Nvidia’s GeForce Now Day Pass rents you an RTX 4080 GPU-powered gaming PC for 24 hours
Nvidia has a new way for gamers to use its GeForce Now streaming service in the form of a Day Pass.
Team Green previously announced in January that this would happen with GeForce Now, but the passes are now actually available.
Previously, you had to sign up for a subscription to experience the full power of the cloud gaming service – unlike the cheap freebie service which is very limited, with long queues (and now also with ads).
With the Day Pass, however, you can use the full GeForce Now service – and even the top-tier RTX 4080-powered offering – for, well, a day as you might guess, for a small outlay.
How many? Nvidia charges $7.99 for an Ultimate Day Pass and $3.99 for a Priority Day Pass in the US (or £7.99 and £3.99 in the UK).
These passes match the existing Priority and Ultimate plans (which come on a monthly basis, or you can sign up for 6 months at a discount).
For those unfamiliar with the plans, Priority is the standard offering for GeForce Now and offers 1080p cloud gaming at up to 60 frames per second (fps) with a maximum session duration of 6 hours. Ultimate raises the bar even higher with an RTX 4080 cloud-based rig that can do 4K gaming at up to 120 fps (or 240 fps if you’re not using 4K) and a slightly longer session length of 8 hours.
Keep in mind that what you get in terms of streaming quality will obviously depend on the quality of your internet connection and how fast it is (or not, as the case may be).
However, it’s also worth noting that Nvidia tells us: “Day passes are available in limited quantities every day, so grab one before the opportunity runs out.”
Analysis: A tough day of gaming
This is a welcome development for those thinking of dipping their toes into the world of cloud gaming, as it allows you to test the waters for just a day.
By a day, Nvidia does indeed mean 24 full hours, so those willing to go without much sleep can really get their money’s worth. (Mind you, for so many reasons, we don’t recommend a 24-hour marathon gaming session – unless you’re doing it for a good cause, like a charity or something).
It’s a great idea to try out the full service this way for a few bucks (for the standard offering) because no matter how much you research or read about how good GeForce Now is or isn’t, there’s no replacement because you actually get it running on your own internet connection for a long time to see how the service performs.
The Ultimate (RTX 4080) Day Pass may be priced a bit too high for some gamers’ comfort.
Since the day passes are only available in ‘limited’ quantities on a day-to-day basis, this could perhaps be a useful way to offload unused gaming server capacity from Nvidia’s point of view.
The downside for existing GeForce Now users could be that if the Day Pass proves popular, it could mean longer queues for them. (And if wait times get longer, we can’t imagine what that will mean for freebie users who already need the patience of a gaming saint).
Remember that with GeForce Now you’re renting the hardware to game on, but not the games themselves – you must also own them (on Steam or the Epic Games Store, for example) and they must be supported by Nvidia’s cloud service. Naturally.