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Nvidia announced this week that the latest version of its subscription service, GeForce Now Ultimate, has officially gone live for several cities in the US and is rolling out to San Jose, Los Angeles and Dallas, as well as Frankfurt, Germany. Areas around these cities can also connect to the new Ultimate tier servers.
This version upgrades the main RTX 3080 tier from GeForce Now and renames it to Ultimate membership, offering the same benefits of the RTX 3080 tier, but upgrades the cloud rig to an RTX 4080 GPU.
The service is powered by the Lovelace GPU architecture and, according to Nvidia (opens in new tab)streams up to 240 FPS with NVIDIA Reflex, up to 4K 120 FPS with support for DLSS 3 and RTX ON, and ultra-wide support up to 3,840 x 1,600p resolution at 120 FPS.
We ran the numbers and found that if you paid ($99.99, about £85 / AU$145) over six years for the Ultimate subscription level in six-month increments, it would cost the same as buying the RTX 4080 graphics card at current price. suggested retail price. This makes it an excellent option for those with a solid internet connection who want the performance of the current generation graphics card without shelling out more than $1,000 for it.
“After starting the rollout of the RTX 4080 SuperPODs today, it will roll out to other regions, with a wider release expected in Q1,” an Nvidia spokesperson told TechRadar. “On our weekly GFN Thursday blog (opens in new tab)we will provide updates each week on which regions are getting RTX 4080 performance.”
Could this be the future of PC gaming?
We’ve previously tried out the RTX 3080 layer for our Acer Chromebook 516 GE review and found that the performance on one of the best Chromebooks we’ve tested is almost indistinguishable from actually using a laptop with the best GPU on the market. market.
And when we got to work with the new Ultimate tier for CES 2023, we found that the performance is even better, as it addresses latency issues that have held back the subscription service. Not only would the upgraded servers bring system latency below that 60ms threshold, but Nvidia also claims that by including Nvidia Reflex in the server-side processing, it can bring it down to just 35ms, which is comparable to a real gaming PC running local equipment.
If this turns out to be true, that would be absolutely huge and make an already great service perfect for even hardcore and ultimately competitive gaming, perhaps even beating the best gaming PC you can get for a similar price.