Nvidia’s GeForce Now game streaming service is getting an RTX 3080-themed upgrade in Europe. Nvidia announced the new membership tier in October, and it’s already available in the US. But, as of today, gamers in Europe can start streaming from the company’s new higher-performance servers, which offer improved resolutions, frame rates, and less latency.
The RTX 3080 membership tier offers up to 1440p / 120fps gameplay through PC and Mac, or up to 4K HDR / 60fps when streamed to an Nvidia Shield TV. That’s up from 1080p at 60fps with the current Priority tier. Session lengths can also extend up to eight hours long rather than six, and Nvidia also says the tier offers lower latency. The big tradeoff is price, with the new tier costing £89.89 / $99.99 for a six-month subscription in the UK, up from £44.99 / $49.99 for six months of the Priority tier. But in our testing the results are impressive.
I should note that despite its name, the RTX 3080 membership tier doesn’t stream from servers literally equipped with retail RTX 3080 cards. Instead, it’s an Ampere GA102 chip on a server with an eight-core AMD Threadripper CPU, 28GB of DDR4 memory, and a Gen4 SSD. It’s a hardware combination that Nvidia says offers 35 teraflops of GPU performance, around three times what an Xbox Series X is capable of and actually more in line with the performance of an RTX 3090.
Nvidia is starting the new tier’s rollout for people who’ve preordered the membership tier in Europe and says that “rollouts for accounts will continue until all requests have been fulfilled.” It’s accepting new orders “pending availability.” As well as the expansion of the membership tier to Europe, Nvidia is also announcing the 20 games that are coming to its service this month, which include indie darling Untitled Goose Game.
