October 28, 2021 The Nvidia RTX 3080 GeForce Now subscription is now available for everyone to pre-order, but comes in limited quantities.
Nvidia proved that just about anyone can run the Crysis Remastered Trilogy no matter whether they’re using a PC, Mac, or smartphone thanks to cloud gaming, but it’s not resting on its laurels. As of today, you’ll notice a brand new top-tier membership that lets you exclusively stream from Nvidia’s new supercomputer, which packs more than 1,000 RTX 3080 graphics cards. At 35 shader teraflops apiece, that’s almost three times the performance of the Xbox Series X and a total of 39 petaflops to tap into.
While the GPU takes centre stage here, Nvidia pairs its flagship RTX cards with AMD Threadripper Pro gaming CPUs to make it a computational powerhouse. Naturally, this translates to a whole heap of performance improvements for RTX 3080 GeForce Now subscribers.
For reference, the Priority membership lets you play games at 1080p resolution and 60fps for six-hour stints. The new subscription bumps this up to 1440p at 120fps on gaming PCs and iMacs, 1600p at 120fps on Macbooks, and even 4K at 60fps with high-dynamic range (HDR) on Nvidia Shield TV. You might see the latter appear on other devices later down the line, but it will only be on Nvidia’s set top box at launch. You’ll even get to game for eight hours per session, although we strongly recommend taking regular breaks anyway.
This does come with heftier bandwidth requirements, as Nvidia says you’ll want around 35Mbps approx for 1440p at 120fps and 40Mbps for 4K at 60fps with HDR enabled.
As you might expect, it doesn’t come cheap at almost double the price of its predecessor. It’s only available in limited quantities at launch and both Founders and current Priority members will have first dibs on the $99.99 / £89.99 subscription for the first six months. You’re not totally left out if you don’t fancy upgrading your current membership, though, as Nvidia assures us that all tiers will benefit from lower latency – but the RTX 3080 will still have less lag as a result of its superior internals.
Update: Now that Priority members and Founders have had a chance at grabbing the new subscription, Nvidia has opened RTX 3080 GeForce Now pre-orders up to everyone. Spots are limited, however, so if you want to see your subscription convert to the new standard in November in the US or December in the EU, you’ll have to be quick.