Quick answer
GeForce NOW wins on picture, on servers and on what you can try free: RTX 5080 rigs, up to 5K at 120 fps, 36 regions with a public queue for each, and a free plan with no end date. Boosteroid wins on price, on hours and on the games the other one refuses: €7.49 a month by the year, no monthly cap, no session timer, and publishers who never signed with NVIDIA. Both stream the PC games you already own on Steam, Epic or another store, so the question is not which library — it is which one carries your games, how far you sit from its servers, and whether you play more than 100 hours a month.
These two are the closest pair in cloud gaming. Both rent you a Windows machine in a data centre and stream the games you already bought; neither sells a game or includes one. NVIDIA is the incumbent, with its own GPUs, its own regions and a free plan that has run since 2020. Boosteroid is the challenger from Kharkiv, on AMD hardware, cheaper, uncapped, and dense in Europe. People switch between them more than between any other two services, mostly over the same three things: the 100-hour cap, a game one of them lacks, and the distance to the nearest server.
This is a round-by-round comparison: the games each one can start, the price, the picture, the play-time limits, the servers and the latency, the devices, and what you can try before you pay. Prices and specifications are the operators' own figures, read on 28 August 2026, with the source next to each one. Game counts and the overlap come from our daily read of both catalogues. We rank the rounds; you decide which of them you care about.
Boosteroid vs GeForce NOW: the specs side by side
Same model, different bets. The lines that differ are the ones to read.
Three lines decide most cases: whether your games are on the service, the 100-hour cap, and where the nearest server is. The rest is a resolution figure you will notice on a television and not on a laptop.
Games: the same stores, two different lists of what will run
Both open your Steam account. Neither runs all of it, and the holes are in different places.
Both services work the same way. You link the stores you buy from and the games you own appear in a library, minus the ones the publisher has not allowed. GeForce NOW links Steam, Epic, GOG, Ubisoft Connect, the EA app, Battle.net and PC Game Pass. Boosteroid links Steam, Epic, Ubisoft Connect, the EA app, Battle.net, Rockstar and PC Game Pass — its own list is shorter on stores and, on some publishers, longer on games.
Today we list 5,878 games on GeForce NOW and 1,713 on Boosteroid. 1,051 are on both, and 662 are on Boosteroid and not on GeForce NOW. That last figure is the reason Boosteroid exists for a lot of its members: every publisher has to opt in to each service separately, and some that never signed with NVIDIA did sign with Boosteroid. The reverse is true too, and the GeForce NOW list is about three times longer, so the long tail of Steam lives there.
How the games start differs as well. About two thirds of the GeForce NOW list is Install-to-Play: the service installs the game onto session storage when you launch it, which takes a few minutes and needs a paid plan. Boosteroid keeps two shelves of its own — games sitting on its machines, and games you install once into your cloud storage, where they stay for the next session. Both are slower than a game the service already holds, and only the second one remembers the install.
The catches
Neither list is a promise. A publisher can pull a game from either service and the game leaves your cloud library the same day; our changelog records each removal. Boosteroid's catalogue is a list of names, so a title in it still needs your own licence on a store, and some games run only in some of its regions — the library marks those covers with a flag. Search a game before you subscribe to either, or paste your Steam profile and we will tell you which of your games each service streams.
Winner: it depends on you. Where your games are settles this round, and it is a different answer for every Steam account. GeForce NOW has three times the list; Boosteroid has 662 games the other one lacks. Check yours before reading on.
Price: €7.49 by the year against $9.99 by the month
Five plans between them, and the cheapest paid one is Boosteroid's — if you pay for a year up front.
A high-end machine with ray tracing. Up to 4K at 120 fps. No limit on session time. €7.49 a month when paid by the year.
The same machine. A longer inactivity allowance, a choice of server location and more viewer seats for stream sharing. €11.24 a month when paid by the year.
1080p at 60 fps. Sessions of 1 hour. You wait in a queue for a machine. Ads before the game starts.
1440p at 60 fps with ray tracing. Sessions of 6 hours. Priority access. 100 hours each month.
An RTX 5080 rig. Up to 5K at 120 fps, or 360 fps at 1440p. Sessions of 8 hours. 100 hours each month.
Boosteroid sells one machine under two names. Ultra is €12.89 a month, or €7.49 a month paid by the year; Ultra Pro is €14.89, or €11.24 by the year, and adds a choice of server, a longer idle allowance and more viewer seats for stream sharing, not better hardware. The annual price is the real price: the monthly one rose from €9.89 to €12.89 in January 2026 while the yearly figure did not move, which tells you how Boosteroid wants to be paid.
GeForce NOW sells two machines. Performance is $9.99 a month for 1440p at 60 fps; Ultimate is $19.99 for the RTX 5080 rig, and NVIDIA's six-month plans take about a month off each. Over a year, Boosteroid Ultra costs about €90, GeForce NOW Performance about $100 and Ultimate about $200 — with the cap on the last two, and none on the first.
The small print on paying
Boosteroid quotes one number in euros or dollars. Its terms list every plan as "12.89 EUR/USD", the same figure in either currency, and the site itself shows euros; a card outside the eurozone may add its own conversion fee. Nothing is refunded once a plan has been used, by the help centre and the terms alike, so the month-to-month price is the one to try it on. The promotions expire and the price does not follow you down: the Summer Vibes deal, four months of Ultra Pro for €35.89, runs from 13 August to 23 September 2026 and holds only while the subscription stays active. A guide that quotes it as the price will be wrong in October.
GeForce NOW bills in your currency, through NVIDIA or a partner. Outside North America, Europe, Japan and a few other markets it is sold by an Alliance partner with its own prices and plans, so the $9.99 and $19.99 here are NVIDIA's own. Both services bill in advance and neither prorates a cancellation: stop before the renewal date, not after.
For the price of Performance you get Boosteroid's whole year with a better picture and no cap. For twice that you get Ultimate, which is a different class of machine.
Winner: Boosteroid. The cheapest paid plan in cloud gaming, on a machine that streams 4K. Only GeForce NOW's free plan costs less, and it is not the same thing.
Picture quality: RTX 5080 at 5K against AMD at 4K
Closer than the spec sheets say near a European server, and not close at the top of the range.
GeForce NOW Ultimate has run on RTX 5080 servers since September 2025: up to 5K HDR at 120 fps, 360 fps at 1080p in competitive mode, DLSS 4 and Reflex on supported games, and a Cinematic mode that streams 10-bit AV1 at 100 Mbps. Performance, the $9.99 plan, stops at 1440p and 60 fps with ray tracing. Every figure is on NVIDIA's FAQ.
Boosteroid was a 1080p service until 2025 and most guides still say so. Since the Ultra plan every member gets up to 4K at 120 fps on AMD hardware with ray tracing, AMD FSR and frame generation. Near a European data centre users describe a stream close to GeForce NOW Performance, for less money and with no cap; a Frankfurt member reports about 20 ms of latency. It is not the Ultimate tier, and it does not claim to be.
“GFN Ultimate is better, but Boosteroid is 3x cheaper and no cap”
a former GeForce NOW member, on r/BoosteroidCommunity, 2026
The verdict users arrive at, thread after thread, is a ranking rather than a winner: better than GeForce NOW Performance, not as good as Ultimate. What they hold against Boosteroid is not the ceiling but the floor: compression that shows in dark scenes, a bitrate that drops when the server is busy, and a picture that varies from one evening to the next with the server it assigned. What they hold against NVIDIA is the price of the plan that avoids all that.
The catches
Both ceilings need a server nearby and a screen that can show them. 5K at 120 fps asks 65 Mbps of your line and a monitor that takes it; 4K at 120 on Boosteroid asks a data centre within a few hundred kilometres, which in North America is not a given. On a laptop screen the two are much closer than the bars suggest. This round is decided on a television.
One of them tells you what you are renting. NVIDIA names the card behind each tier, RTX 5080 on Ultimate, an RTX-class rig on Performance, and prints the frame rate and resolution each one reaches. Boosteroid says AMD, 4K, 120 fps, and no more: no card name, no tier list, no figure for what a busy Friday does to your session. When two services promise the same 4K, the one that shows its hardware is the one whose promise you can check.
What an hour costs your data cap
Neither service publishes what it sends per hour, but both publish the connection they want for each setting, and a stream that asks for 45 Mbps is a stream that sends about 20 GB an hour. The figures below are those recommendations turned into gigabytes; a real session averages less, because a bitrate is a ceiling, not a mean. Against a 1 TB monthly cap, 4K on either service is an evening habit, not an all-day one.
Boosteroid asks for more of your line at every setting: 35 Mbps for 1080p at 60 fps where NVIDIA asks 25, and 93 for 4K at 60 where NVIDIA's 4K at 120 asks 45. That is a difference in codecs as much as in pictures, NVIDIA's AV1 against Boosteroid's H.264 and H.265, and it is the reason the two look closer on a fibre line than on a 50 Mbps one.
Winner: GeForce NOW. Ultimate is a class above anything Boosteroid runs: more pixels, three times the frame-rate ceiling, DLSS 4 and HDR. At the $9.99 tier the gap closes to almost nothing.
Play-time limits: a 100-hour cap against no cap at all
The round that sends people from one to the other.
Since the first billing date after 15 January 2026, every paid GeForce NOW member gets 100 hours a month. The mechanics matter more than the headline, so here they are in full. Up to 15 unused hours roll over to the next month, once. When the hours run out you buy more in the account portal, in blocks of 15: $2.99 on Performance, $5.99 on Ultimate. Sessions still end at six hours on Performance and eight on Ultimate, and a new one starts on the same count. Founders, the members who paid before 17 March 2021 and never lapsed, keep unlimited hours for life, unless they upgrade to Ultimate. Free members are not counted, because they queue instead. NVIDIA says about 6% of members reach the cap; this round is for them.
An hours budget, worked out
Two hours on four weeknights and six on each weekend day is 68 hours a month, inside the cap with room to spare. Three hours every evening is 90, still inside, with nothing left to roll over. Five hours a day is 150: on Ultimate that is $19.99 plus four blocks at $5.99, about $44 for the month, against €7.49 on Boosteroid Ultra by the year. Count your evenings before you choose; the cap is either invisible to you or the whole decision.
Boosteroid has no monthly cap and no session timer. What it has is an idle rule, 10 minutes without input on Ultra and 15 on Ultra Pro, with three minutes to rejoin, and, at peak hours in busy regions, a queue it does not publish. Play as long as you like; it is on the front page, and it is true.
“with the limited 100 hours… it was getting too expensive”
a GeForce NOW member of four years, on r/GeForceNOW, December 2025
Winner: Boosteroid. No cap, no timer, nothing to buy back at the end of the month. This is the round GeForce NOW chose to lose to hold its price.
Servers and latency: 36 regions with a queue you can read, against 29 you cannot
Latency is distance. One of the two tells you the distance before you pay.
GeForce NOW runs about 36 regions: NVIDIA's own in North America, Europe, Japan and India, and Alliance partners elsewhere with their own prices and plans. NVIDIA publishes the status of each one, and the community feed our servers page reads publishes the queue at each pod, so you can look at the region near you at 9 p.m. on a Friday before you spend anything.
Boosteroid counted 29 data centre locations in March 2026, across Europe, North America and Brazil, dense in the first and thin in the other two. It publishes no map, no status page and no queue figure. Reviewers call North America hit or miss, and user reports agree with both halves: a clean 20 ms stream in Frankfurt, a fuzzy one with heavy input lag in the US. Ultra Pro members can pin a server; Ultra members take the nearest.
Our network test pings the servers of both that answer from a browser, which is the closest thing to a Boosteroid status page there is.
Winner: GeForce NOW. More regions, the only status feed, and the only queue you can read before paying. In Germany or Poland the two are level; in Texas or São Paulo they are not.
Devices: two services that run almost everywhere
Mac, Linux, TVs and phones on both sides. The edges are a Steam Deck and a Shield.
GeForce NOW has native apps on Windows, macOS, Linux (out of beta since August 2026), ChromeOS, Android, NVIDIA Shield, LG and Samsung televisions, and a Steam Deck app that reaches 4K at 60 fps docked. On an iPhone or an iPad you use the browser.
Boosteroid has apps on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, Android TV, LG, Samsung and, since January 2026, Whale TV sets, and runs in a browser everywhere else, iPhone included. There is no Steam Deck app: the Linux build does not install on SteamOS's read-only system, so Deck owners use the browser or a community package.
Winner: GeForce NOW. By a nose, and only for the Steam Deck and the Shield. On a Mac, a Linux desktop, a phone or a television the two are level.
Free plans and trials: a free plan against a free-to-play game
One of the two lets you try your own games for nothing. The other lets you try Fortnite.
GeForce NOW's free plan has no card and no end date: 1080p at 60 fps, one-hour sessions, the standard queue and, since 2025, up to two minutes of advertising while you wait. It is a slow way to play and the best way to learn what cloud gaming feels like on your line, in your region, with your games.
Boosteroid has no free trial and refunds nothing once a subscription is used. What a free account can do is start the free-to-play games in its catalogue — Fortnite, Dota 2, Genshin Impact — with no licence, which tests the stream from your sofa if not your own library. If that first hour stutters, do not buy the year.
Winner: GeForce NOW. A free plan that runs your own games beats a free game that runs on a plan you have not bought.
The verdict: is Boosteroid or GeForce NOW better for you?
Seven rounds, counted from the verdicts above.
| Round | Winner |
|---|---|
| Games | It depends |
| Price and plans | Boosteroid |
| Picture quality | GeForce NOW |
| Play-time limits | Boosteroid |
| Servers and latency | GeForce NOW |
| Devices | GeForce NOW |
| Free plans | GeForce NOW |
| Rounds won | Boosteroid 2 · GeForce NOW 4 |
Four to two, with the first round unscored, and the tally flatters GeForce NOW a little: two of its four rounds are won at the Ultimate tier, which costs nearly three times Boosteroid's year. Put the two $10 plans next to each other and it is Boosteroid's picture, Boosteroid's hours and Boosteroid's price against NVIDIA's servers and free plan. Put your Steam library next to both lists and the round nobody scores decides it.
Take Boosteroid if
- You live in Europe, within a few hundred kilometres of one of its data centres.
- You play more than 100 hours a month, or in sittings longer than eight hours.
- A game you own is on Boosteroid and not on GeForce NOW — 662 of them are.
- You want the cheapest paid plan there is, and can pay a year up front.
- You play on a Mac, a Linux PC, a phone or a television. It has an app for each.
Take GeForce NOW if
- You play on a 4K television or a fast monitor and want the picture an RTX 5080 gives.
- You live in North America, Japan, India or anywhere Boosteroid is thin.
- You want to see the queue near you before you pay, and a status page when it breaks.
- You play on a Steam Deck or a Shield.
- You want to try cloud gaming tonight with your own games and no card.
Our services page puts both next to the other four, with live status and the plans as they stand today.
Which one for you: five kinds of player
The scorecard counts rounds. Readers do not; they have a library, a country and a number of hours. These are the five who write in.
You play more than 100 hours a month
Boosteroid, and it is not close. A 150-hour month on GeForce NOW Ultimate is $19.99 plus four blocks of 15 hours at $5.99, about $44; the same month on Boosteroid Ultra by the year is €7.49. NVIDIA says about 6% of members reach the cap. If you are one of them, this decides it.
You play shooters, or anything ranked
GeForce NOW. Reflex, 120 fps and up on Ultimate, AV1 at a steady bitrate, and a server assignment that does not change from one evening to the next. Some live-service games also refuse to run inside a virtual machine, and Boosteroid is one; check the game's page before paying for it.
You own the PlayStation ports on Steam
Boosteroid. Sony's PC ports are the games people switch for, and NVIDIA does not carry them. Boosteroid streams the copy you already own.
You live in North America, India, Japan, or far from a big city
GeForce NOW, for the servers. It has data centres on every continent and a public status for each; Boosteroid's 29 locations are dense in Europe and thin elsewhere, and a session there is a longer road trip. Run the network test first: it pings both from your browser.
You want to try cloud gaming tonight without a card
GeForce NOW's free plan, with your own Steam games, at 1080p and 60 fps after a queue. Boosteroid has no trial and no refund; its free account starts only free-to-play games. Try NVIDIA's first, and if the cap or a missing game bites, Boosteroid is a month away.
The games people switch for
These are the titles that come up, thread after thread, as the reason someone left one service for the other. Each one links to its page, where the services that carry it today are read from the catalogue.
- HELLDIVERS 2 — the most-cited reason to add Boosteroid; a Sony port NVIDIA does not carry
- The Last of Us Part I — Sony port, Boosteroid only among the two
- Ghost of Tsushima — Sony port, Boosteroid only among the two
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 — Sony port, Boosteroid only among the two
- God of War Ragnarök — Sony port, Boosteroid only among the two
- Grand Theft Auto V — Rockstar left GeForce NOW in 2020; Boosteroid streams the Steam copy
- Red Dead Redemption 2 — same story as GTA V
- Marvel Rivals — the ranked shooter people test both on; GeForce NOW, at 120 fps on Ultimate
- Path of Exile 2 — GeForce NOW; users in Germany report stutter on Boosteroid in the busy zones
- Europa Universalis V — GeForce NOW; the game that made strategy players compare the two in April 2026
- Monster Hunter Wilds — GeForce NOW, where the RTX 5080 tier is the point
- Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 — GeForce NOW; Ubisoft's launcher is all but absent on Boosteroid
What people who switched say
Six threads from November 2025 to August 2026, on r/GeForceNOW, r/BoosteroidCommunity and r/cloudygamer, read for the reasons people give rather than the votes. The same five come back every time.
The ranking. Nobody who has used both calls one of them better outright. The comment with the most votes in the most recent thread puts it in one line, and every other thread agrees with it:
“Better than geforce now performance, worse than ultimate.”
the top comment under “Is Boosteroid really that bad?”, r/BoosteroidCommunity, August 2026
The server you get. Boosteroid picks the data centre for you, and not always the nearest one; Ultra Pro is the plan that lets you choose. People in Germany, Poland and Czechia describe a stream they are happy with; people further out describe evenings that differ from one to the next.
“much more reliant on you having close proximity to a datacenter”
the top comment under “GeForce now vs boosteroid”, r/GeForceNOW, December 2025
“so sometimes you connect quite far away”
a Boosteroid member, r/BoosteroidCommunity, February 2026
The housekeeping. A GeForce NOW machine keeps your games installed and patched between sessions. On Boosteroid a game may need an update, or a fresh download, when you come back to it, and some report that in-game settings do not survive the session either. People who play one or two games do not notice; people who rotate through a library do.
“having to reinstall or update some games every single time is an annoyance”
a member who tried Boosteroid for a weekend, r/GeForceNOW, November 2025
“boosteroid doesnt even save game settings, not even sound or keybinds”
the same thread, r/GeForceNOW, November 2025
The picture in motion. The complaint that sends people back to Ultimate is not resolution but what compression does to a dark scene or a fast turn. The praise that keeps people on Boosteroid is that Performance, at the same price, has a cap and a smaller picture.
“Constant compression artifacts, muddy textures in darker scenes”
someone who went back to GeForce NOW Ultimate after Boosteroid Ultra, r/cloudygamer, August 2026
The small print. Game Pass titles on Boosteroid ask for a Microsoft sign-in at every launch. A session with no input closes after ten to fifteen minutes. There is no refund once a plan has been used. None of it is hidden; all of it comes as a surprise to someone arriving from NVIDIA, where none of it applies.
What is missing from every thread is as telling: nobody complains about Boosteroid's price, and nobody complains about GeForce NOW's picture. Each service has settled on what it is good at, and the people who switch are the ones who wanted the other thing.
Using both: one for the games, one for the hours
Cheap enough together that some people do.
Because both stream the games you own, nothing stops you holding both: your Steam library appears in each, and a game's cloud saves follow you between them wherever the game itself syncs them. The combination people describe is GeForce NOW Ultimate for the games that deserve 5K on the television, and Boosteroid for the long evenings and the titles NVIDIA does not carry. At €7.49 plus $19.99 a month it costs less than Game Pass Ultimate and GeForce NOW together, and either one can be dropped in a month.
What changed in the past twelve months
The updates that moved each service, in the order they happened.
Boosteroid
- September 2025: Ultra Pro plan, €14.89, with a choice of server and a longer idle allowance (Boosteroid).
- January 2026: monthly Ultra goes from €9.89 to €12.89; the yearly €7.49 stays (Boosteroid). Apps on Whale TV sets (Boosteroid). 8 million subscribers reported (Wikipedia).
- March 2026: new capacity in France, Poland and the Czech Republic; 29 locations in all (Boosteroid).
GeForce NOW
- September 2025: RTX 5080 servers, 5K at 120 fps, Install-to-Play (NVIDIA).
- January 2026: the 100-hour monthly cap applies to every paid member (AlternativeTo).
- April 2026: Game Pass and Ubisoft+ labels in the app (NVIDIA).
- July 2026: public launch in India with local prices. A new server in Canada.
- August 2026: the native Linux app leaves beta (NVIDIA).
Sources
Operator pages, read on 28 August 2026: Boosteroid, its pricing update, Ultra FAQ, help centre and capacity announcement; GeForce NOW, the GeForce NOW FAQ and membership page, NVIDIA's Blackwell announcement, the system requirements and the November 2024 post that priced the extra-hour blocks; Boosteroid's terms, connection requirements and refund page.
Reviews and user reports: BestGaming.cloud on Boosteroid in North America, and the r/BoosteroidCommunity, r/cloudgaming and r/GeForceNOW threads linked where they are quoted, all from 2025 and 2026. Game counts and the overlap are our own, read daily from both catalogues.
Questions
Is Boosteroid better than GeForce NOW?
At the same price, often: Boosteroid Ultra by the year costs €7.49 a month for 4K at 120 fps with no hour cap, against $9.99 for GeForce NOW Performance at 1440p with a 100-hour cap. At the top, no: GeForce NOW Ultimate's RTX 5080 rigs stream 5K at 120 fps with DLSS 4, and Boosteroid has nothing like them. Where you live matters as much as the plan.
Can I play the same games on both?
The 1,051 games in our catalogue that both services carry, yes — the same Steam copy, since both stream games you own. Saves follow you where the game syncs them to Steam Cloud or a publisher account.
Which games are on Boosteroid but not GeForce NOW?
662 today, by our daily read. Publishers opt in to each service separately, and some signed with Boosteroid and not with NVIDIA. Boosteroid's list marks the other services each game is on, and a search of the catalogue answers per title.
Does Boosteroid have a 100-hour cap?
No. Boosteroid has no monthly cap and no session timer. It closes a session that receives no input for 10 minutes, 15 on Ultra Pro. GeForce NOW's paid plans stop at 100 hours a month since January 2026, with up to 15 unused hours carried over and extra blocks of 15 hours sold at $2.99 on Performance and $5.99 on Ultimate.
Does Boosteroid have a free trial?
No, and no refund once a subscription is used, by its own help centre. A free account can start the free-to-play games in its catalogue, which is the way to test the stream before paying. GeForce NOW has a free plan with no end date.
Which one has better latency?
The one with a server nearer you. GeForce NOW has about 36 regions and publishes their state; Boosteroid has 29 locations, dense in Europe, and publishes nothing. In Germany or Poland users report about 20 ms on both. In the US, GeForce NOW is the safer bet. The network test measures your ping to each from a browser.
Does Boosteroid work on a Steam Deck?
Through the browser, or a community package — there is no Boosteroid app for SteamOS. GeForce NOW has a native Steam Deck app that reaches 4K at 60 fps docked.
How much data does each one use per hour?
By the operators' own recommended connections, about 11 GB an hour for 1080p at 60 fps on GeForce NOW and 16 GB on Boosteroid; about 20 GB for 4K at 120 on GeForce NOW and 42 GB for 4K at 60 on Boosteroid. A real hour averages less, since those are ceilings. On a 1 TB cap, 4K every evening fits; 4K all day does not.
Can I keep both?
Yes, and some people do: GeForce NOW Ultimate for the games that deserve its picture, Boosteroid for long evenings and the games NVIDIA does not carry. Your Steam library appears in both, and either subscription can be dropped in a month.
Every service, side by side, with live status and the plans as they stand today: compare the services.
