GeForce Now's biggest challenge has turned out to be that major publishers have pulled their games from the service, regardless of latency. Still, this and other cloud gaming services have the potential to change the game. In the same vein is Nvidia's new CloudXR software development kit. It brings similar concepts for streaming virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences to lower-performance headsets.

It is called CloudXR because VR, AR, and MR are collectively referred to as XR. With this SDK, developers can stream graphically demanding XR content to virtually any head-mounted display, whether it is a high-end headset like the Vive Pro or a much less powerful one like the Oculus Go or an Android device (such as GearVR). Streaming. [With the Nvidia CloudXR platform,] any end device, including head-mounted displays (HMDs) and connected Windows and Android devices, becomes a high-fidelity XR display capable of showing professional-quality graphics." Nvidia explains.

As with GeForce Now, the receiving hardware is much less critical, as powerful servers do the heavy lifting. In this case, Nvidia's RTX servers with professional Quadro RTX 8000 GPUs and 6000 GPUs do the bulk of the work.

For now, this is not the VR equivalent of GeForce Now; with the CloudXR SDK, they can stream content from their RTX servers to headsets via Wi-Fi, 5G cellular, or Ethernet. [The CloudXR server provides a virtual HMD driver and the application can assume that the HMD is locally connected, so no application-level changes are required. the CloudXR server driver receives frames from the OpenVR application and then encodes the frames and forwards them to the CloudXR client application. [On the client, the Cloud XR Client Application receives the frames and audio, decodes them, and presents them to the end device runtime. The application also relays controller and HMD tracking data and input to the server," Nvidia continues.

While enterprise customers are the primary target, Nvidia states that it has also created an SDK for "consumer platforms." Thus, even if Nvidia did not create a GeForce Now equivalent from this product, it is possible that a third party could.