The Ultimate level of GeForce Now (opens in new tab) goes fully live today with the RTX 4080 Superpods going online in select data centers around the world. Very select data centers. San Jose, Los Angeles and Dallas are the first to open in the US, with Frankfurt taking on EU duties across the Atlantic.
Nvidia suggests it will start putting upgraded servers online every week and has made a page where you can follow (opens in new tab) how close those new RTX 4080 powered servers are to you.
Over there are new Ada GPUs are lurking in the London-based EU West server rooms, however, as I’ve been fiddling with the new tech from my home and office in Bath for the past few weeks. And you can color me impressed.
Although, to be honest, I’ve been extremely impressed with GFN’s technology since it first updated its legacy RTX 20 series servers with new stream sync features. Then it added the RTX 3080-level hardware (opens in new tab) which boosted performance even further, and I played all of Control in RTX mode and Life is Strange: True Colors via GFN at 4K on my Shield. And now we get the latest and (next) best Ada GPUs to borrow for our playtime.
Ultimate level specs
Because that’s essentially what you do; for your $20/month Ultimate membership, you are essentially borrowing a RTX 4080 (opens in new tab)powered gaming PC for the time you’re playing. On virtually any internet-connected device you own. Whether that’s TV, set-top box, phone, tablet, Mac or PC, there are GFN apps for you. Or you can just go through a simple web browser, as you still have to do on the Steam Deck. although Nvidia claims to want to work with Valve (opens in new tab) to sort out that Steam Deck thing.
The appeal of RTX 4080 hardware is not the only appeal of the Ultimate tier, but with the latest updates, they finally deliver ultra-wide and HDR support on the GFN PC and macOS applications as well. That may be a minor thing, but it’s long been frustrating having to play on a 3440 x 1440 screen with big black bars on either side of it.
That wouldn’t be enough to convince me to upgrade my membership with the promise of any Superpod upgrades in my area, but unlike the way it’s treated the prices of its latest graphics cards, it’s top GeForce tier Now keep at the same price. That’s indicative of a segment of the market that Nvidia doesn’t have an almost complete monopoly on.
But yes, the old $20/month RTX 3080 plans will automatically switch to Ultimate plans for the same price, leaving the $10/month Priority and limited one-hour free memberships.
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So, what’s it like to use? Well, it’s not quite seamless. Even through the dedicated applications, you still almost inevitably come across some very PC issues. By all accounts, you boot into a limited PC session and play games from your own Epic, Ubisoft, or Steam accounts. And that means all the hoops we PC gamers take for granted.
The next-gen The Witcher 3 update has given me all the excuses I need to reboot the game from scratch, and I’ve had a blast. However, just like on a standard PC, you still have to navigate the startup programs. On GFN, that means booting into Steam (desktop via the PC app or Big Picture on Android) and clicking the game you’ve already clicked to play. Then press ‘play’ again in the next CDPR launcher.
If you’ve got a mouse plugged in, that’s fine, but on GeForce Now via the Shield Android TV tube, you’ll need to briefly enable mouse mode on your pad to navigate the Windows-based screens, which is a bit of a pain. Especially if you forgot which damn button to long press.
And then you sometimes start in a game that does not run at the right resolution. Geralt appeared in extremely low resolution when I first started up the game (and occasionally still does) and Crysis first appeared in a 768p window. So sometimes you have to play with the settings, for example enabling ray tracing and HDR when starting a game.
You can instruct the GeForce Now app to remember your personal configurations for each game, but that won’t allow you to play across devices while sharing cloud storage.
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I can turn on anything — yes, even Geralt’s wavy Hairworks locks.
And that’s how I’ve been using GFN, especially with The Witcher 3. I could play the game on my RX 6800 XT powered office gaming rig, but it doesn’t like the extra fancy stuff the update added and delivers low, stuttering frame rates at its best. Through the GFN app, though, I can turn on anything — yes, even Geralt’s flowing Hairworks locks — and happily play on the 40-inch ultrawide attached to it.
Then I can play on the 4K TV with HDR at home or throw it on my 4K projector for BIG WITCHER ENERGY. Both are connected to a Shield device with an Xbox pad attached.
Oddly, my home experience was stronger, despite a wired machine in the Bath office claiming to have a blazing fast connection. I see more visual artifacts as the stream hits a blip and the footage downgrades to compensate. However, at home, with a 5 GHz wireless connection and a download speed of 100 Mbps, it’s practically indistinguishable from local play.
The sharpness of forcing GeForce Now to work at the resolution you want, if you know your network can handle it, is one thing, but what really impressed me about this latest update is the responsiveness. Previously it was super smooth, but it was possible to see the tiniest bit of input lag when moving the mouse quickly. Now my old eyes are struggling to discern any tangible difference between the responsiveness of my home machine versus playing on GFN.
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Pinning some North Korean future scum in Crysis certainly feels fast, and I’ve also dodged and parried with impunity in The Witcher 3. A tougher test would be if Nvidia could support something like FIFA 23, with the quick responses it required, but herein lies a broader issue with GFN game support.
There are a huge number of games available through the service, and if you already have a large Epic or Steam library, you’ll have plenty to choose from. But it’s not all there is to it and there will be corners of your game library you’ll want to stream where GeForce Now’s light never shines. And that means it’s hard to think of the service as a complete replacement for a gaming PC. For me it would mean never playing Kerbal Space Program or Football Manager again, something I never would have known.
The hardware now on offer with GeForce Now is seriously impressive and the device support is incredible. Having RTX 4080 visuals on a Steam Deck, with a measurable increase in battery life, or running on a dim-witted $500 office laptop, or streaming directly to a TV… it’s another thing. The top-level GPUs – in either RTX 3080 or RTX 4080 packages – allow you to game at the highest level, with the highest RTX settings at the kind of resolutions and refresh rates that PC players demand.
The newer Ada GPU brings all of its DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, as well as Reflex latency-killing features to admittedly fewer locations, but that will spread, and hopefully soon. Especially since demand for the RTX 4080 may not be that high, Nvidia may have a few more to distribute.
I’d take the occasional visual artifact about the outrageously priced graphics card market right now.
But as always with any kind of game streaming, your experience will depend entirely on your network conditions. The 4K/120Hz capabilities are fine if your connection is robust enough (and I don’t just mean raw download speeds), but if you’re in an environment where the network is heavily loaded, or if there are just strange gremlins on your network . your connection, you won’t get the pin-sharp images that can mark GeForce Now at its best.
Networking is one of the dark arts of technology, and I still have no idea what to do when it all goes wrong, other than pull the plug and reset a goddamn router.
However, the fact remains that GeForce Now will be your cheapest route to an RTX 40 series upgrade for your gaming experience. The $1,200 nominal sticker price of the RTX 4080 is long gone, and you’ll have to spend more to get one today. But even at MSRP, you could have had six years of GFN’s Ultimate level for the same money. And if recent history is anything to go by, you’d also have seen an RTX 5080 update somewhere along the line.
And when high-end PC gaming is currently prohibitively expensive to access any other way, I’d now pick up the occasional visual artifact in the outrageously priced graphics card market. We’ve already talked about the idea of one tactical pc upgrade (opens in new tab) in the face of skyrocketing component prices, and if you’ve been thinking about an update to your current gaming PC but were daunted by the thought of selling organs for the privilege, even a six-month subscription to GeForce Now could be your ultimate pc panacea.