GeForce NOW RTX 3080: Teraflop for rent

GeForce NOW RTX 3080

The GeForce Now service, which we have talked about extensively on our pages in the past, has exceeded 12 million players, thanks in large part to the free use of the platform.

Considering that until a couple of years ago cloud gaming was seen almost as a utopia, with services like the ancient Gaikai, Onlive and the recent Google Stadia that have never managed to earn that label of reliability that gamers were looking for, it's encouraging to see an audience willing to give cloud gaming a chance.

All the more so now that he has probably the best motivation to try it: playing games using the coveted RTX 3080 graphics card, even though he doesn't physically own it.

Right now Nvidia's RTX 3080 is among the best graphics cards you can (not) buy. It tops the benchmark lists and its Ti variant is the fastest according to PassMark right now. It is so sought after that months after its release, players were still camped outside stores just to get one, while others even resorted to daring truck heists to get it.

Cyberpunk 2077 runs pretty well and you can indulge yourself with the settings at will. For higher resolutions you need a lot of bandwidth, at least 50 Megabits. Miners on the one hand and the semiconductor crisis have caused a frightening shortage of graphics chips dedicated to gaming and it is for this reason that it is easy to see why the latest offering from GeForce Now, a service where players can enjoy themselves connected to a virtual machine that uses RTX 3080 in the cloud, at a cost of 99.99 euros every six months, becomes very greedy for many palates.

All this is made possible by the new GeForce Now SuperPODs, supercomputers created specifically by Nvidia to perform this task and which allow you to play up to 1440p 120 FPS on PC and Mac, up to 4K 60 FPS on Shield TV and up to 120 FPS on select Android smartphones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S21.

In the SuperPODs we find AMD Threadripper PRO CPUs combined with Nvidia graphics accelerators, with each configuration dedicated to the RTX 3080 plan able to offer CPUs with 8 cores / 16 threads, 35 TFLOPS GPU three times more powerful than one. Xbox Series X, 28GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and SSD with performance equal to that of a PCIe 4.0 drive.

The titles available come from the users' own game libraries, which cover multiple services including Steam, Epic, GOG and others. All this provided you have Internet connections that are fast enough, stable and with a very high bandwidth capable of downloading huge amounts of data and with low latency.

The specifications recommended by Nvidia speak of lines of at least 50 Mbps in download and a ping of less than 40 ms, but being able to take your triple A games with you on the go, in places where it is not carrying a console or, worse, a huge gaming PC, is one of the best steps the gaming industry can take.

Far Cry 6 on GeForce Now RTX 3080 is one of the launch titles and is well supported. After downloading the GeForce Now app and creating an account, there are various subscription plans that you can subscribe to. There is a free plan so users can test the service, providing access to free to play games along with the subscriber's game libraries for limited one hour sessions. Just enough to whet the appetite of the players.

The next plan is Priority, which allows those who pay € 9.99 per month or € 49.99 for six months to "skip the line" and have priority in the service access queues compared to players with the free plan and playing for up to six hours at a time. Both tiers have access to 1080p gaming at 60fps.

The latest entry, the GeForce Now RTX 3080 plan covered by this review, extends sessions to eight hours but above all eliminates some of the previous performance limitations. The maximum resolution and frame rate supported on PC and Mac with the RTX 3080 level is 2,560x1,440 at 120Hz, while Nvidia Shield with an HDMI 2.0b connection can play back up to 4K and 120Hz, with HDR.

GeForce NOW has a selection of free-to-play games but the focus is on the titles already owned by users. The idea is to be able to play those games on virtually any device without the need for expensive graphics cards or high-end CPUs, as all the heavy lifting takes place in the cloud.

When a game is available in multiple stores, the app allows you to choose which service to access. The first time we run it, you need to provide your account details; if you don't have it, you can't play it unless it's a free-to-play title.

Control on GeForceNow RTX 3080 is a real treat to the point that you don't even want to activate DLSS . Not all titles from each service, such as Steam or Epic Games, are available for the Nvidia-hosted service. However, there is a fairly large chunk of our library available, including Square-Enix's Guardian of the Galaxy. NVIDIA says it is working with various publishers to get more experiences like this one for its subscribers. It's also worth noting that when Far Cry 6 came out, it was available on GeForce NOW at launch. Many other popular AAA titles are also available, including hits like Battlefield 1, Control, and MechWarrior 5.

To further reduce latency, NVIDIA has several custom settings in the GeForce NOW application. The Competitive setting should reduce latency to the minimum possible. However, to achieve this, the resolution is reduced to 1080p with a 120Hz refresh rate. Adaptive sync monitors - FreeSync or G-Sync - will have the best experience with the Competitive preset. Of course, latency varies by internet connection.

We ran our GeForce NOW tests on a nominal 100 Mbps and true 60 Mbps FTTC connection and were positively surprised by the performance. On a wired connection the service was flawless with no lag or interruptions of any kind, which only occurred sporadically when we tried to use a wireless connection, but most of the time it didn't seem to play in similar conditions on a normal notebook.

In the same way that Netflix streaming isn't as high-quality as playing a 4K HDR Blu-ray at home, streaming a game on a service like GeForce Now is an experience that requires some sacrifices. Video compression results in slightly jumbled motion at times, and we occasionally noticed blocky distortions or a half-second moment where the game paused and needed to recover, but nothing major.

For every game we ran tests at both 1080p and 1440p but we left the settings intact. NVIDIA optimizes every game available on the service using an algorithm similar to the GeForce Experience app. We took those defaults, which aimed to reproduce mid-high manual configurations, and tested Cyberpunk 2077 and Control between the available titles, both games that make prolific use of Nvidia's ray tracing and DLSS that gives the RTX 3080 the chance to shine, playing long enough to forget that the machine was on a server hundreds of miles away from us.

The main screen of the service is integrated into the GeForce Experience app. From here it is possible to link all the titles already owned to the service. Even those of platforms like Steam and Epic Games. Playing Control in 4K (without ray tracing or DLSS) we measured an average of 46 ms of latency via GeForce Now. It's lower than playing the same game in the Xbox cloud (58ms) at the same resolution. However, enabling ray tracing at the highest setting on GeForce Now increased the input latency to 75ms. Ray tracing places a greater demand on a graphics card, so it appears that demand is reflected on the user side with increased input latency.

The story was different for Cyberpunk 2077 - in 4K we measured 63 ms of input latency with both ray tracing enabled and disabled. This, however, may have something to do with the character's position in the game. In Control we were in a room with lots of artificial lighting and reflective surfaces. In Cyberpunk 2077, we were in the middle of a desert (the Badlands) during the day. Regardless, it may be that ray tracing adds more latency in some cases, but the difference is too small to be noticed with the naked eye or felt with the joypad and shouldn't have any noticeable effect on the gaming experience.

We carried out other tests on Far Cry 6: the GeForce Now version does not allow the use of ray tracing or HD textures; for now, therefore, we have only used the ultra preset. Performance this time around was above average, with the RTX 3080 reaching 95 fps, with a latency of 54 ms. Apex Legends and Fortnite shot at a constant 120 fps at maximum settings, with a latency of 56 milliseconds. Excellent results for titles that are not particularly demanding.

GeForce Now RTX 3080 is a decidedly intriguing system to play in the particular period we are going through, in which graphics cards, high-end and not, are a very almost product unavailable and victim of somewhat unreasonable market dynamics. If you have an internet connection with good bandwidth and low latency, GeForce Now is almost as responsive as a high-end gaming PC.

It is definitely not the ideal solution for those who use extremely ping-sensitive games such as driving titles or hyper-frenetic multiplayer shooters, but for an action game, an RPG, or more generally singleplayer games with medium-low rhythms, it succeeds to be a valid replacement, provided you have a high-level network connection, at least 50-60 real Megabits in download, so to speak.

Still in GeForce Experience it is possible to change the qualitative options, in particular those of the streaming that affect latency and image quality. If your connection is limited to home Wi-Fi, perhaps difficult, this product is certainly not for you as well as those who use smartphones as hotspots. For everything else, even a paleolithic laptop or Mac mini can be transformed into a powerful gaming PC in an instant.

Prices? At 99 euros for a six-month subscription, GeForce Now RTX 3080 costs 16.50 euros per month, just under a premium Netflix subscription. The fact is that Netflix has no additional costs beyond the subscription; you don't have to buy the single movie before streaming it, while with GeForce NOW, if you don't already have the titles you want to play, you have to be content with what passes the convent.

Most Read Now

Is GameStop Christmas Nightmare for Employees? There is talk of locked wages, grueling shifts and more

GameStop in chaos.

Forza Horizon 5 bans a player for 8,000 years due to a livery

A livery is cost dear to a Forza Horizon 5 player.

PS5, some players are receiving an invitation from Sony to purchase the console

These invitations are a PlayStation Europe initiative.

However, the service would likely cost a lot more if the games themselves were included, especially considering day-one releases like the recent Far Cry 6 and Guardians of the Galaxy. And the beauty of the GeForce Now service in general is that many of the titles that are already in your game library can now be played on far more devices than a powerful gaming PC.

The cost is therefore worthy of note but to have this kind of performance by now we have to resign ourselves to putting on the plate at least 2500 euros for a PC as it should be. For fans of the PC Master Race, the goal will always remain to become the game machine: there is certainly a large audience of enthusiasts without the budget, the motivations and above all the time to devote to gaming: for this audience the GeForce experience Nvidia's Now is solid, in an absolutely remarkable 3080 version.

If you have grown tired of chasing the prices of the video card market and are frustrated by prices or low availability, GeForce Now RTX 3080 is a great way to resist the current shortage of gaming components, with the added benefit of being able to play on a wide range of devices and platforms.

To make the service truly essential, the only thing missing is support for a very large stock of titles which for the moment is not yet present, but Nvidia seems to be on the right path to extend it along the lines of what is already happening for the basic versions of the GeForce Now service.