For the cloud gamers among us, you should probably know about NVIDIA’s new GeForce NOW performance tier, known as GeForce NOW RTX 3080. Essentially, NVIDIA has created new supercomputers in the cloud, powered by RTX 3080 equivalent cards, allowing gamers to stream titles in the highest possible quality with extremely low latency.
GeForce NOW RTX 3080 Basics
The basics of what you need to know is, the RTX 3080 tier offers 4K streams at up to 120 FPS on PC and Mac clients, 4K HDR on NVIDIA SHIELD, and up to 120FPS on the GeForce NOW Android app. Furthermore, while most GeForce NOW users will experience a discernible reduction in latency, RTX 3080 members streaming at 120 FPS will observe the, “greatest benefits through high frame rate synchronization,” according to NVIDIA in its blog post. “In the lowest latency mode, these members can experience total latency as low as 60ms — comparable to the latest game consoles.”
This is all made possible by NVIDIA new SuperPOD. As detailed, each cloud SuperPOD consists of over 1,000 GPUs that deliver more than 39 petaflops of graphics horsepower. Each instance is 35 teraflops of performance, nearly 3x that of an Xbox Series X. SuperPODs are outfitted with AMD Threadripper PRO CPUs, 28GB of DDR-3200 memory, and PCI-GEN4 SSDs.
I don’t even know what that stuff means but it sounds fancy.
Pricing
GeForce NOW Founders and Priority members have early access to preorder GeForce NOW RTX 3080 starting today. Six-month memberships cost $99.99, with availability in North America starting in November and in Europe in December. Pre-orders will open broadly to all gamers later this month, pending availability. According to NVIDIA, quantities are limited.
Priority memberships continue to be available starting at $9.99 per month. These members get access to performance rigs that turn RTX ON, extended session lengths, and faster access to gaming servers. New Priority members will be eligible to pre-order RTX 3080 memberships after registering.
For more detailed information, check out NVIDIA’s blog post linked below. Additional SuperPOD information can be viewed here, too.
// NVIDIA