Nvidia launches GeForce Now beta, turns your Mac into a virtual gaming PC

First introduced back at CES this past January, Nvidia’s GeForce Now for Mac is available in beta. This service from Nvidia allows Mac users to access PC-only games and offers up a strong performance, especially for less powerful Macs.

Nvidia’s streaming service GeForce Now first debuted a couple of years ago with the company’s Android tablet, then expanded to its set-top box last year. Now, the service has been expanded to support Macs. Here’s how Nvidia describes its new service for Macs.

Bring your favorite PC* games to life at max settings, with smooth framerates—all powered by GeForce® GTX GPUs in the cloud. All you need is a good Internet connection, and to be located in North America. Currently, the free beta is only available  for Mac users. Join our waitlist to be notified when GeForce NOW for Mac becomes available in new regions, and when the PC version is released.

We were most impressed after demoing Witcher 3 on an iMac and Rise of the Tomb Raider on a MacBook Air.

More impressive, though, is the performance of GeForce Now on the Macbook Air. The older, less powerful machine had Rise of the Tomb Raider loaded up, and the game played without a single hiccup despite being on the highest settings. Needless to say, it was pretty impressive. However, this service isn’t perfect. GeForce Now takes a while to fully load up, but Nvidia did mention that it is working to speed things up. Currently, loading up Rise of the Tomb Raiderfrom the service via Steam takes about 1-3 minutes. Everything will, of course, depend on your internet connection and an ethernet connection is strongly recommended.

Nvidia is promoting the popular Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds which isn’t available yet for Mac. However, there are many more titles supported including several of the Call of Duty titles, Destiny 2 beta, Diablo III, League of Legends, and Rocket League among others.