The global chip shortage and supply-chain issues have made it hard to find high-performance gaming cards. Nvidia Corp. has a solution: sell it as a service. Nvidia announced that their new GeForce Now RTX 3080-series is available to rent remotely, allowing for eight hours of gameplay a day. Available for pre-order now with the November launch soon, the GeForce Now RTX 3080 plan will cost $99 for six months (around $16.67 per month) and run at up to 1440p resolution with 120 fps on computers or 4K HDR 60 fps on Shield TV.
The upgrade comes in advance of the holiday season, the second consecutive fourth quarter in which chip shortages and supply-chain issues have made Nvidia’s popular 3080 gaming cards either hard to come by or only available at exorbitant prices well higher than the suggested starting retail price of $699.99. For example, RTX 3080 Ti gaming cards have a list price starting at $1,199.00 on Best Buy while online retailers like Newegg are listed as being sold out and were priced up to double the original when they had been available.
The 3080-service is directed at “core or mainstream gamers,” not so much for professional gamers who rely on the fastest possible performance to make a living due to “latency,” or delays due to internet connectivity. Latency for the cloud-platform service is about 56 milliseconds, while the latency for a physical 3080-card installed directly on a gamer’s rig is about half of that, an Nvidia representative said.
The service allows you to play any of the hundreds of supported PC games on a remote server, provided that you bought the game separately or that it’s a free-to-play title. In addition, you can play on a wide variety of devices, from PCs and Macs to phones and Nvidia shield TVs. It can even run in a web browser, making it possible to use on a variety of platforms, including Chrome OS. Up until now, there have been two tiers of GeForce Now membership: a free tier that provides basic gameplay for up to one hour at a time, and a Premium tier that costs $49.99 for six months while giving you priority access. The latter also gives RTX ray tracing and gameplay of up to 60 fps at 1080p. For double the price, the new RTX 3080 tier increases session time to up to eight hours, along with the increased resolution and frame rate.
(All information was provided by MarketWatch and Tom’s Hardware)
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