Nvidia has announced a raft of upgrades for its GeForce Now cloud streaming service with a new premium tier offering RTX 3080 class graphics performance, allowing for 1440p120 gameplay across a range of platforms and 4K60 HDR, limited for now to Shield Android TV devices. New latency reductions techniques are also promised, with Nvidia making bold claims about input lag up against competing cloud technologies – and even local devices.
All of this is made possible via brand new class of server blade Nvidia is bringing online, dubbed the ‘SuperPod’. While you’re not getting to an actual RTX 3080 as such, you are getting equivalent enterprise-class hardware based on the same GA-102 silicon, backed up by an eight-core, 16 thread AMD Threadripper processor working in combination with ultra-fast PCIe Gen 4.0 solid-state storage and an impressive 28GB of 3200MHz DDR4 memory. This gives the SuperPod top-class graphics performance (only an RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3090 are faster in the Nvidia stack), though CPU performance would fall a little short of the latest Ryzen 5000 and Intel CPUs.
The cost of this new premium tier is £89.99 for six months (UPDATE: 99.99 Euro and $99.99 US) – an interesting proposition for the kind of hardware that Nvidia reckons would cost you circa $2000 to buy, and that’s without adjusting for the manic price inflation in the current market. Obviously though, you are renting access to Nvidia servers, so there’s no hardware for to resell when it comes to upgrading, while the quality of the experience will come to down to the perennial cloud favourites – image quality and latency. In terms of the kind of connection you’ll need to push this service to its limits, 35Mbps is cited for 1440p gaming a 120fps, while 40Mbps is required for 4K60 HDR cloud streaming.