Cloud gaming with Geforce Now

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1

Hi, I wrote a long review about the cloud gaming service Geforce Now (by Nvidia) and I tried it on Qubes OS:

Here are the Qubes OS specific bits, to read after the review :slight_smile:

I wasn’t able to use a qube with a GPU, so this applies for all Qubes OS users :slight_smile:

As stated in the review, without hardware acceleration the web browser will drop frames and Geforce will reduce the quality until it gets better. Playing in 720p instead of 1080p allows to cope better with the stream and keeping a higher quality.

Xbox One USB controller doesn’t work in usb passthrough, it’s not specific to geforce now though, the device auto detach itself… However the Playstation Dualsense (PS5 controller) works perfectly fine if you pass it to the qube with Geforce Now :+1:

If you need a mouse, use an USB mouse and pass it to the qube with geforce now, the cursor will be captured by the browser focus and works pretty fine. Once you are done, the easiest method to get the cursor back to dom0 was to unplug the mouse and plug it back. :sweat_smile:

There was no issue with the keyboard :v:

Globally, this can be a cheap and practical way to play some casual game, but this is not practical for anything serious :confused:

4 Likes
What games can you play Without GPU passthrough?
2

I’m shocked no one in over a year and a half has had a single thing to say on this lol. Right now I’m really conflicted as to whether I should get a new gaming rig or use this service. I’ve used services like this in the past, like Shadow, but it wasn’t that great at the end of the day.

Are you still using this service? Is there any way to improve performance from within Qubes?

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I’m not using it anymore for various reasons. On qubes os it would run better with a dedicated GPU of course, but then it’s a bit pointless.

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Maybe not. What if I outfitted my rig with an old, say, 2070? I’d save a lot on the build, and I could devote the 2070 to a Geforce qube. Do you not see that as feasible?

5

Yes, it would allow you to play with GFN in full resolution and quality. Actually, a smaller GPU would be better if possible as it only need to decode a h264/h265 stream, but the 2070 is fine.

1 Like
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I know this is old but I just set this up and it worked flawlessly, so I thought I’d share it. This is how I do gaming in qubes using geforce now:

Starting from the debian-13-minimal template, in the template (as root)

/usr/bin/apt-get -y install qubes-usb-proxy xserver-xorg-input-libinput xinput

Then create an AppVM and in there - you will want to resize the AppVM home a bit:

/usr/bin/qvm-volume resize app-geforce-now:private 10G

Then inside the AppVM do (as user)

/usr/bin/flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo"
/usr/bin/flatpak --user install --verbose --assumeyes --noninteractive flathub org.chromium.Chromium"

To “launch geforce now”, run this inside the AppVM:

/usr/bin/flatpak run org.chromium.Chromium --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL --use-gl=angle https://play.geforcenow.com

You can kind of use a dispvm based on the appvm as well, the only thing you want to save is your login to geforce now… You might as well enter it each time. Personally I prefer a DispVM there.

For gaming you need to attach a second mouse - your original mouse will try to weirdly layover, which wont work. Just attach a second mouse to your box and use the Qubes OS usb assignment thingy to attach it to your gaming AppVM (or DispVM). This will then be “the gaming VMs mouse”.

To upgrade the flatpak in the AppVM:

/usr/bin/flatpak --user update --verbose --assumeyes --noninteractive org.chromium.Chromium
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Did chromium from the apt repo not work?

8

yes, I was surprised how utterly flawlessly everything worked.