Hi all, I have very recently set up a cloud gaming subscription under the Geforce Now (Cloud.gg) service. I have successfully made it work to a high standard, however I had to do a pretty fiddly workaround to get there. This is just to document my working method to potentially help others, as well as being an opportunity for others to suggest more efficient and/or cheaper methods to getting the service running with Slingshot or other similar ISPs.

For info, I am under the Gigantic Fibre plan with about 800/300mbps connection. The connection has been great generally with no outages or anything.

Fast forward to setting up Geforce Now - this is a service where basically they have data centres within Australia (all over the world actually) filled with high spec gaming PC's which lets you run games remotely on their machines, which then streams to a local device in NZ. I am using a new Samsung TV with a bluetooth controller. The service app is installed natively on the TV. I do not own a computer or any other hardware at all.

This Geforce service has a pretty handy connection test within the app - which states that I had a stable connection, however the latency was sitting at around 170-180ms (not ideal, unplayable to most probably). I thought this is unusually high so I then began troubleshooting the issue.

I tested the service on different devices (phone), wifi (5g and 2.4g), lan, various router settings, ports, QoS etc. These all had a very similar performance. I then also tested my connection on different devices (phone) and pinged some random servers actually located in Australia - these all had a latency of around 30-40ms, which sounds about what is should be for an efficient connection. Thus I was able to determine that the issue most likely lay with the ISP, or with the Geforce Now server I was connecting to. 

I then decided to troubleshoot by using a VPN (I used Surfshark) - connecting to a good server in Australia with a 30-40ms latency ping. Subsequently using the Geforce Now connection test in their app immediately had me at a great connection rating and performing under the expected latency of around 40ms ping. Great. The next couple of issues that had to be solved was there is no way to natively install the VPN on the TV - this was thankfully easy as I am able to run the VPN directly on the router. Although the connection to Geforce Now was great, the service was ultimately not letting me run the service and giving me some error. I suspect that Geforce have VPNs generally blacklisted to limit international bots or just for keeping loads manageable on their servers - anyway I solved this be getting a dedicated IP from the VPN, essentially a unique IP that won't be be able to be associated with the VPN service (to my knowledge anyway). At this point (and having since played the last couple of days), the experience is absolutely fantastic and seamless, and is actually mind boggling how well the technology actually performs. I couldn't recommend the Geforce Now service enough.... as long as you can manage to get a good connection from your ISP. 

I have not run a traceroute directly to the Geforce Now server without the VPN enabled (not sure how to do this or what the IP address is), but I strongly suspect the issue can be attributed to a poor ISP international route provided by Slingshot to this particular Australian server for whatever reason, perhaps routing through Singapore or even further before getting to Australia. I do not think that this routing issue will be unique to Slingshot (2degrees) but I could be wrong there.

I don't have the knowledge to think of an alternative network solution (I'm sure there is at least one other viable method). I suppose I will try connect without the VPN every few months to see if the issue eventually resolves itself.