Ahead of CES 2023 in Las Vegas, Nvidia said on Tuesday, January 3, that its on-demand cloud gaming service, dubbed GeForce Now, is coming to some Hyundai, BYD, and Polestar electric vehicles.
According to Nvidia, the new GeForce NOW service can make time spent charging or travelling in cars more enjoyable by allowing front-seat passengers to stream games while the car is parked and, if screens are available, allowing passengers to game in the rear seat.
Vice president (VP) and general manager of automotive at NVIDIA, Ali Kani, said, “Accelerated computing, AI and connectivity are delivering new levels of automation, safety, convenience and enjoyment to the car. The ability to stream popular titles from gamers’ libraries and dozens of free-to-play games will bring the in-vehicle infotainment experience to new heights.”
The company also claimed that more than 1,000 games, including top-rated ones like A Plague Tale: Requiem, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Cyberpunk 2077, can be played using GeForce NOW’s low-latency streaming technology powered by GeForce servers in the cloud.
Another VP of automotive, Danny Shapiro, in an interview, said, “It’s like Netflix but interactive; it’s not just buffering content and sending it down. Somebody would have a gaming controller, and those button clicks are transmitted to the server.”
“The game is played, rendered and then streamed back to the device. So there’s a lot of technology we’ve developed to basically reduce the latency and enable somebody to play a game in the cloud with the exact same experience as they would expect on their PC or running on their local TV,” Danny added.
A similar attempt was also done by BMW in October 2023 when they partnered with AirConsole to provide casual online multiplayer games in their vehicles, starting with the seven series models this year.
According to BMW, the phone can be used as a controller, and the gaming will be done over the cloud servers. The focus at the time was mainly on casual, relaxing multiplayer titles, and no announcement for AAA game support was made during that time.
Despite not being that popular in the competitive and esports scene, cloud gaming is slowly making its way into casual multiplayer and single-player experiences.