Acer’s Chromebook 516 GE is here to play – if you’ve got great internet

A Chromebook needs more than just an RGB keyboard to be a gaming laptop. It also needs a high refresh rate screen and solid port selection. Now let’s talk. I’ve been reviewing the $649.99 Acer Chromebook 516 GE, one of three newly announced gaming Chromebooks my colleague Monica wrote about this week, and I’ve got good news: It makes a compelling impression of a gaming Laptop as long as you have fast internet.

I tested a pre-production unit of the 516 GE and it looks very different inside than a typical gaming laptop. There’s no high-end processor or graphics card to run the latest games. Instead, it’s outfitted an Ultrabook with the necessary connectivity – cutting-edge Wi-Fi 6E connectivity and a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port – to sing cloud game streaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now as well leave as on a more expensive Windows computer.

The real star of the hardware is the 16-inch display with an aspect ratio of 16:10. It supports a QHD resolution (2,560 x 1,600) and is set to a refresh rate of 120 Hz by default (Chrome OS’s settings don’t seem to allow changing the refresh rate, by the way). It looks as good as screens in Windows gaming laptops that cost two to three times as much. I also want to commend the keyboard. It’s not mechanical, but each key delivers a tactile leap, and the WASD keys have handy white borders around them.

These advantages make gaming on a Chromebook feel more normal. I played half-life 2, portal 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and more without thinking too much about the fact that I’m gaming on a Chromebook, let alone streaming the games from a server farm somewhere. You can forget that the games don’t run natively. And this laptop’s screen specs support that illusion.

you need one very good Internet connection to maintain this illusion. If you want to take full advantage of the 516 GE’s 120Hz 1600p panel, you’ll need at least 35Mbps download speeds, and you’ll need to pay $19.99 a month (or $99.99 for six months) for pay the highest tier GeForce Now. The $9.99 tier limits you to 1080p at 60 frames per second.

These requirements may not be outlandish for city or suburban dwellers, but are likely to present problems for anyone who does not have access to high-speed terrestrial internet. While some LTE/5G home internet connections can meet the speed requirements, the latency likely won’t meet Nvidia’s recommendation of 40ms or less. Plus, if you have a data cap, streaming games will roughly use this laptop’s native screen resolution and refresh rate 20GB per hour.

If you meet these internet requirements (which I do at home: 226 Mbps download, 23 Mbps upload) you will likely have a great gaming experience. Cyberpunk 2077, running over Wi-Fi at the laptop’s native resolution and refresh rate (with max bitrate set to Auto), looked almost as sharp as it would on a real gaming rig. But further The edge‘s office WiFi I had to drop down to Balanced quality mode – 1400 x 900 and 60 frames per second at around 6 GB of data per hour. Your gaming experience is entirely dependent on your internet speed and network hardware, and these are difficult variables to control wherever you go with this laptop.

The appeal of cloud gaming is that you can experience high-end gaming without having to pay for high-end gaming hardware. Google has tried to break into cloud gaming with its soon-to-be-defunct cloud gaming service Stadia, but it hasn’t been able to match Nvidia GeForce Now and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, in part because those services let you play games you already have own other platforms instead of having to buy them again.

And while offloading the heavy lifting means you can play on hardware you already have, companies are starting to sell devices optimized for cloud gaming. If you’ve been following the latest tech news, this is the idea behind Logitech’s G Cloud Gaming handheld, except with a portable Android tablet handheld console.

A cloud gaming Chromebook makes a lot more sense than Stadia (or an Android tablet, spoiler alert) because even when you’re not gaming, a laptop is a very useful thing. And the 516 GE has respectable specs for the price of $649.99. This model features Intel’s Core i5-1240P processor, integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB NVMe SSD.

We’ll be delving deeper into performance on gaming Chromebooks like this for a full review as soon as possible.