I’ve fallen into the camp of wanting nothing more than a small-screen handheld console like a Steam Deck to play my favorite games. But could the opposite entice me enough to leave my comfort zone? What if I wanted the biggest screen possible to play my games? The Apple Vision Pro and Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service would be the answer, but Apple’s walled garden yet again stifles what could be a great experience.
The $3,500 price tag on an AVP is more than I would be comfortable paying for any visual product, let alone a 75-inch big-screen QD-OLED TV. However, the Vision Pro could offer the equivalent of a wall-to-wall big-screen experience if you can get comfortable with it. The system has a 3660 x 3200 resolution per eye micro-OLED display. The headset includes some of the best displays on any VR headset I’ve used. Shouldn’t it be the best possible display to play non-VR games? Nvidia announced early in January that GeForce Now would start to support Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 without players needing to jump through extra hoops of downloading non-first-party browsers. The issue for Vision Pro users is two-fold. One, Safari causes problems that don’t exist on other platforms. The other issue is currently all GeForce Now plans are currently sold out.
© Image: Kyle Barr / GizmodoEven with the latest update, 2.0.70, Nvidia makes it clear you can’t play games with a mouse and keyboard through GeForce Now on Vision Pro and Safari. This seems to be a limitation with Safari rather than the GeForce Now browser-based software. I’m fine with a controller to play Warhammer 40K: Darktide on Vision Pro. If I wanted to dig into Baldur’s Gate III, I’d be so much happier with a mouse and keyboard. Weirdly enough, the AVP’s eye-tracking and pinch gestures work as a mouse click, even in the game. It’s not enough to control most games, anyway.
I want games to use the Vision Pro’s high-res lenses and 100-degree FOV. The Safari window can get rather big, enough to fill an entire wall’s worth of space, but it’s not the wrapped widescreen experience that would make streaming on Vision Pro sing. The service requires you to manually change quality settings to force it to play at the promised 4K resolution. I was also locked to 60 FPS, likely due to the max 100 Hz refresh rate on the Vision Pro’s displays.
Once you’re finally in-game with all the settings configured, games can look very nice, so long as your internet connection holds up. You need at least 40 Mbps for 4K resolutions up to 60 FPS. If you’re spending $3,500 on a Vision Pro, you may be able to afford high-speed internet services, but some of us aren’t too lucky with what we can get, depending on where we live.
I have already played some games on the Vision Pro through the ultrawide Mac mirroring feature on visionOS 2.2, and that was a fun experience for the paltry (though growing) number of games supported on Mac. You could potentially stream from a gaming PC using Apollo on Windows. Still, streaming is the only answer when Apple doesn’t play nice with either Epic Games Store, Steam, or practically any other store without its own App Store. You could already get GeForce Now running on the separate Nexus app. It’s essentially the same experience on Safari,
© Image: Kyle Barr / GizmodoStreaming is an awkward beast. It will let you play a game from practically anywhere, but it wholly depends on your internet speeds. My office WiFi clearly isn’t good enough for most games through GeForce Now, let alone playing it at the promised 4K resolution. You could already get GeForce Now running on the separate Nexus app. It’s essentially the same experience on Safari, with all the same limitations.
So many of these issues could have been aided with a dedicated app. Either Nvidia doesn’t want to spend time creating a VR-first app, or it doesn’t want to get entangled with Apple’s demands for a 30% cut on in-app purchases. There’s no GeForce Now app available on iOS or iPadOS either. You also have to remember the service is expensive, especially if you want to play at 4K. The Ultimate subscription normally costs $20 a month. This will normally get you the equivalent of a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU and long sessions, but the page says all plays, whether day, 1-month, or 6-month, are all sold out. This could be because the service now also works natively on Steam Deck, so a whole new wave of gamers is looking to jump onto the service.
Either way, VR users are still locked out of what could be a premium experience. The gaming potential for Vision Pro is there, but without controller support or games outside the app store, it will always be limited. Apple has stepped up its push to get gaming into its ecosystem, though only on its terms. The tech giant wants its customers to buy the latest and greatest Macs or iPads for gaming. No Apple system can be a prime target for gamers without opening up the hedges on its walled garden.
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