Nvidia announced this week that the latest version of its subscription service, GeForce Now Ultimate, is live in multiple cities across the U.S., with rollouts to San Jose, Los Angeles, and Dallas, as well as Frankfurt, Germany. These urban peripheries will also be able to connect to the new Ultimate servers.
This release upgrades GeForce Now’s top-tier RTX 3080 tier and rebrands it to Ultimate, offering the same benefits as the RTX 3080 tier but upgrading the cloud platform to an RTX 4080 GPU.
The service is powered by the Lovelace GPU architecture and, According to Nvidia (opens in a new tab)stream at up to 240 FPS with NVIDIA Reflex, stream at up to 120 FPS in 4K with support for DLSS 3 and RTX ON, and stream at up to 3,840 x 1,600p at 120 FPS resolution for ultra-wide support.
We crunched the numbers and found that if you paid for the Ultimate subscription tier ($99.99, or about £85/AU$145) in six-month increments over six years, it would cost the same as buying an RTX 4080 graphics card at the current price recommended retail price. That makes it an excellent choice for those with a steady internet connection who want the performance of a current-generation graphics card without paying more than $1,000 for it.
“After the RTX 4080 SuperPOD starts rolling out today, it will begin rolling out to other regions, with a wider launch expected throughout the first quarter,” an Nvidia spokesperson told TechRadar. “In our weekly GFN Thursday Blog (opens in a new tab), we’ll be updating information on which regions are getting RTX 4080 performance every week. “
Could this be the future of PC gaming?
We previously tried out the RTX 3080 tier in our Acer Chromebook 516 GE review and found that the performance of one of the best Chromebooks we’ve tested was virtually indistinguishable from a laptop actually running the best GPU on the market.
When we got our hands on the new Ultimate tier at CES 2023, we found that the performance was even better because it solved the latency issues that hindered subscription services. Not only does the upgraded server keep system latency below the 60ms threshold, but Nvidia also claims that by incorporating Nvidia Reflex into its server-side processing, it can reduce it to 35ms, which is comparable to an actual gaming PC running on local hardware. .
If that turns out to be true it’s absolutely huge and makes an already excellent service perfect for even hardcore gaming and ultimately competitive gaming and probably beats even the best gaming pc you can get for a comparable price .
