game and your streaming settings.

There is also a feature called Install to Play, which lets you install games directly to cloud storage rather than relying solely on the preloaded titles on GFN's servers. This significantly expands the library of games you can access. To use it, you need the 200GB cloud storage add-on, which NVIDIA is currently offering at Rs 299 for 3 months. That storage also doubles as a place for your save files, so your progress carries over across sessions and devices without any manual syncing.

Performance and Gaming Experience

Let me start with the most important thing: GeForce Now does not care what device you are on, as long as your internet does not let it down. I tested on five different devices and across different game genres.

I loaded up Forza Horizon 5 on the MacBook Air M2, which has 8GB of RAM. It played the game on the Extreme graphics preset without a single tantrum. On the iPhone 16e, I played Star Wars Outlaws at Ultra settings with Ray Tracing enabled, and it gave me 80 fps with a ping of 31ms around 10:30 pm.

Resident Evil Requiem I played on the OPPO Find X9 Pro, and this was the session that genuinely impressed me the most. I ran it at the Max preset with Path Tracing enabled. This is something I cannot do on my local setup. Path Tracing is brutally demanding, and my hardware taps out well before hitting that kind of fidelity. Since the Ultimate tier on GFN runs on an RTX 5080, it gave me constant 90fps, while the game looked stunning on a smaller display too. This would look absolutely stunning on a 4K TV or monitor.

Those were all single-player, story-driven games, though. So I went a step further and tried a co-op campaign session with a friend on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. For this, I came back to my PC and plugged in via Ethernet. On the highest available preset with 1080p resolution, I was pulling over 100 fps throughout. There was a single moment where the resolution dipped for a second and snapped right back. That was it. But, the thing is — after about 20 minutes, I had completely forgotten I was actually playing on a cloud and not on my PC locally.

And then there was Fortnite on the Poco X8 Pro. GeForce Now has native touch controls for Fortnite, and this actually worked perfectly. I played the no-build battle royale mode and for the first time, genuinely enjoyed Fortnite. There was one hiccup, though. I had completely forgotten that I was downloading an entire season of Shrinking on the Apple TV app on a different phone, and that ate into the bandwidth and caused multiple latency spikes mid-game. The moment I turned that off, everything came back to normal. So, essentially, when you are on GFN, your connection belongs to the game entirely.

Latency and Servers

This is the single biggest reason GeForce Now actually works in India. NVIDIA has deployed servers in Mumbai, and that proximity makes a real difference.

For gamers in Mumbai, latency is in the 10ms range or lower. That's genuinely exceptional for a cloud gaming service. I'm in Delhi, which is farther away, and the highest ping I experienced throughout the week was 43ms. That's well within acceptable territory for most gaming scenarios.

The service itself flags anything over 40ms as a potential concern. But I never actually felt it translate into gameplay issues. The yellow warning is more conservative than the reality of what 43ms actually feels like in practice, especially for story-based games.

Should You Buy GeForce Now?

NVIDIA GeForce Now's launch in India is better than I expected. The service is not for everyone. Bad internet will break it immediately. And it won't replace Xbox Game Pass for people who want games pre-loaded.

But for the person who has a device with a display and a halfway decent broadband connection and does not want to spend a fortune on a gaming rig? This is a very strong option. For Rs 666 a month at the Ultimate tier, the value is hard to beat.

If you are still not convinced, I recommend getting on the waitlist and trying it for the first three months. At this price, the risk of trying it is about as low as it gets. It is not a perfect service, as many factors come into play. But it is a genuinely good one, and that is more than I was ready to say about cloud gaming in India until this week.

Buy it if...

You don't own a gaming PC or laptop, but you have a monitor, phone, or any screen with a fast and stable internet connection
You already have a library of games on Steam, Epic, Xbox, or Ubisoft
You want RTX 5080-level performance without spending Rs 100,000+ on a rig