The recently released Pixel 6 Pro. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales
Pixel 6 Pro owners just got another reason to give Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud game streaming service a shot. The service can now stream games at 120fps on Google’s latest flagship smartphone, according to a recently updated support page spotted by XDA Developers. It’s unclear when the update rolled out exactly, but it means games should feel smoother and more responsive to play compared to when they were capped at 60fps.
That makes Google’s phone the first non-Samsung smartphone to support 120fps. According to Nvidia’s help page, the feature has previously been available for Samsung’s S21 lineup, as well as its S20 FE and Note 20 phones. You’ll need to pay for GeForce Now’s top-of-the-line RTX 3080 tier to stream games at this higher framerate, which costs $99.99 for six months of service. That’s not exactly cheap, but it’s still more affordable than actually tracking down one of the graphics cards for yourself, and as of last week, there’s no waitlist to sign up.
On Android, GeForce Now is limited to 1080p streaming, which is, unfortunately, lower than the native resolution of the Pixel 6 Pro’s 1440p screen. If you want 1440p streaming at 120fps, then you’ll need to stream to a PC or Mac, while jumping up to 4K 60fps HDR streaming requires an Nvidia Shield TV. 1080p streaming also requires 25mbps of bandwidth, and Nvidia recommends connecting to a 5GHz wireless router.
It’s a neat little upgrade for Nvidia’s game streaming service, which allows you to play some (but not all) of your existing games bought on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and Ubisoft Connect / Uplay. We’ve already been impressed with what it’s capable of, and updates like these hardly hurt. Hopefully, 4K support on non-Nvidia hardware isn’t far behind.
If you have a GeForce Now RTX 3080 subscription and you’re using a Pixel 6 Pro, you can manually enable the higher framerate from the Stream quality menu in the GeForce Now app.