In Europe, Nvidia’s GeForce Now game streaming service is getting an RTX 3080 makeover. The new membership tier was introduced by Nvidia in October and is now accessible in the United States. However, European players can now begin streaming from the company’s new higher-performance servers, which offer increased resolutions, frame rates, and latency.
When streamed to an Nvidia Shield TV, the RTX 3080 membership tier enables up to 1440p / 120fps gameplay on PC and Mac, or up to 4K HDR / 60fps on PC and Mac. That’s an increase over the existing Priority tier’s 1080p at 60fps. Sessions can now last up to eight hours instead of six, and Nvidia claims that the tier has lower latency. The main difference is pricing, with the new tier costing £89.89 / $99.99 in the UK for a six-month subscription, compared to £44.99 / $49.99 for the Priority tier. However, the results of our tests are excellent.
The RTX 3080 membership tier, despite its name, does not broadcast from servers that are physically equipped with retail RTX 3080 GPUs. Instead, it’s an Ampere GA102 device paired with an AMD Threadripper CPU, 28GB of DDR4 RAM, and a Gen4 SSD on a server. It’s a hardware combo that Nvidia claims can deliver 35 teraflops of GPU performance, which is around three times the performance of an Xbox Series X and more in line with an RTX 3090.
People who preordered the membership tier in Europe will get the new tier first, and “rollouts for accounts will continue until all requests have been fulfilled,” according to Nvidia. New orders are being accepted “pending availability.” Nvidia is also unveiling the 20 titles that will be coming to its service this month, including indie darling Untitled Goose Game, in addition to the expansion of the membership tier to Europe.