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In short
GeForce NOW rents you a gaming PC: an RTX 5080 rig for $19.99 a month, up to 5K at 120 fps, a free plan with no end date, and your own Steam, Epic and GOG games. Xbox Cloud Gaming rents you a library: from $9.99 the games are included, and many play on a phone with no controller. But from November Xbox includes only 5, 10 or 15 cloud hours by plan, against 100 on GeForce NOW. GeForce NOW is the better stream by a wide margin. Xbox Cloud can still be the better deal if you own few PC games.
The two services answer the same question, how to play big games without a gaming PC, in opposite ways. NVIDIA rents you the machine: an RTX 5080 rig in a data center that runs the games you already bought on Steam, Epic, GOG or the Xbox store. Microsoft rents you the library: hundreds of games streamed from Xbox hardware, for one fee that includes the games. Both start at $9.99 a month.
Today we list 5,975 games on GeForce NOW and 1,408 on Xbox Cloud Gaming, and 1,045 of them are on both. A listing on both services does not guarantee the same access. GeForce NOW needs a copy from a supported store and a suitable plan. Xbox may include the game with your Game Pass tier or require a separate Xbox purchase. Check the game page for each service’s conditions. Prices and specifications are the operators’ own. Game counts come from our catalogue, which reads both services every day.
GeForce NOW vs Xbox Cloud Gaming: the specs side by side
Green marks the better line. Two lines have no better, because the two are not selling the same thing.
Two lines in that table settle most cases. Games included is why people take Xbox Cloud: $9.99 gives you fifty or more games, and $22.99 more than five hundred, with Microsoft’s own releases on launch day. Stores it opens is why people take GeForce NOW: it is the only one of the two that opens your Steam account.
Game library: your Steam account against the Game Pass catalogue
One service streams your purchases. The other streams a rental library.
GeForce NOW links to Steam, the Epic Games Store, GOG, Ubisoft Connect, the EA app, Battle.net and the Xbox store, and streams the games in those libraries that NVIDIA has enabled. That is thousands of games, not all of them. The subscription buys the machine, not the games. With ten years of Steam purchases, $9.99 a month turns a Chromebook into a PC that plays what you already own. With no PC games, it gives you nothing to play.
Game Pass includes the games: fifty or more on Essential, two hundred or more on Premium, five hundred or more on Ultimate, with Microsoft’s own releases in the catalogue on launch day. You start any of them from a browser in under a minute. It is a rental: when a game’s Game Pass term ends, it leaves the catalogue and your cloud library with it. Our changelog records each removal.
Since November 2024, Stream Your Own Game streams games you bought on the Xbox store whether or not they are in Game Pass. It covers more than 1,000 titles, on the Xbox PC app as well as the browser. It needs Game Pass Ultimate, and it reads the Xbox store only. Your Steam library stays where it is.
The gaps in both libraries
Both libraries have gaps, and not the same ones. On GeForce NOW every publisher has to opt in, and some never do: Helldivers 2 streams on Xbox Cloud and not on GeForce NOW, and Hogwarts Legacy took two years to arrive. About two thirds of the GeForce NOW list is Install-to-Play, which needs a paid plan and a few minutes of installing at the start of each session. On Xbox Cloud not every Game Pass game plays in the cloud, and the catalogue changes every month. Search a game before you subscribe, or paste your Steam profile to see which of your games each service streams.
Winner: it depends on you. A full Steam account makes GeForce NOW the obvious choice. An empty one makes Game Pass the obvious choice.
Price: what $9.99 buys on each side
The two cheapest plans cost the same and are not the same purchase.
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 1080p. Sessions of 8 hours. 100 hours each month.
Cloud play. A library of 50 or more games. Online multiplayer.
Cloud play with shorter waits. A library of 200 or more games. Xbox-published games within a year of launch.
Cloud play at the best quality and the shortest waits. A library of 500 or more games. New games on day one. EA Play, Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft+ Classics.
Game Pass Essential at $9.99 includes the stream and a library. GeForce NOW Performance at $9.99 includes the stream and an empty machine. If you own no PC games, Essential is far cheaper. If you own a Steam backlog, Performance is far cheaper, because the games are already paid for.
At the top, the gap is $3 a month. GeForce NOW Ultimate is $19.99, about two months cheaper on NVIDIA’s twelve-month plans. Game Pass Ultimate is $22.99, sold by the month. Over a year that is roughly $240 against $276, and the $276 includes five hundred games.
Both prices moved in the last year. Microsoft raised Ultimate to $29.99 in October 2025, then cut it back to $22.99 in April 2026, and new Call of Duty games no longer arrive on day one. NVIDIA kept $19.99 through the RTX 5080 upgrade and added a 100-hour monthly cap on every paid plan.
Winner: Xbox Cloud. The same $9.99 includes the games. On GeForce NOW you still have to buy them.
Stream quality: 5K at 120 fps against 1440p at 60
The one difference you can see from across the room.
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 Quality mode that streams 10-bit AV1 and asks 100 Mbps of your connection.
Xbox Cloud spent years at 1080p and 60 fps and has closed part of the gap. Microsoft took the beta label off in October 2025 and gave Game Pass Ultimate up to 1440p at a higher bitrate, first in browsers and on PC, then on consoles, handhelds, Fire TV and LG and Samsung sets in February 2026. The new encoder is a large improvement over the old one. It is still one quarter of the pixels and one sixth of the frames.
Two more differences matter. Xbox Cloud runs the console build of each game, and GeForce NOW runs the PC build with PC settings, so ray tracing and DLSS 4 exist on one side and not the other. And on Xbox Cloud a faster connection does not make the picture sharper past a point, because the limit is the encoder, not your line.
What the top figures need
5K at 120 fps needs a server near you, a screen that can show it, and 65 Mbps. On a laptop screen the two services are much closer than the bars suggest. On a phone the gap is close to invisible.
Winner: GeForce NOW. Four times the pixels, six times the frame-rate ceiling, HDR, and the only ray tracing of the two.
Play-time limits: 100 hours against 15 at best
100 hours on GeForce NOW. 15 at most on Xbox, from November.
Since January 1, 2026, every paid GeForce NOW member gets 100 hours a month, with up to 15 unused hours carried into the next month. Blocks of 15 more hours cost $2.99 on Performance and $5.99 on Ultimate. Sessions end too: one hour on the free plan, six on Performance, eight on Ultimate. Since spring 2026 a session with no input closes in under five minutes. NVIDIA says about 6% of members reach the cap.
100 hours is three and a third hours a day, every day. Most people do not reach it. Someone who plays three or four hours most evenings does, and a heavy month then costs more in extra hours than the subscription itself. The cap is a recurring complaint among heavier GeForce NOW users, and some say it made them leave.
“with the limited 100 hours… it was getting too expensive”
a member of four years, on r/GeForceNOW, December 2025
Xbox Cloud has no monthly cap and no session timer until November 2026. Then Essential includes 5 hours, Premium 10 and Ultimate 15, and extra hours are sold at a price Microsoft has not announced. It has a queue at busy times, shorter on Premium and shortest on Ultimate, and Microsoft publishes no figure for it.
Winner: GeForce NOW. 100 included hours against 15 at best. Xbox's extra-hour price is still unknown.
Devices: which screens each service runs on
Both run almost everywhere. The differences are at the edges.
GeForce NOW has native apps on Windows, macOS, Android, ChromeOS, NVIDIA Shield, LG and Samsung televisions, a Steam Deck app that reaches 4K at 60 fps on a docked TV, a native Linux app out of beta since August 2026, and an Amazon Fire TV app announced at CES 2026. Xbox Cloud runs in a browser, in the Xbox app on Android and Windows, on LG and Samsung televisions, on Fire TV, in a Meta Quest headset, and on Xbox consoles, where it streams games you have not installed and games your console is too old to run. On an iPhone or iPad both use the browser. Microsoft rebuilt its web app in January 2026.
Winner: GeForce NOW. The only one with a native app on a Mac, on Linux and on a Steam Deck. Xbox Cloud is the only one on an Xbox console and in a Quest.
On a phone: per-game touch controls against a virtual gamepad
The screen where the picture gap closes and the controls decide it.
Xbox is better on a phone. Microsoft ships game-specific touch layouts for a large part of its catalogue: an overlay drawn per game, so Forza steers and Minecraft builds with nothing plugged in. GeForce NOW offers a generic virtual gamepad on screen, and touch support in a handful of games, Fortnite among them. Most of its library is PC games that expect a pad or a mouse, so a controller is still the practical answer.
The other difference on a commute is the clock. Only GeForce NOW counts the minutes against a monthly total and closes the session at six or eight hours.
Winner: Xbox Cloud. Per-game touch layouts on many titles, against a generic gamepad and a few touch-enabled games.
Countries and servers: where each service works
One sells in far more places. Only one tells you the state of the server near you.
NVIDIA runs its own data centers in North America, Europe, Japan and India, and sells the rest of the world through GeForce NOW Alliance partners, local operators with their own prices, plans and hardware schedule. Brazil gets 40 hours a month on Performance. Taiwan sells sessions in five-hour blocks. The RTX 5080 servers arrive in partner regions later. Read the partner’s page before you pay.
Xbox Cloud sells in 29 countries, India included since November 2025. Microsoft publishes no region list, no queue figure and no per-region status, so our Xbox page can only tell you whether the service as a whole is up. NVIDIA publishes both. Our servers page shows every GeForce NOW region’s queue as it stands now, so you can look at the server near you before you pay.
Winner: GeForce NOW. More of the world, directly or through a partner, and the only one whose regional queues you can check before you pay.
Free plans and trials: what you can test before paying
One permanent free plan, one $1 trial.
GeForce NOW has a free plan with no card and no end date: 1080p at 60 fps, one-hour sessions, the standard queue, and since 2025 up to two minutes of ads while you wait. It is slow, and it is the best way to find out what cloud gaming is like on your connection, in your region. Microsoft sells 14 days of Essential or Premium for $1. In July 2026 it started testing an ad-supported free stream of games you already own, for Xbox Insiders only.
Winner: GeForce NOW. A free plan with no end date, which shows you what your region is like on a Friday evening before you pay.
The verdict: is GeForce NOW or Xbox Cloud Gaming better for you?
It depends on what you already own.
GeForce NOW is the better stream: more pixels, more frames, ray tracing, more devices, more countries and 100 hours on a paid plan. Xbox Cloud Gaming includes the game library and plays on a phone without a controller, but from November even Ultimate includes only 15 cloud hours. If your Steam account is full, GeForce NOW is the answer. If it is empty, Game Pass is still the better bundle, as long as you stay inside its cloud hours.
Take GeForce NOW if
- Your games are on Steam, Epic or GOG. Xbox Cloud does not open those accounts.
- Stream quality and latency matter most: a 4K television, a fast monitor, RTX features.
- You play on a Mac, a Linux PC or a Steam Deck.
- You play less than 100 hours a month.
- You want to try a cloud service for free, without giving anyone a card.
Take Xbox Cloud Gaming if
- You already pay for Game Pass. The cloud is included.
- You own few PC games and want hundreds to choose from for one monthly fee.
- You play a lot each month, in long sessions, and do not want to count hours.
- You play on a phone or a tablet, with or without a controller.
- You own an Xbox that can no longer run the games you want.
Our services page puts both next to the other four, with live status and the plans as they stand today.
Using both: Game Pass games on GeForce NOW
The two services work together more than they compete.
GeForce NOW streams a large part of the PC Game Pass catalogue. You link your Microsoft account, sign in once, and the supported Game Pass and Microsoft Store titles appear in your GeForce NOW library. Since April 2026 the app labels them. So a Game Pass game can be played at 1440p through Microsoft, or at 5K with ray tracing through NVIDIA, from the same Game Pass subscription. Xbox game pages themselves carry a cloud streaming button that offers GeForce NOW next to Xbox Cloud.
Some people use Game Pass to find games and GeForce NOW to play the ones they keep. At the top of both ladders that is $42.98 a month. You can drop either one in a month.
What changed in the past twelve months
The updates that changed each service, in order.
GeForce NOW
- September 2025RTX 5080 servers, 5K at 120 fps, Install-to-Play, 100 GB of session storage (NVIDIA).
- January 2026The 100-hour monthly cap applies to every paid member (AlternativeTo).
- April 2026Game Pass and Ubisoft+ labels in the app (NVIDIA). Install-to-Play stays usable after the 100 hours (ComputerBase).
- July 2026Public launch in India with local prices. A new server in Canada.
- August 2026The native Linux app leaves beta (NVIDIA).
Xbox Cloud Gaming
- October 2025Out of beta, cloud play on every Game Pass plan, 1440p on Ultimate, Ultimate raised to $29.99 (The Verge).
- November 2025India brings the count to 29 countries (Xbox Wire).
- February 20261440p and higher bitrates reach consoles, handhelds, Fire TV and LG and Samsung sets (Xbox Wire).
- April 2026Ultimate back to $22.99; Call of Duty no longer on day one (Xbox Wire).
- July 2026An ad-supported free stream of games you own, in test with Xbox Insiders (Xbox Wire).
Sources
Operator pages, read on August 28, 2026: GeForce NOW, the GeForce NOW FAQ and membership page, NVIDIA’s Blackwell announcement, Xbox Game Pass plans, Xbox Cloud Gaming, the buy and stream list, Xbox speed requirements and supported devices.
Reporting: The Verge on Xbox leaving beta, Windows Central and Digital Foundry on the new encoder, Notebookcheck on the 1440p demonstration, Tom’s Guide and PCGamesN on the RTX 5080 tier, Windows Central on the hour cap, TechRadar on advertising in the free queue, Tom’s Guide on the GeForce NOW button on Xbox game pages.
Game counts and the overlap are our own, read daily from both catalogues. GeForce NOW queue lengths come from PrintedWaste’s community feed; incident reports come from NVIDIA’s public status feed. Our wait-time estimates use our own queue samples, as explained in the methodology. User reports are linked where they are quoted.
Questions
Can I play the same game on both services?
Sometimes. 1,045 games in our catalogue are on both. GeForce NOW streams the copy you own on Steam or another store. Xbox Cloud may include the game with your Game Pass tier or require a separate Xbox purchase; a Steam copy does not grant Xbox access. They are separate installs with separate saves, unless the game itself has cross-save.
Can I play Game Pass games on GeForce NOW?
Many of them, yes. Link your Microsoft account and the supported PC Game Pass and Microsoft Store titles appear in your GeForce NOW library, labeled as such since April 2026. You need both subscriptions, and NVIDIA has to have enabled the game.
Can I play my Steam games on Xbox Cloud?
No. Xbox Cloud reads the Xbox store and nothing else. Stream Your Own Game covers more than 1,000 titles you bought from Microsoft, and none you bought on Steam.
Which one is better on a phone?
Xbox Cloud Gaming. A large part of its catalogue has game-specific touch controls and no session timer. From November, however, a monthly total of 5, 10 or 15 hours counts down by plan. GeForce NOW has a virtual gamepad and touch support in a few games such as Fortnite, but most of its library expects a controller.
Which one is cheaper over a year?
GeForce NOW Ultimate is about $240 a year against $276 for Game Pass Ultimate, and NVIDIA’s twelve-month plans cut its figure further. The Game Pass figure includes the games and the GeForce NOW figure does not, so the real comparison is against what you would spend on games.
Do I keep my saves if I switch?
Games with cloud saves that cross platforms keep them, and most big multi-platform games do. A save tied to one store account stays with that store.
How fast does my connection need to be?
Microsoft asks for 20 Mbps. NVIDIA asks for 25 Mbps at 1080p, 35 at 1440p, 65 for 5K at 120 fps and 100 for its Cinematic mode. On both, a wired connection or 5 GHz Wi-Fi matters more than the number. Packet loss ruins cloud gaming, a slow line only lowers the resolution.
Do I need a controller?
For GeForce NOW, in practice yes. There is an on-screen gamepad and touch support in a few games, but most of its library expects a pad or a mouse and keyboard. For Xbox Cloud, no: many games have a touch overlay. A keyboard and mouse work through a community extension, not officially.
Every service, side by side, with live status and the plans as they stand today: compare the services.
