Cloud gaming is kinda amazing
We went through the same coping phases with movies and music. Yes, vinyl had a resurgence, but it's still a tiny sliver of hours listened. Same too with 4K Blue-rays. Almost everyone just listens to Spotify or watches on Netflix these days. It's simply cheaper, faster, and, thus, better.
Not "better" in some abstract philosophical way (ownership vs rent) or even in a concrete technical way (bit rates), but in a practical way. Paying $20/month for unlimited music and the same again for a broad selection of shows and movies is clearly a deal most consumers are happy to make.
NVIDIA, though, kept working, and its GeForce NOW service is actually, finally kinda amazing! I had tried it back in the late 2010s, and just didn't see anything worth using back then. Maybe my internet was too slow, maybe the service just wasn't good enough yet. But then I tried it again a few days ago, just after NVIDIA shipped the native GFN client for Linux, and holy smokes!!
But of course seeing Fortnite running in full graphics on that remote 4080 made me hungry for even more. I've been playing Fortnite every week for the last five years or so with the kids, but the majority of my gameplay has actually been on tablet. A high-end tablet, like an iPad M5, can play the game with good-for-mobile graphics at 120 Hz. It's smooth, it's easy, and the kids and I can lounge on the couch and play together. Good Family Fun! Not peak visual fidelity, though.
So after the NVIDIA GeForce NOW experience, I found a way to use the same amazing game streaming technology at home through a local-server solution called Apollo and a client called Moonlight. This allowed me to turn my racing-sim PC that's stuck downstairs into a cloud-like remote gaming service that I can access anywhere on the local network, so I can borrow its 4090 to play 120-fps, ultra-settings Fortnite with zero perceivable input lag on any computer in the house.
The NVIDIA cloud streaming is very impressive, but the local-server version of the same is mind-blowing. I'm mostly using the Asus G14 laptop as a client, so Fortnite looks incredible with those ultra, high-resolution settings on its OLED, but unlike when you use that laptop's built-in graphics card, the machine stays perfectly cool and silent pulling a meager 18 watts. And the graphics are of course a lot nicer.