Can you play video games on an old Chromebook?
Can you play video games on an old Chromebook? Yes, and no:
Due to the current shortage of laptops across the US, many students and young adults have made the transition to Chromebooks as a cost-effective solution to continue their education without having to break the bank on laptops that have raised 20-40% in the last few months. Chromebooks are great little machines for primary use, such as writing up an essay, surfing the web, or logging into their school portal to turn in assignments. Even with Chromebooks being lower spec machines, services such as Google’s and Nvidia’s GeForce have managed to develop a solution to allow people the oldest devices to experience the most graphics-intensive AAA title games.
Enter the wonderful world of game streaming services, which allows you (for a monthly fee, of course) to use gaming servers to take the hardware load off of your device without sacrificing the performance to appreciate a game in its entirety. While there are some recommended specs to ensure that the games run smoothly on your older laptop or Chromebook, over the last few weeks, Nvidia has been putting in patches that are helping lower the recommendations. Support has come out in the previous week for the ARM processors (which most Chromebooks have if they are not using an intel based processor), and now all that you need is a good internet connection to access your backlog of games. While FPS (frames per second) are not at the “golden standard” 60 fps, utilizing the streaming service allows you to experience newer games such as death stranding, red dead redemption, and the world of warcraft latest shadowlands expansion with 40-50 FPS consistently.
Think of it like this, your TV at home is essentially a big computer monitor, with little to no graphical power. So how is it that you can enjoy your favorite movies and TV shows while using a cheap, little amazon fire stick or Roku? Those small streaming service devices use the same concept as the game streaming services, allowing you to take the load off of your device and place it onto the company’s high-end servers, letting the servers do all the heavy lifting for your’s that simple.
Technology has come a long way, and the concept of streaming services isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. This is excellent news for consumers, as this allows you to take full advantage of the company’s services to keep your electric bill down while still enjoying your favorite entertainment content. Whether it’s streaming the latest and greatest video games to binge-watching your favorite TV shows, streaming services have become the way of the future, and that’s great news for you!
