One of the perks of LG and Samsung’s new Smart TVs is their built-in support for NVIDIA’s game streaming service, GeForce NOW, enabling gamers to enjoy some of their favorite games without a lot of additional hardware.
Those platforms may not be the best place to enjoy GeForce NOW at the moment, however. As recently disclosed by NVIDIA’s Phil Eisler, GeForce NOW streams on LG and Samsung smart TVs currently max out at 1080p, a substantially lower resolution than what’s provided by the premium RTX 3080 tier of the service (1440p at 120 FPS on PC and Mac).
“The TVs use many different SOCs with different performance levels capable of decoding our streams at 60 FPS, so we’re focused on 1080p first,” Eisler explained in a statement to The Verge. That said, NVIDIA will be improving the quality of GeForce NOW streams for LG and Samsung smart TVs with the appropriate hardware in the near future.
“We’ve rolled that out with LG first in December and with Samsung models in the first half of 2022, and will increase resolutions in the second half of 2022 as we continue to optimize for those decoding applications,” promised Eisler.
Contrastingly, Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service offers 4K streams on both LG and Samsung smart TVs, although it’s unclear whether this means the resolution of the stream itself or the actual internal render resolution of the games. GeForce NOW’s membership plans include a paid Priority and RTX 3080 tier, the latter of which costs $99.99 for six months and includes perks such as exclusive access to RTX 3080 servers and a free copy of Crysis Remastered.
Source: The Verge