We’re testing the new GeForce ‘3080’ upgrade now, experience unparalleled cloud...

The prospect of buying a reasonable new GPU in 2021 remains a starting point, and that says nothing of your hopes for a purchase. An excellent choice for nowhere near MSRP values. in a A world of chip shortageThere is not much we can do to change this sad reality, other than asking greedy crypto developers to do so please Donate their high-end GPUs to people who want to play games with stuff.

For some people, cloud gaming can be a good alternative. This concept allows players to connect their much weaker devices (netbooks, set-top boxes) to supercomputer farms. As long as they can maintain a decent broadband connection and afford some latency footage (and Bandwidth Exceed), they can, on paper, expect high-quality games. But so far, we haven’t seen great computing power in this market. Stadiums in particular began as Unfortunately insufficient power serviceWhile the biggest cloud option is PC-centric, Nvidia GeForce Now, it has a mix of power limitations and usage frustrations.

This week, Nvidia is pushing ahead with its most interesting cloud gaming service upgrade yet: the GeForce Now 3080, named after its powerful RTX 3080 GPUs. Pre-orders for this service are now officially onlineDepending on your willingness to compromise, you may want to consider it.

We tested the preview last week and the results are, frankly, dreamy. At $198 a year, this level of service works on two fronts: it unlocks connections to Nvidia’s most powerful servers, And It opens more options on the local end to anyone using the service. The result is a stunning game that rivals the computing power you can muster with a locally owned RTX 3080 Ti.

How GeForce Now Fits into the World of Streaming

The catch, of course, is that GeForce Now is still the heaviest cloud gaming option. To his credit, the service Moreover The most flexible and independent of the interfaces.

So, before I get to the best parts of Nvidia’s new “GeForce Now 3080” option — faster performance, higher maximum resolution, and maximum frame rate — I have to set the stage for running the service and compare it to its contemporaries. So be indulgent with me.

Most cloud gaming services require that they depend on their store ecosystems in some way. You can only play on google stadia If you buy Stadia exclusives of these games (or get free gifts through the paid subscription service Stadia Pro). If you want to stream games in . format Broadcast Xbox Games, you have to Pay for Xbox Game Pass UltimateAnd, you can only stream a selection of about 200 games from this service, unlike additional Xbox games that you buy individually. And Amazon Luna Offers a A variety of “channels”, each with individual costs and unique content, which you can choose and stack in the same way you use with video streaming subscription services.

On the other hand, the cost of GeForce Now has nothing to do with the games you can buy or borrow and everything to do with the Nvidia hardware you rent from the cloud. In some ways, GeForce Now is just a cloud computer that you can use however you want. When you use GeForce Now, you connect to other storefronts in their server farm, load games you’ve already purchased, play them using their profiles, and save files. Nvidia’s cloud gaming service doesn’t care where and how you buy games. He just wants to feed them.

However, the big problem is that some game publishers don’t allow Nvidia to stream their games. (Remember: When you buy a game through an online storefront, you only pay for access to a license. This means, among other things, that publishers can use your access in exactly this way.) At the launch service in 2019, Nvidia was forced to remove Games that were originally supported after some publishers launched a scandal in particular Games from the Battle.net service by Activision Blizzard. Good news, over time many games have been added to the service from the following storefronts, which now total just over 1,100 games:

• to smoke
• Epic game store
• Ubisoft Connect
• Original EA

Until this week, GeForce Now only had two tiers: $98 per year or free. The latter includes performance degradation and required waiting in server queues, so if too many people are using the service, you have to wait for clients to pay. This free option is a good way to confirm that your ideal streaming device — a vulnerable smartphone, set-top box, or laptop — can connect to the service and translate your keyboard or keyboard and mouse strokes to the cloud. Streaming video games. But that’s not great for image quality or computing power.

RTX 3080 level wins, even at higher resolutions

On the other hand, the paid version includes rudimentary “Nvidia RTX” support. Their server instances include Nvidia’s GPU cores dedicated to ray tracing and deep learning (DLSS), but only a few per instance, powered by the RTX-optimized variant of the server-class Tesla T10 GPU. The results are usually powerful enough for modern and mid-range PC games that hit a continuous refresh of 1080p and 60fps, and typically play a number of graphical bells and whistles.

as You already believedIf you’re in the right geographical area for Nvidia’s servers and have a low-connection wired Ethernet connection, you can expect anything but consistent performance while gaming with a mouse and keyboard on a variety of devices. But 1080p at 60fps and medium settings are basically what the rest of the streaming shows have to offer. How much juice can the same ecosystem of Nvidia apps muster, especially if Nvidia itself, which makes many high-end GPUs, implements its own hardware upgrade?

The best way to answer that is to let some compatible games do the talking. These are the same versions of PC games that you can install on your PC, after all, and some come with built-in reference screenshots. So, I ran some testing on the current $98/yr service, aka the “founders” level, before Nvidia invited me to pre-release testing for the ‘3080’ at $198/yr for it. The strength of the two can be compared. server options.

The above standards for the brutal computer Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (no ray tracing) and Corps guard dog (intrinsic ray tracing) is explained in their comments. Bottom line: All tests run at the new 3080 service level at a higher resolution of 1440p, but it still far exceeds the same tests that are run at a lower resolution of 1080p at the service’s foundational level. Unfortunately, we couldn’t run these tests with a frame time graph attached, so we ended up with wavy and wavy line graphs from Ubisoft. After all these criteria to do It comes with “lowest 1%” crucial numbers, and when it’s higher (which is, by far, at level 3080), you can expect less time stuttering. The image and refresh rate drops.