If this were a high school scenario, Xbox and Nvidia would be gawking at each other from across the dining room Microsoft seems to be in a particularly cooperative mood these days, with Game Pass coming to Amazon Fire TV And now the Redmond giant has partnered with Nvidia to bring GeForce Now integration to the Xbox gaming page

Xbox has joined forces with Team Green and Boosteroid to implement both game streaming services on the title pages of the official Xbox website (thanks to The Verge) A convenient and practical benefit of this collaboration is that GeForce and Boosteroid subscribers can now launch and stream games directly from these Microsoft pages

The new “Choose Streaming Platform” button on the Xbox game page allows you to choose your preferred streaming service, provided you are a subscriber of course; Nvidia's streaming service is the best in the industry, boasting the highest picture quality and lowest input lag The Priority sub offers up to 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution at 60 frames per second and costs $999/£999/m, while the top-of-the-line GeForce Now Ultimate tier is $1999/£1799

If you have a decent broadband connection, I highly recommend going Ultimate In my home country of the UK, I am fortunate enough to have 1GB of fiber optic

The Ultimate offers the power of a cloud-based GeForce RTX 4080 GPU (the third fastest graphics card Nvidia makes after the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 Super) and can be used with digital Up to 4K resolution (3840 x 2160) at 240 fps on select titles owned from the platform The best experience on Ultimate was with Cyberpunk 2077: input lag was minimal and frame rates felt above 60 fps

As The Verge points out, the seemingly closer business relationship between Microsoft and Nvidia has resulted in the two giants partnering on a 10-year deal to allow you to play your owned Xbox games on GeForce Now This follows Microsoft's historic acquisition of the giant publisher and some Activision Blizzard titles

Selecting GeForce Now redirects you to an app to play, so let's read between the lines what's going on here In a way, this is another step forward in the 10-year partnership agreement between Microsoft and Nvidia

However, we still have to choose between Xbox Cloud Gaming (capable of 60 FPS at 1080p) or the far superior GeForce Now (capable of 240 FPS at full 4K) Over the past year, there has not been much improvement in Microsoft's over-platforming, except for extensions to other platforms like Fire TV

So, let me get out my crystal ball and predict the future Because to the slightly skeptical (like me), it may seem tacit admission that Redmond does not have the ability to reach such heights as resolution and refresh rates

And with a full nine years left in this collaboration, we could see Microsoft begin to enlist a little help from Nvidia's GeForce Now technology to improve the quality and latency issues currently seen with Xbox Cloud Gaming Will it? I think so Whatever the thinking behind this, it would give people more options to access games, and more options is always a good thing