The choice between cloud gaming and your own PC can’t be settled by a single monthly fee, because you buy a computer once but keep paying for a subscription. The short answer: the cloud works out better if you play in bursts and already own your games, your own machine works out better if you play daily, want to tinker with your games or play without internet.
The deciding number isn’t the monthly price, though, but how much you pay over three or five years and what you’re left holding after that time.
How much the cloud costs when you count in years
GeForce NOW prices for the Czech market, as of the verification date at the end of the article, are these:
| Performance | Ultimate | |
|---|---|---|
| Month | CZK 299 | CZK 599 |
| Year | CZK 2,999 | CZK 5,999 |
| Three years on an annual subscription | CZK 8,997 | CZK 17,997 |
| Three years on a monthly subscription | CZK 10,764 | CZK 21,564 |
| Five years on an annual subscription | CZK 14,995 | CZK 29,995 |
| Highest resolution | up to 1440p | up to 5K |
Paying annually saves roughly a sixth compared to monthly on both plans, so if you’re sure you’ll stick with the cloud, pay once a year. If you’re not sure, start monthly and pay a bit extra for the option to quit anytime. What each plan includes besides resolution is covered in the overview of GeForce NOW plans and prices.
Why you won’t find a comparison with a specific build here
It would be tempting to set a specific PC build against those numbers. But graphics card and CPU prices in Czechia shift from week to week, and a comparison built on an amount we haven’t verified would look convincing and be a lie. So it’s more useful to ask two questions: what you don’t get with a subscription, and what you no longer have to deal with.
What you don’t get with a subscription
- Ownership of the machine. After three years of subscription, you have nothing. A computer still has residual value after three years, you can sell it, upgrade it with a new graphics card or pass it on within the family.
- Access to game files. With GeForce NOW, game and driver updates are controlled by NVIDIA, not you. You can only install your own software where you’re the administrator of the machine, and in the cloud only one model matches that: Shadow PC rents you an entire Windows computer. Even there, though, some games won’t run because of publisher anti-cheat and DRM, since they prohibit running in a virtual machine.
- Playing without internet. The cloud needs a connection the entire time you play. NVIDIA lists latency under 80 ms to the data center as a requirement and recommends 25 Mbps for Full HD at 60 FPS. A connection drop means the end of the session, not just a frozen picture.
- Certainty that you can play everything. With GeForce NOW, the publisher has to allow the game for the cloud, and availability varies by country because of age ratings. NVIDIA itself warns that a game bought in a store through the service may not be streamable in the cloud.
- Space for installed games. Both the Performance and Ultimate memberships include 100 GB of storage per gaming session, which means the game downloads again at the start of every session. Persistent storage is a paid add-on at USD 2.99 a month for 200 GB, USD 4.99 for 500 GB and USD 7.99 for 1 TB. If you cancel your plan, the contents are deleted at the end of the billing period without delay and with no way to recover them.
That last item is the most underestimated. If you plan to play your own games via Install-to-Play, add a dollar amount for storage to the subscription, otherwise you’ll be downloading a hundred-gigabyte game every time you launch it.
What you no longer have to deal with
- The upgrade cycle. The Ultimate plan runs on the most powerful server rigs, and when NVIDIA deploys a newer one, you get it at no extra cost. At home, you replace your graphics card once every several years and pay for it in full.
- Noise, heat and power consumption. The data center burns the power, not your room. You notice it in summer, and with a laptop you’ll hear it in the fan noise too.
- Maintenance. Drivers, game updates, cleaning out dust or figuring out why something won’t launch are no longer your problem.
- The need for a powerful device. You can run GeForce NOW on a Mac from 2009 or newer, on Windows with a dual-core CPU and 4 GB of memory, on a Chromebook with 4 GB or in a browser. The connection matters, not the hardware.
- Waiting for downloads. Ready-to-Play games launch right away, and with Shadow PC you get a gigabit line inside the machine regardless of how slow your home connection is.
How many hours you get for the money
A cloud subscription is sold as a monthly fee, but what you’re buying is time. Both paid GeForce NOW plans have a cap of 100 hours a month, so an annual Performance plan gets you at most 1,200 hours of gaming. That works out to CZK 2.50 per hour, and CZK 5 on Ultimate.
A hundred hours a month is roughly 3.3 hours a day. If you play less, you pay for time you don’t use. If you play more, you hit the cap and either buy extra hours or finish playing on the basic rigs for free. This is exactly where the math flips in favor of your own computer, because once it’s paid for, it doesn’t cost you anything per hour.
Caps also differ within the cloud. Shadow PC gaming plans have 120 or 210 hours a month, Boosteroid doesn’t list any monthly hour cap and doesn’t limit the length of a single session either. If you play a lot and don’t want to give up the cloud, these are the options to look at. The article on alternatives to GeForce NOW has an overview.
Who the cloud is worth it for
Go with the cloud if you already have a Steam library and your machine can’t keep up anymore. If you play in bursts, in the evenings and on weekends. If you want to play on a laptop, TV or handheld where a newer game wouldn’t run at all. And if you don’t want to pay for a rig all at once but spread it out over months.
Go with your own PC if you play several hours a day, if you play competitively and every tenth of a second matters to you, if you mod, if you play titles the cloud doesn’t support, or if your connection is unstable. This group also includes anyone who uses their computer for things other than gaming.
Consider a console if you’re deciding mainly on price. The one-time investment is lower than for a gaming PC, games run without tweaking settings, and the PS5 vs Xbox Series X comparison is a good place to start.
For players in Czechia, there’s one more point in the decision. NVIDIA’s nearest data centers are in Poland and Germany, and it has no server in Czechia or Slovakia, so a trip across the border always gets added to your monitor’s response time. You won’t notice it in slower games, but you will in competitive ones. Some services haven’t made it to Czechia at all, which also applies to Amazon Luna and the countries where it’s available.
FAQ
It is if you play in bursts and already own your games. In Czechia, annual Performance costs CZK 2,999, or CZK 14,995 over five years, enough to buy a computer that you could still sell afterward. If you play daily, though, you’ll hit the cap of 100 hours a month and the math flips.
With GeForce NOW, game and driver updates are controlled by NVIDIA, and Install-to-Play only works with Steam and only for games the publisher has allowed in the cloud. Among cloud services, only Shadow PC lets you install anything freely, because it rents you a full Windows machine. Even there, anti-cheat blocks some games.
With GeForce NOW on an annual subscription in Czechia, CZK 8,997 for Performance and CZK 17,997 for Ultimate. Paying monthly, CZK 10,764 and CZK 21,564. The difference between annual and monthly payment is roughly a sixth of the price, so the annual option pays off for anyone who stays with the service.
Ready-to-Play games keep your progress via Steam Cloud if they support it. The contents of any purchased persistent storage, however, are deleted at the end of the billing period without delay and with no way to recover them. Before canceling, it’s worth checking what’s stored there.
Above all, you need stable internet. NVIDIA recommends 25 Mbps for Full HD at 60 FPS and lists latency under 80 ms to the data center as a requirement. A gigabit plan will raise your resolution but won’t improve response time, because that’s determined by the length of the route to the server.
Subscription and hardware prices keep moving, so recalculate both sides of the equation using current price lists. How the cloud works technically is explained in the introduction to what cloud gaming is, NVIDIA’s model is covered in the article what is GeForce NOW, and a different sales model is shown in the comparison GeForce NOW vs Xbox Cloud Gaming. Other articles are in the cloud gaming section on Gamers Together. Information verified as of 17 August 2026.