Nvidia announced a major upgrade coming to its GeForce Now cloud gaming technology. Soon enough, gamers will be able to stream some of their favorite titles at up to 4K and 240 frames per second, all thanks to the RTX 4080.
The update, which comes with a new membership tier, will also unlock Nvidia’s DLSS 3 and Reflex technologies for GeForce Now subscribers, and Nvidia promises unprecedented levels of performance.
Nvidia is bringing its Ada Lovelace generation of GPUs to supercharge its own cloud gaming service. The company promises 64 teraflops (TFLOPs) of graphics power, which it claims is five times the performance provided by the Xbox Series X console.
As mentioned, the RTX 4080-powered GeForce Now will also deliver the full range of ray tracing powers found in Nvidia’s arsenal, all thanks to the latest DLSS 3. To add to that, Nvidia’s Reflex technology is also present and available to competitive gamers, with the option to play at up to 240 frames per second (fps) and a click-to-pixel latency below 40ms.
Nvidia showed off the new technology in a couple of quick clips from Rainbow Six Siege. The clip shows that GeForce Now, in combination with Reflex, was able to run the game at 240Hz and 25ms — a huge step-up over the 60Hz, 71ms combo served up without Reflex.
The RTX 4080 will only be available in Nvidia’s new GeForce Now Ultimate membership, which will replace the previous top-tier RTX 3080. If you were paying for the RTX 3080 subscription tier, your membership will be upgraded to the new Ultimate tier automatically.
Only those who pay for the Ultimate membership will be able to benefit from Nvidia’s best graphics cards, which includes being able to stream games at up to 4K. Nvidia says that the existing GeForce RTX 3080 subscribers will receive the upgrade at no additional cost, meaning the membership will cost $20. It’s unclear whether new subscribers will be paying the same price, though.
If you’re eager to upgrade, the good news is that you will likely be able to do it soon, but not quite yet — and depending on your location, you might have to wait longer. The initial availability will begin in late January, and the coverage will grow to include more data centers in North America and Western Europe throughout the first quarter of 2023.
Nvidia announced the RTX 4080 superpods during its CES 2023 keynote, alongside a bunch of other exciting products, such as the RTX 4070 Ti or the full range of RTX 40 laptop graphics cards, including a mobile version of the RTX 4090.
