Nvidia announced this week that the latest version of its subscription service, GeForce Now Ultimate, has officially launched in several US cities, including San Jose, Los Angeles and Dallas, as well as Frankfurt, Germany. The areas surrounding these cities will also be able to connect to the new Ultimate tier servers.
This release updates the main tier of the RTX 3080 GeForce Now and rebrands it as Ultimate Membership, offering the same benefits as the RTX 3080 tier but upgrading the cloud platform to the RTX 4080 GPU.
The service is based on the Lovelace GPU architecture and, according to Nvidia (opens in a new tab)streams up to 240 FPS with NVIDIA Reflex, up to 4K 120 FPS with DLSS 3 and RTX ON support, and ultra-wide support for resolutions up to 3840 x 1600p at 120 FPS.
We put in the numbers and found that if you were paying for an Ultimate subscription in six-monthly increments for six years ($99.99, around £85/AU$145), it would cost the same as buying an RTX 4080 graphics card at the current MSRP. This makes it a great option for people with a solid internet connection who want the performance of a current-gen graphics card without having to pay over $1,000 for it.
“Having started rolling out the RTX 4080 SuperPOD today, rolling out to other regions will begin, with a wider rollout expected in Q1,” an Nvidia spokesperson told TechRadar. “In our weekly Thursday GFN blog (opens in a new tab)we will be providing updates weekly on which regions are achieving RTX 4080 performance.”
Could this be the future of computer games?
We previously tried the RTX 3080 level in our Acer Chromebook 516 GE review and found the performance on one of the best Chromebooks we’ve tested to be almost indistinguishable from actually running a laptop with the best graphics card on the market.
And when we took a look at the new Ultimate tier for CES 2023, we found performance to be even better as it fixes the latency issues that were holding up the subscription service. Not only would upgraded servers lower system latency below that 60ms threshold, but Nvidia also claims that by including Nvidia Reflex for server-side processing, it can bring it down to 35ms, which is comparable to an actual gaming PC. local equipment.
If true, that would be absolutely massive and would make an already great service ideal for even hardcore and ultimately competitive gaming, perhaps even beating even the best gaming PC you can get for a comparable price.