Nvidia announced this week that the latest version of its subscription service, GeForce Now Ultimate, has officially launched in several cities in the US, with rollouts taking place in San Jose, Los Angeles, and Dallas, as well as Frankfurt, Germany. The areas around these cities will also be able to connect to the new Ultimate tier servers.
This version upgrades the first RTX 3080 level from GeForce Now and renames it to Ultimate Membership, offering the same benefits of the RTX 3080 series but with the cloud platform upgrade to the RTX 4080 GPU.
The service is powered by Lovelace GPU architecture and according to Nvidia (Opens in a new tab)streams at up to 240fps with NVIDIA Reflex, up to 4K 120fps with DLSS 3 support and RTX ON, and Ultra Wide support at up to 3840 x 1600 pixels at 120fps.
We crunched the numbers and found that if you paid for the Ultimate subscription tier in six-month increments for six years ($99.99, about £85 / AU$145), it would cost about the same as buying an RTX 4080 graphics card at its current MSRP. This makes it an excellent choice for those with a solid internet connection who want the performance of their current graphics card without having to shell out over $1,000 for it.
“After RTX 4080 SuperPODs begin rolling out today, they will begin to spread to other regions, with a broader release expected throughout the first quarter,” an Nvidia spokesperson told TechRadar. On our weekly GFN blog on Thursday (Opens in a new tab)We’ll be providing updates every week on which areas are getting RTX 4080 performance.”
Could this be the future of PC gaming?
We previously tried the RTX 3080 class to review the Acer Chromebook 516 GE and found that performance on one of the best Chromebooks we’ve tested is nearly indistinguishable from running a laptop with the best GPU on the market.
And when we got hands-on with the new Ultimate for CES 2023, we found that the performance is better, as it addresses the latency issues that once again held back the subscription service. Not only will the upgraded servers reduce system latency to less than 60ms, but Nvidia also claims that by integrating Nvidia Reflex into its server-side processing, it can bring it down to 35ms, which is the equivalent of a real gaming PC. running local machines.
If this turns out to be true, that would be pretty huge and would make an already great service perfect for hardcore and ultimately competitive gaming, and possibly even the best gaming PC you can get for a similar price.