Nvidia’s game streaming service GeForce Now is getting access to heaps of RTX 4080 graphics cards. That means plenty of frames on a wide range of platforms, up to 240Hz, all without breaking the bank for one of these high-end cards to call your own.
The new RTX 4080 ‘Superpod’ for GeForce Now will be rolled out to data centres starting late January, with the roll out happening across different locations globally as the year goes on. If you’re lucky enough to receive the first wave of RTX 4080 GPUs, you can gain access to the ray tracing power of the Ada Lovelace architecture and DLSS 3 on your devices via the cloud.
DLSS 3 could definitely make a big difference to the streaming experience, ideally helping keep CPU utilisation low to allow these server pods to deliver higher performance. That said, there’s a specific new upgrade coming to deal with latency: Competitive Reflex 240Hz Mode.
Nvidia Reflex is the company’s latency-busting and measuring technology, and it’s been on the desktop for a while now. With this new Competitive Reflex 240Hz Mode, Nvidia is bringing that sort of competitive speed-up to the cloud, in the hopes of making cloud gaming a little less laggy.
Nvidia touts a 34ms end-to-end latency in Fortnite with the new mode enabled, and I have to say that is a pretty impressive number. As Nvidia notes, that’s faster than an Xbox Series X in 60Hz mode, but the thing to note is that frame rate does directly correlate to latency. What that means is higher frame rate, lower latency. There are other factors, too, however, such as input latency, monitor latency, and web connection latency—that last one matters for streaming games, of course.
In order to access RTX 4080 Superpods in the cloud, you need to be a Now Ultimate Member. For existing RTX 3080 Members, there’s no need to fret. You’ll be automatically upgraded to the RTX 4080 Ultimate tier starting soon, if you’re close to one of the updated data centres that is. New users can sign up for $20 a month, presuming there’s capacity spare—new capacity will come online throughout Q1 in Europe and North America.
The other big news out of Nvidia’s CES 2023 Special Broadcast is new regions coming to GeForce Now. These include South Africa, Armenia, and Malaysia.