The Vision Pro Enters a New Gaming Era with GeForce NOW Support
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While you might think a powerful virtual reality headset like Apple’s Vision Pro would be a gamer’s dream, there sadly hasn’t been much uptake among app developers. However, that’s just changed thanks to support for Nvidia’s GeForce NOW cloud gaming service.
Even though there’s a decent list of native visionOS games on the App Store, you won’t find too many mainstream titles. The collection is made up of indie apps, many of which are merely casual games that are playable within the spatial computing environment. Cool, but hardly on the level of an immersive first-person shooter.
Thankfully, Nvidia has been happy to fill that gap. At the beginning of the year, it announced that GeForce NOW would be coming to “Apple Vision Pro spatial computers,” unlocking AAA console titles and turning Apple’s headset into a GeForce RTX gaming PC.
In collaboration with Apple, Meta and ByteDance, NVIDIA is expanding GeForce NOW cloud gaming to Apple Vision Pro spatial computers, Meta Quest 3 and 3S and Pico virtual- and mixed-reality devices — with all the bells and whistles of NVIDIA technologies, including ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS.
Nvidia
With over 2,100 supported titles and new ones coming all the time, Vision Pro owners will finally be able to enjoy a true collection of VR games. However, it’s not limited to just immersive new titles like DOOM: The Dark Ages and Avowed. Nvidia says that GeForce NOW on the Vision Pro can handle any gamepad-compatible PC titles “on a massive virtual screen” in their own “personal gaming theater.”
Plus, GeForce NOW offers over 100 titles for free, so Vision Pro users can try out a few games to see how it works. There’s no native visionOS app for this — it’s all handled through the browser. However, as MacStories pointed out when it covered the announcement earlier this month, it may be tricky unless you update to the latest version of visionOS:
For starters, the current version of Safari on visionOS does not support adding PWAs to the visionOS Home Screen. Given that the existing version of GeForce NOW requires saving a web app to begin the setup process, this either means that a) NVIDIA knows a visionOS software update in January will add the ability to save web apps or b) GeForce NOW won’t require that additional step to start playing on visionOS. The latter option seems more likely.
Federico Viticci, MacStores
Today’s brief announcement on X doesn’t go into any specific details on how this will work. Still, it can’t be a coincidence that visionOS 2.3 was released only two days ago, so we’d recommend updating to the latest version before giving it a try. Even if enhanced PWA support isn’t a thing, there may be other fixes and optimizations in the latest software release.
Notably, Nvidia doesn’t list any specific software requirements on its support page, although it does recommend a 5 GHz Wi-Fi connection with 40 Mbps of bandwidth if you want to stream games at 4K/60fps resolutions. A Microsoft Xbox One/Series or Sony DualShock 4 controller is also required as Apple Vision Pro gestures are not supported while streaming games, and physical keyboard and mouse support is limited to navigating the app.
