The point of cloud gaming is it doesn’t require a powerful PC; a Chromebook should do just fine. Today, Google and Nvidia are ready to prove it by giving away a free, no-strings-attached GeForce Now subscription to every modern Chromebook owner.
You don’t have to buy a new machine, and there’s no recurring subscription. You don’t have to enter any credit card information, Google spokesperson Peter Du confirms to The Verge. As long as you’ve got a Chromebook from 2017 or newer, you can simply head over to Google’s Chromebook Perks page and hit the “Get perk” button to redeem a three-month subscription to the Priority tier of Nvidia’s GeForce Now.
If you’ve purchased a gaming Chromebook, the deal’s even sweeter: you get three months of GeForce Now Ultimate, the higher tier of Nvidia’s platform that lets you stream at 1440p resolution and 120 frames per second.
It’s a shame Nvidia isn’t letting everyone try Ultimate because it’s still pretty easy to write off cloud gaming if you don’t experience the improved latency and image quality that only come with the company’s Ultimate tier. It shows what the service is truly capable of.
You will need a fast internet connection for cloud gaming, of course, as we discovered testing one of the first gaming Chromebooks with GeForce Now, but the beauty of a free three-month subscription is you can just try it and find out.
Interestingly, this announcement comes just two weeks after Google quietly revealed that even more powerful gaming Chromebooks with dedicated Nvidia GPUs had been canceled. Were these free Nvidia subscriptions originally meant to go with Nvidia-powered Chromebooks? It reminds me of the time Google announced gaming Chromebooks to begin with — right after it canceled its own Google Stadia cloud gaming platform.