January 19th, 2023 at 7:22 p.m. by Claus Ludewig – The cloud gaming service Geforce Now is now being expanded to include Ultimate membership with the power of an RTX 4080.
With Geforce Now you can stream PC games previously purchased on Steam or in the Epic Games Store and explicitly approved by the respective game developer for Geforce Now via the Internet connection to a device and then play them. With the new, paid Ultimate membership, users have the power of a Geforce RTX 4080 at their disposal. The new Geforce Now RTX Ultimate is now available for just under 20 euros per month. Anyone who already has a membership with Geforce Now RTX 3080 will soon automatically and free of charge upgrade to the RTX 4080. There are also ten new games for the cloud gaming service.
Geforce RTX 4080 from the cloud with more performance than the desktop graphics card
Quadro graphics cards in the Windows servers called “SuperPODs” provide a graphics performance of more than 64 teraflops for each user. This performance even surpasses the RTX 4080 desktop graphics card, which delivers 48.7 FP32 TFLOPS. However, the raw performance still has to be transported through the network, so that less performance reaches the user. Ultimate membership offers new options to reduce latency, but tearing can occur.
Also new is the support for Nvidia Reflex in connection with Geforce Now RTX in the Ultimate version. In contrast to natively running games, the game developer does not have to do anything, Nvidia itself assembles Reflex with Geforce Now. PC games can be played at up to 240 fps. Ray tracing effects can also be admired and are made possible with the AI upscaling DLSS 3. Nvidia promises a latency of less than 40 ms when the internet connection is stable and you are in the same country as the server location.
In the first hands-on, Geforce Now RTX Ultimate works quite smoothly, but it depends on your own internet connection. If the connection does not deliver a constant 35 Mbit/s, gaming pleasure becomes a frustrating experience. Here also lies one of the biggest problems of cloud gaming services. As long as the gigabit expansion does not take place across the board and the correspondingly more expensive Internet contracts for fiber optics are concluded at the same time, the Internet connection will not be up to cloud gaming in many places. Conveniently, the free Geforce Now app checks whether your own Internet connection meets the requirements.
Without an Ultimate subscription, you can try Geforce Now for free and test for yourself whether the dedicated line is fast and stable enough. In the case of Geforce Now RTX Ultimate, it should be noted that the manufacturer recommends a LAN connection. Although it is understandable that the large amounts of data prefer to reach the end device via cable, this disqualifies a number of devices from the outset for which cloud gaming would make sense. For example, current Apple MacBooks no longer have an Ethernet connection. Even if all the above requirements are met, there is still a big hurdle, as you can see on the next page.
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