I played AAA games on a ‘gaming Chromebook’ with GeForce Now and Xbox Game Pass — which one is better?

I try to have an open mind when reviewing anything, but to be honest, I was kinda ready to dismiss the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE as a gaming device out of the box.

After all, Chromebooks aren’t for gaming, right? These are cheap(er) laptops largely meant for students or people who don’t need advanced features from their computer. Most PC games aren’t supported by ChromeOS and the internal specs aren’t good enough to run anything intense, anyway.

But remarkably, thanks at least in part to advances in cloud gaming tech (e.g., Nvidia GeForce Now and Xbox Game Pass), the $650 Chromebook Plus 516 GE is actually pretty good at playing video games. It’s also pretty good at just being a laptop, though not without some ChromeOS-flavored hiccups along the way.

This piece kills two birds with one stone. It’s a review of the Chromebook Plus 516 GE as well as a deep dive into which cloud gaming services fares better on it: Nvidia GeForce Now or Xbox Game Pass? (Skip to “Cloud Gaming” for this analysis.)

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE price and specs

This is a great laptop keyboard.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

For $650, this is what Acer provides in the Chromebook Plus 516 GE:

• Intel Core 5 120U processor

• Intel integrated graphics

• 16-inch display with 2560×1600 resolution, 16:10 aspect ratio, and 120Hz refresh rate

• 256GB SSD storage

• 8GB RAM

The processor and GPU aren’t necessarily anything to write home about, but that’s to be expected from a Chromebook. For the price, this is actually a pretty decent deal. A 256GB SSD is plenty for a device that will mostly rely on Google cloud storage, while 8GB of RAM is enough to ensure that multitasking won’t be too problematic.

The display is also great for the price, but we’ll get into that in a second.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE: Design

I’m not enamored with the Chromebook Plus 516 GE’s design, but it’s not horrible, either.

See what I mean?
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

In essence, it just looks like any other big black laptop. The main thing I’m not a fan of is the design on the lid — about 80 percent is shiny black, while the remaining 20 percent is matte black to accommodate the Acer and Chromebook Plus logos. To me, it just looks a bit awkward. Choose shiny or matte, I don’t care, but don’t do both.

Fortunately, laptops are meant to be used, not just looked at. Acer packed some nice physical features into this machine, including a keyboard with nearly ideal key sizes, nice spacing between the keys, and pleasant key travel when pressed. It’s quiet and feels fantastic on your fingertips. The keyboard is also backlit, which is a nice touch.

One small knock I have against the design is that, compared to other Chromebooks I’ve used in the past, this one’s pretty beefy. Specifically, it’s 3.8 pounds, making it fairly heavy for a portable work machine.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE: Display

In terms of display tech, Acer’s latest Chromebook Plus has one of the best Chromebook screens I’ve seen. The 16:10 aspect ratio adds an extra little bit of vertical space if you need it, and many high-end video games support that. Its resolution is high and sharp, ensuring that anything you look at will be crystal clear. 

It’s a big boy for a Chromebook.
Credit: Joe Maldonado / Mashable

I’d also like to shout out the 120Hz refresh rate. For a device that’s marketed as a gaming behemoth, that’s really important. Most PC games are capable of running at higher than 60 frames per second with powerful enough hardware, which is a benefit that’s missing from a large majority of console games. 

There is one major issue, though. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to change the display’s refresh rate in the device settings. A 120Hz refresh rate is great for gaming, but for everyday internet use, it’s not that useful and can drain the laptop’s battery. The ability to turn it down to 90Hz or 60Hz would be lovely, but that’s not available.

If you want to know how the display fared while gaming, check out the “Cloud Gaming” section.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE: Ports

The port selection is a real winner. On the left, there’s a USB-C port, an Ethernet port, and a headphone jack.

The ports on the left side.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

The ports on the right side.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

On the right, there’s another USB-C port, an HDMI port, and a regular USB port. This should ensure you have plenty of options when connecting accessories and peripherals, and even gives you a way to connect the laptop to a TV via HDMI.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE: Cloud gaming

For testing purposes, I was supplied with an Nvidia GeForce Now Ultimate subscription.

Acer is selling this as a “gaming Chromebook,” so let’s talk about how it actually fares as a gaming device.

Pretty decently, as it turns out! To be clear, I don’t mean as a local gaming device that you install games on. This isn’t a traditional gaming laptop. Instead, the best approach is to use a game-streaming service like Xbox Game Pass or Nvidia GeForce Now. This way, the game is running on much more powerful hardware elsewhere (Nvidia’s servers, for example) and beaming a high-quality, high-framerate video to your Chromebook.

‘Control’ is so cool.
Credit: Steam/Remedy

I tested both of those services out on Chromebook Plus 516 GE and came away fairly impressed with what I saw. Let’s start with Game Pass, since it’s much simpler.

Xbox offers a selection of Game Pass games (not every game that’s available via that service, mind you, just some of them) for game streaming through a web browser. Just log into an eligible Game Pass account and you can start playing (some of) your Xbox games right away.

It’s all remarkably quick. My save data synced right away and I was playing an old save of Assassin’s Creed: Origins in HD at 60 frames per second (FPS) on a Chromebook. There wasn’t much visible video buffering or stuttering, either. The same held true for Forza Horizon 4. However, as will always be true of game streaming, there is a bit of input latency. This wasn’t very noticeable in Assassin’s Creed, but rendered Forza nearly unplayable for me.

I was more impressed by GeForce Now, but with the caveat that I was using the Ultimate subscription tier, which runs your games on an RTX 4080 GPU on a server farm somewhere, ensuring high-end performance on just about anything you can play. Framerates can also go up to 240 FPS with Ultimate. The free and cheaper GeForce Now tiers grant access to lesser hardware and a 60 FPS cap.

‘Assassin’s Creed’ works well in a streaming format.
Credit: Ubisoft/Steam

I can’t speak to how GeForce Now’s cheaper tiers work on this Chromebook, but Ultimate was fantastic. It’s able to pull in games you own from third-party marketplaces like Steam and Epic, and while plenty of games aren’t supported for legal rights reasons, a decent chunk of my Steam library was available right away. I started a new game in Control, jacked the settings up all the way, turned on ray tracing, and was a little blown away.

The game ran at at least 60 FPS, if not much more. Textures looked crisp, the resolution was sharp, and the ray-traced reflections worked as advertised. Most impressively, the input delay was hardly noticeable, at least during Control’s simple early combat encounters. I could see a world in which the late-game difficulty curve is too much to handle via game streaming, especially because I did notice a few short instances of video stuttering.

As a sidenote, plugging an Xbox Series X controller into the USB port worked instantly. There was no setup needed and it worked with every game I played.

I have to admit, as a lifelong console gamer who also owns a Steam Deck for some limited PC excursions, there isn’t really a world in which I’d ever make a Chromebook my primary gaming device. It just ain’t happening. I’m too much of a purist about video buffering and input delay to deal with these things long-term.

However, not everyone is like me. If the Chromebook Plus 516 GE sounds like it fits your specific gaming needs and tastes, I can at least vouch for its performance. This is an excellent game-streaming laptop, regardless of your thoughts on game streaming.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE: Performance

Its regular everyday performance is fine, too. 

It performs well.
Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable

I don’t have quite as much to say about this because it’s not as surprising or fascinating as its gaming prowess, but the Chromebook Plus 516 GE will work perfectly well as an everyday work/school machine, as long as your tasks are mostly confined to web browsers. The processor is fast enough to keep up with everyday tasks, while the 8GB of RAM keeps things moving, even when you have a bunch of tabs open. 

I should also note that I never noticed the laptop getting warm, even while gaming. I guess that’s one of the advantages of streaming games rather than running them on local hardware.

If you’re curious, I ran a test using the GeekBench benchmarking software and the Chromebook Plus 516 GE had a multi-score score of 7,660. That’s not really remarkable by laptop standards, but compared to other Chromebooks we’ve tested out this year, it’s great. Those other ones had scores in the 4,000s.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE: Google AI features

You may be wondering what the distinction is between a regular Chromebook and a Chromebook Plus. One of the main ones is that Chromebook Plus laptops have access to Google’s best Gemini artificial intelligence features.

This pretty much manifests in the form of three features that are already, in some form, available on newer Google devices like the Pixel 9. Help Me Write, for example, will — well — help you write. Simply right-click on a text entry field in Gmail, for example, and Gemini will let you type in a text prompt so it can compose the perfect message in your stead, according to your instructions.

You can also right-click on the desktop wallpaper to generate new AI ones, though this is more limited. Rather than free text entry, it’s more like Mad Libs, with you choosing from a bunch of options to fill in a pre-existing prompt. Finally, Magic Editor has made its way over from Google phones to let you quickly and easily edit photos.

All of these things work as advertised, though I will say I’m disappointed by the limitations of the wallpaper generator. Regardless, I’ve made my thoughts clear on Google’s push for AI ubiquity in my Pixel 9 review and elsewhere; I don’t think anyone needs AI to help them write emails or create desktop wallpapers.

Writing a quick message or finding a new wallpaper are not difficult or time-consuming tasks by any means, and I don’t think we gain anything from automating them and potentially stealing from scraped internet content at the same time.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE: Battery life

Last but certainly not least, the Chromebook Plus 516 GE has excellent battery life for a laptop. 

Using our in-house testing method, which involves looping a YouTube video at 50 percent brightness and 1080p resolution until the battery dies, I was able to get 10 hours and 12 minutes out of the Chromebook Plus 516 GE. You should almost certainly be able to get a full work day out of this bad boy on a full charge, in other words. 

That’s just good stuff, folks.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE: Final thoughts

Put one way, the Chromebook Plus 516 GE is an incredible value: You can play high-end PC games at their highest settings and highest frame rates for less than the cost of a PS5 Pro. As a nice bonus, it’s also a fully functional laptop.

This $650 machine is expensive and beefy by Chromebook standards, but it’s still a better value than a gaming laptop as long as you don’t mind game streaming. Quality battery life, a great keyboard, and a solid gaming display seal the deal. 

I might never buy one of these for myself, but there’s definitely someone out there who would get the most out of the Chromebook Plus 516 GE.