Graphics giant Nvidia is getting into the networking business, in a roundabout fashion: The company has announced the GeForce Now Recommended Router programme, in which it highlights third-party routers best suited for use with its game streaming platform.
GeForce Now, built on top of the company's GeForce Grid cloud gaming platform, promises to allow players to run triple-A Windows games on lower-end hardware including otherwise-incompatible Apple Mac systems and Nvidia's own Android-powered Shield microconsole and tablet devices. Like all cloud gaming systems, though, the experience is very much network-sensitive: Too high latency, too much packet loss, or too little bandwidth and the experience goes from a convincing replica of local play to a blurry, juddery mess.
It's here that Nvidia's getting involved: The company has announced a new certification programme, GeForce Now Recommended Routers, in which it will give its blessing to hardware it knows won't degrade the gaming experience. 'With our recommended routers, in-home network congestion becomes a thing of the past, helping to keep your gameplay silky smooth,' claims Nvidia's Andrew Fear. 'The latest generation of routers allows you to configure settings to prioritise GeForce Now before all other data. But we wanted to make it even easier. Recommended routers are certified as factory-enabled with a GeForce Now quality of service (QoS) profile. It’s automatically enabled when you’re gaming with GeForce Now.'
The company has confirmed that a range of third-party networking specialists have signed up to the programme, including Asus, D-Link, Netgear, Razer, TP-Link, and Ubiquiti, with the first routers to bear the marque launching this week in the US and Canada and Ubiquiti's Amplifi HD Gamer's Edition being the first out of the gates. The same GeForce Now-specific QoS profile will also be made available to existing routers via a firmware update, Nvidia has confirmed, though a list of which routers are to receive this update has not been provided.
More information is available from the launch announcement.
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