One of the main questions with cloud gaming is how well games perform on various services? And naturally a follow up question after that would be is it really worth signing up for?
Well, to answer those questions, benchmarking some popular games on various cloud gaming services might give you a better clue on whether these services will fulfill your gaming needs or not. In this video, we will benchmark The Division 2 on 4 different platforms in the most used High Definition setting – 1080p.
GeForce Now at 1080p
First up we have GeForce Now. Since GeForce Now is a free service, this is an obvious choice for new cloud gamers who play PC games. It’s also good to note that GeForce Now ONLY runs in 1080p as of now. No support for 4K yet even under the Founders edition. We’ll see if that changes in the near future. Lets run the test. I’ll GeForce Now’s stats in the upper left corner.
The GeForce Now test has a score of 5259 with a standard average of 60 FPS all the way through. You can check the cloud PC stats here as well.
Stadia at 1080p
Next up we have Stadia. Since The Division 2 is one of the few games able to crossplay with the PC gamers, we thought it would be great to benchmark this as well. Please note that the Benchmark utility is not present on the Stadia version as it is on the PC version so we made mock run of the Benchmark ourselves. We also downloaded a Chrome extension to see the in game stats as well.
Now it took almost exactly a minute to get from the front of Air Force One to the platform you see here. So we took an average FPS from that time and came to average of 59.75 fps.
Shadow Tech at 1080p
We have our Shadow PC up next. It is the low end Boost level PC. Most Shadow users are going to be using this tier so this is the level we are using for this test.
Our Shadow test had a surprising score of 4715 with a FPS average of 53. So far it’s the lowest out of the three.
Personal Couch Gaming PC
Last but not least we have my personal couch PC. We decided to run this test as well to get a good comparison vs actual at-home desktop hardware.
My PC stats include an AMD Ryzen 5 2600, 16 GB of 3200MHz RAM, and the GTX 1070 Ti.
This had surprisingly better results than the Shadow PC at a score of 5186 with an FPS average of 59.
Overall comparisons
Geforce Now and Stadia had quite similar results with Shadow a bit shy on the performance. It’s hard to tell which won but with these tests, you can chalk it up as a tie. I will leave the PC stats up here to compare with the rest as the PC competes best with the Shadow PC stats yet it yielded a better score and average fps.
Now, if I had to choose between GeForce Now and Stadia for 1080p gameplay, I’d choose Stadia. Why? GeForce Now is a free service and good bandwidth can sometimes be limited due to high demand. This can happen pretty frequently and when it does, the infamous “Spotty Connection” message appears and I instantly get downgraded to 720p or even worse at times. This has never happened to me on Stadia. I have had a consistent 1080p connection almost all the time. Now, this might due to the lack of usage but as of now, I have no complaints.
So to wrap this up, Stadia would be my choose overall for consistent 1080p gameplay. Second place would go to Shadow, I rarely get drops in performance with Shadow even if they don’t have the best hardware. The convenience of GeForce Now is nice but it’s not reliable to give great performance all the time on the free version OR the paid Founders version.
I hope that gives you a better idea of which cloud gaming platform may be the best for you. To see more cloud gaming tests like this, make sure to subscribe and stay tuned here at the only place where you can do battle in gaming heaven – Cloud Gaming Battle.
