Modern Warfare 4 open beta: how to play it on GeForce NOW, Boosteroid and Xbox Cloud

Three services stream it, and the Battle.net, Steam and Xbox versions are the same beta: which one you use is a question of the account you already have. The beta is free on all of them, so the subscription pays for the machine, not for the game.

NVIDIA lists the beta as ready to play, which means it starts from the cloud with nothing to install first, and it carries no membership requirement: the free plan starts it like any other. What GeForce NOW needs is proof that the beta is in one of your libraries.

1. Add the beta on one store. It is free on Battle.net, on Steam and on the Xbox store, and no code is involved.
2. Open GeForce NOW, search for Modern Warfare 4, and link the store account when it asks.
3. Press Play. Any wait you see is your region’s queue, not the game’s.
4. Sign in to your Activision account inside the game. Rewards earned in the beta stay with that account and carry into the full game.

The free plan can run it, with what the free plan always costs you: sessions of one hour, ads before the game starts, 1080p at 60 fps, and the standard queue. Performance, at $9.99 a month, gives six-hour sessions, 1440p and a priority queue. Ultimate, at $19.99, runs on RTX 5080 servers with eight-hour sessions, up to 5K at 120 fps, or 360 fps at 1080p in competitive mode. Both paid plans stop at 100 hours a month.

The queue is the part that decides your weekend. A beta everybody wants to try lands on the same machines everybody else is already using: over this weekend the busiest GeForce NOW regions passed 900 people in the queue at their worst moments, and the free plan waits in that line. Our servers page shows every region’s queue as it stands now, and our queue guide covers the two things that shorten it without a subscription.

The free plan can play the beta. On a Saturday evening, a good part of that one-hour session goes on the queue.

Boosteroid carries the same beta, in its Steam and its Xbox form, and far fewer people know it. That is the useful part this weekend: Boosteroid has no free plan, so there is no free queue to sit in, and no session limit either, so an evening runs in one sitting. It costs €12.89 a month, or €7.49 a month paid by the year, and it asks for the same thing GeForce NOW does: the beta in the Steam or Xbox library you link to it.

Microsoft streams the beta itself, from its own page, in a browser or an app: a phone, a tablet, a TV, a laptop that could never run it. That route needs a Game Pass subscription — Essential at $9.99 and up — rather than a copy of anything, because the beta is free and online play on Xbox is what the subscription buys. It streams from Xbox Series X servers, at 1080p on Essential and Premium and up to 1440p on Ultimate.

Activision’s own support page for the beta is blunt about the requirement: “PC players: TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are required to play online game modes.” It is the rule behind most of the weekend’s error messages, and behind a great many people spending a Saturday in a BIOS menu. It exists because RICOCHET runs at the kernel level, and a machine that cannot prove how it booted is the machine a cheat hides in.

The check happens on the machine that runs the game. When you stream, that machine belongs to NVIDIA, to Boosteroid or to Microsoft, and it already satisfies the requirement — the beta would not be enabled on those services otherwise. Your own PC receives video and sends button presses, and its BIOS settings never come up.

If your PC fails the Secure Boot check, a cloud session is the fastest way into a beta that ends Tuesday. Fix the BIOS afterwards, for the full game.

It depends on what you want out of the beta. Between your mouse and what you see there are now two crossings of your internet connection, and no setting removes them. Ultimate is the closest a stream gets: RTX 5080 servers, Reflex on supported games, and a competitive mode that runs 1080p at 360 fps. The free plan at 1080p and 60 fps is enough to learn the maps and decide whether you want the game in October; it is not the plan on which to judge your aim.

Distance matters more than money here. A data centre 300 km away feels like a PC, one 3,000 km away feels like a bad controller, and our network test tells you which of those you have before you pay for anything. If you do stream on Ultimate, our guide to the new DLSS 4.5 controls explains which of them to leave alone in a shooter.

Activision opened the second weekend with figures rather than a patch note: more than 375 cheat reseller operations disrupted, more than 80 cease-and-desist demands served, more than 30 vendors shut down. During the first weekend its lawyers drove to Ohio and served one of them in person. The campaign is aimed at the people selling cheats, not at how you connect.

That is worth saying plainly, because the question comes up every time a Call of Duty beta opens: streaming is not a grey area. Publishers choose which games appear on GeForce NOW and Boosteroid, so the beta is on both because Activision put it there, and on Xbox Cloud Gaming because Microsoft streams it itself.

Modern Warfare 4 launches on October 23, 2026, and it is the first mainline Call of Duty since Microsoft bought the series that is not on Game Pass on day one: Xbox has been reminding members to buy it. Nobody has announced the cloud versions yet. NVIDIA has not put the full game on its day-one list, and Boosteroid announces titles when they arrive rather than before. The precedent is good — Call of Duty already streams on both services, and this beta was enabled on both within a day — but a precedent is not a date.

The release is on our calendar, and this page will say where the full game streams as soon as anyone says it. Meanwhile the beta ends Tuesday, September 1 at 10 a.m. PT: 1 p.m. in New York, 6 p.m. in London, 7 p.m. in Paris.

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 - Open Beta — On GeForce NOW with the Battle.net, Steam or Xbox version, on every plan.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 - Beta — On Boosteroid with a Steam or Xbox copy, with no session limit.