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Technology

Nvidia GeForce Now's RTX 3080 Plan Upgrades You To 1440p and 120fps at $100 for 6 Months (cnet.com) 33

Nvidia's new RTX 3080 plan for GeForce Now is probably the biggest upgrade for its cloud-streaming service since it turned on RTX ray tracing for subscribers over two years ago. From a report: The new plan is targeted at more traditional gamers for whom 60fps simply doesn't cut it, and it'll cost $100 for every six months you're signed up. In addition to the RTX ray tracing of the Priority plan, it offers 8-hour sessions, up to 1440p and 120fps gaming on PC and Mac (1600p on MacBooks), 4K HDR 60fps with 7.1 surround audio on Nvidia Shield (using DLSS) and up to 120fps on select Android devices. On iOS, GeForce Now has to use Safari rather than a dedicated app, which likely either can't handle or is too locked down to hit the higher frame rates.) According to the company, MacBooks are the second most popular device it sees used by the service, which isn't surprising given how poor the Mac's gaming is compared to PCs. The new MacBook Pro models, with their 120Hz displays, will be able to take advantage of the higher resolution and frame rates.
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Nvidia GeForce Now's RTX 3080 Plan Upgrades You To 1440p and 120fps at $100 for 6 Months

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  • 1080p 60hz is bad enough.

    • for compressed video the relationship between resolution and bandwidth is less than linear. and modern compression algorithms let you pick the encoder's output bandwidth even with changes in resolution and frame rate.

      • True enough but if you just upscale and increase the refresh rate the customers will notice it and be pissed about it.

        That would be worse than back in the day when IBM would wrap a printer belt twice around a pulley and then charge double because the printer was twice as fast

    • I don't even use 60hz, most games for me won't go that high, those that do are older. I don't notice the difference, and for those where it does make a difference they're not going to want the latency of streaming anyway.

  • Assuming that I want it and am willing to pay $200/year how many years will I be able to do this ? Will I find in, say, 5 years time that I can no longer pay for it and that my kit & games are no good and that I will need to buy new again ?

    • by Mascot ( 120795 )

      My limited (as in I signed up and tested it last weekend) experience with Geforce Now is that you do not buy your games there. You link your account on a supported store (e.g. Steam) and can play any supported game that you own there. "Supported", in the first case, seems to be Steam and Epic. In the second case "the publisher of said game did not throw a hissy fit over allowing people who purchased the game to play it via Geforce Now".

    • by The Raven ( 30575 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @12:37PM (#61914429) Homepage

      GeForce Now lets you play the games you already own through Steam (many of them at least).

      For example, I own 784 games on Steam, via purchases, Humble Bundles, etc. Of those, 149 are available on GeForce Now. I didn't have to pay extra, I'm just paying to rent the cloud equipment to play them on. This works out to about 20%, though more popular games are more likely to be available than niche indie titles.

      I recently got a new video card, so I'm no longer in the target demographic for this platform, but it's important to note that gamers with a poor rig but good internet would likely have a better experience (for much less cash) playing their PC games via this subscription than purchasing an equivalent PC. And I don't mean 'better temporarily', I mean just flat out better, dollar for dollar. It's a good deal if you meet the target demographic:

      * Willing to limit your games to those available on the platform
      * Good internet that's near to a GFN datacenter
      * Don't play competitive twitch online shooters like Counterstrike, Destiny, or Fortnite
      * Don't use the gaming hardware for non-gaming tasks (video editing, dev work, etc)

      This is in direct contrast to competing offerings from Microsoft and Google, which offer walled gardens that only have a limited selection of games that only work inside their platform (though at least with MS the 'platform' includes Windows and XBox, and not just the cloud offering).

      • by Agripa ( 139780 )

        I recently got a new video card, so I'm no longer in the target demographic for this platform, but it's important to note that gamers with a poor rig but good internet would likely have a better experience (for much less cash) playing their PC games via this subscription than purchasing an equivalent PC.

        Ok, you lost me there. Good internet? What world do you live in?

        • by b3e3 ( 6069888 )
          They left out a couple of words: Good internet speed/bandwidth/low ping.

          For example, at home I have a gaming rig that's just about end-of-life for modern PC games, a gigabit fiber connection, and a GFN server farm only about a hundred miles away. GPU prices are still unreasonably high at the moment, and I've considered signing up for a service like this to play new games on my old pc until component prices settle down.
  • Fuck and that (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Thursday October 21, 2021 @10:44AM (#61913847)
    Having this service for longer than a year is more expensive than what I would pay for a video card.
    Stop trying to make the entire game industry go sub based.
    • by godrik ( 1287354 )

      Having this service for longer than a year is more expensive than what I would pay for a video card.

      So I guess you would not buy a video card to play video games at all then?
      Because any video card to play modern video games is going to be more expensive than $200.
      The best I can find in a pinch under $200 is that https://www.newegg.com/yeston-... [newegg.com]
      And any modern integrated graphics from intel will do better than that.
      Currently I am using a Titan X which was the gaming gold standard in 2017. It still retails for over $1200. And many modern games would not be playable on it

      So maybe you don't play modern games;

      • Currently no. Not with the miners and scalpers out there.
        Man fuck these people. They are the reason I still have a 570x
      • What is "modern"? I don't need this year's games, most were all stupid. But my $200 card I bought 3? years ago plays what I want to play - Little Nightmares II (that's this year, right?), Dishonored 2 looks awesome, Fallout 4 is a dream, etc. I'm a couple "gens" behind I think, but the video cards aren't the drawbacks in newer games anymore, instead it's getting the solid state drive, more ram, and a faster CPU that makes the difference.

    • by Mascot ( 120795 )

      Try to recognize that you do not represent the only possible use case.

      This isn't meant to replace your gaming rig. It's a _service_ for people who find that they have need of it. I use it so my girlfriend can play Windows games on my Macbook Air, when she's spending time at my place. Ideally we'd use Steam remote play to stream from her PC at home, but the stability and quality of that has been crap when we've tried it (and that's with both of us on fiber on the same ISP, so bandwidth is very much not an is

      • She should buy a big girl PC
      • by godrik ( 1287354 )

        I'll admit I have a hard time believing enough people are paying for the service to make it profitable, but I for one appreciate that it exists.

        I don't know about that service in particular. But some other similar service were essentially letting you install your own game, or run your own steam account from their cloud VMs.
        Some friends were essentially buying them buy the month. the idea was "I'll have some time this month, I'll play a lot. But next month I'll cancel the subscription becasue I don't intend to play"

        • by Mascot ( 120795 )

          I have no idea what the tech behind it is, but that's in effect what this service is (except you don't get everything in your Steam, I think, only titles they have cleared with the publishers).

          Do you know anything about the economics of the services you're referring to? Maintaining a data center with a ton of high-end GPUs isn't free, so it seems to me they'd need a fair amount of active customers at any given time to cover the costs. It seems like too much of a niche product for that to be the case, but I

    • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      I see someone hasn't been shopping for video cards lately.
    • Yup. I remember getting my $220 video card and thinking that I was splurging way too much and that my self control was vestigial and what the hell is wrong with me. I did laugh out loud in the store at the $950 video card at the end of the line and thinking who would be stupid enough to buy that.

  • ... can I mine with this?

  • Shouldn't obvious ads like this have the burnt orange background so they're set apart from the actual news stories?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    4k, 120fps, HDR, 7.1 at what bitrate? They leave out the most important quality metric.

  • does not care about Hz alone, but also about latency.

    Latency on this service (?) is, of course, horrible.

    The number of people with very low-latency internet _but_ with no way to play on a -let's say- "proper" rig, can't be that high.

    Then again, they must have thought it through... right?

  • They can make it infinite pixels and hrz if the latency makes gaming suck, what's the point.
    Buy a PC.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    First they took software from us and by transitioning to subscription plans, now they are doing it with hardware. Soon we will not own anything. Only borrow. That way you can pay all live and have nothing to show for it at the end
  • Since there seems to be confusion, nVidia steaming is different than other "stores". They basically rent you the GPUs on their datacenter.

    There is actually no "store" of their own. Your own Steam, Epic or Uplay games will show up. More realistically maybe 25% - 50% of them, since many publishers don't like the idea of allowing you to play your own content that you purchased to be played on the platform that you choose. i.e.: they want to double-dip, so many games are not available (even though there is no t

  • Feh. Just feh. The rent-everything business model needs to collapse now and collapse hard.

Elliptic paraboloids for sale.

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