I abandoned my Steam Deck for a year – but Nvidia GeForce Now has made it a Nintendo Switch 2 killer

Tom's Guide

2 days ago

Nvidia GeForce Now is now available to download on Steam Deck. The full native app was quietly announced at CES 2025, but now it's here. To say this is one of the biggest steps forward that Nvidia has made in cloud gaming would be an understatement.
I've been testing it, and not only has it renewed my dwindling love for the Steam Deck, I think this combination could be the Nintendo Switch 2's biggest threat.
Of course, this comes with some conditions, which I'll go into, but for the purpose of just playing gorgeous-looking games on a handheld, getting GeForce Now on the Deck is significant.
So, what does it have to do to beat the Switch 2? As a gamer that isn't necessarily that bothered by the team chat, motion controls or other fun additions to Nintendo's new console, this combo has to do two things well:
Does it hit both these notes? Sort of, as there's still some way to go. But it does so in a way that makes me confident that Nvidia is on the right track here, and it's making me reconsider my past judgements of game streaming. Let's get into it.
This is the model of Steam Deck I used for this testing, and in all honesty, for all the love I have for OLED, this is all you need for a great gaming experience.
For a limited time, you can get 40% off a 6-month Nvidia GeForce Now Performance tier package. This gets you 1440p gaming capabilities at 60 FPS, and gives you an Nvidia RTX gaming PC in the cloud to handle all your gameplay on any device — be it a Steam Deck, smartphone, or even the Meta Quest 3.
With $10 off my favorite cheap docking station for Steam Deck, this is a must-buy for anyone sporting Valve's handheld. Not only do you get the 100W power delivery and HDMI 2.0 for 60 FPS gameplay, but there's two USB ports for peripherals and even an Ethernet cable for that smoother, faster connection for GeForce Now.
There's a bit of a workaround to it, so let's break down the steps:
There is a plan B using Command Line if you need it, but out of everyone I've spoken to, nobody had to resort to this. If you're in the minority here, Nvidia's got you covered.
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Let's address the elephant in the room: I loved the Steam Deck when I first got it — I even reviewed it for Laptop Mag and was smitten. So, what changed over the past three years?
Honestly, my uses have always come in waves. It was perfect for travel — playing AAA games on a flight is still awesome, even if it's a little rough.
But over the last 12 months, three things happened that pushed it into the dreaded 'man drawer' (you know the one).
But that really good reason has arrived. Let me tell you about GeForce Now, and how it's completely revived my love for the Steam Deck.
Dramatic, I know, but let me explain.
For those uninitiated, GeForce Now is Nvidia's cloud gaming service that links to your existing Steam, Epic, Ubisoft and Xbox libraries, and gives you streaming access to the games that you already own.
Once the best server is selected upon opening a game, you are taken straight into the game. And, if you're on GeForce Now Ultimate, you have an entire RTX 4080 gaming rig to play on.
As you can see from the screenshots, the difference is night and day if you're playing with a good internet connection for two key reasons.
First, you're not relying on the AMD silicon to power the games. That means no more hardware limitations, and it means you can play the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 at maxed out settings for beautiful visuals at a locked 60 FPS (the only constraint of my OG Steam Deck's refresh rate).
In fact, if something becomes a little more demanding (like Indiana Jones and The Great Circle), you can make the most of DLSS (provided you're on Ultimate) to make it even smoother. Whether I was on my home network or at the pub, I could play to my heart's content.
And speaking of that, this leads me to the second part — the battery life boosts. Currently, the 40Wh cell in my old Steam Deck is showing its age. Firing up a Balatro session can see that life draining in around 90 minutes, and don't even get me started on the roughly 45 minutes I get on Hitman: World of Assassination.
But by putting the computational demands on a cloud server rather than spinning up the AMD chip on the device, I've seen longevity go up dramatically.
For context, playing the same level on Hitman, I'm able to get roughly 6 hours of longevity in one sitting. Did I come out of the pub rather tipsy for playing that long? Yes. But it's purely revelatory watching the power demands on my Steam Deck reduce from 15 watts down to 7 watts for GeForce Now and getting so much more stamina for it.
Also, shoutout to the low latency on offer here. Cloud gaming has a bit of a reputation for lagging controls — something I still feel in Xbox Cloud Gaming for sure.
But there is one more thing that the Steam Deck with GeForce Now has to do to truly put Nintendo on blast: docked mode. I wired it up to my TV to see what I could squeeze out of it.
And the end result is incredible. It's not perfect, as resolution scaling seems to be limited to the 16:10 aspect ratio of the Steam Deck's display, but the fidelity of games on here due to the fact you're streaming an entire gaming PC is oceans beyond what the Nintendo Switch 2 will be able to do.
Going back to Hitman with everything turned up to Ultra and DLSS set to balanced, frame rates were smooth, details were beautifully rendered without any of those network speed glitches you may see in visuals and it scales well to a big screen.
If Nvidia is reading this (hi), if you could update this to support external screens better (maybe giving us full 4K 16:9), that'd be another significant step forward.
Let's start with the obvious. GeForce Now on Steam Deck has been Nvidia's Jay-Z moment, allowing the company to reintroduce itself as the best player in the cloud streaming game.
Gameplay is near-latency free, connecting is rapid with very short waiting times (provided you go for Ultimate or Performance, which, based on what I see from the free mode, are the only real ways to go) and the sheer drop in power demands meant I could play all day with no worries.
A little bit of work needs to be done on transitioning between handheld and docked mode to really make it sing on a TV. But as far as first steps go, this is a Herculean leap into it.
Of course, there are limitations. The big one being that it requires an internet connection. But statistically, most of the time you'll be on your Deck near a Wi-Fi network, so outside of the smaller circumstances where you'll have to rely on your device's chip to run offline, there's no better way to play on Steam Deck right now.