Game streaming — GeForce Now Ultimate first impressions: Streaming has come a real long way At its best, Nvidia’s cloud-based service feels like an extension of your hands.

Kevin Purdy – Jan 19, 2023 2:00 pm UTC Enlarge / It’s not actual GeForce RTX 4080 cards slotted into GeForce Now’s “Superpods,” but Nvidia says the hardware is pretty close.Nvidia reader comments with 0 posters participating Share this story Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit

Cloud-based gaming service GeForce Now’s new Ultimate tier is rolling out today, promising a series of adjectives about game streaming that might have seemed impossible just a few years ago: high-resolution, ray-traced, AI-upscaled, low-latency, high-refresh-rate, and even competition-ready.

I tested out GeForce Now’s new Ultimate tier, powered by Nvidia’s RTX 4080 “SuperPODs” on a server set up for reviewer early access, for a week. If I hadn’t been conscious of watching numbers and looking for hiccups, the performance of a remote 4080 rig felt remarkably local. It also unlocked the kind of high-end gaming performance on systems that would otherwise have no business trying to pull it off.

Ars had previously described our GeForce Now 3080 experience as “dreamy” and called the performance “a white-hot stunner that rivals the computing power you can muster” with the same RTX 3080 card in your PC. It’s easy to lay at least the same kind of praise on the new Ultimate tier. It replaces the previous RTX 3080 option for the same price ($20 per month, $99 for six months) but is powered by an industry-leading chipset that costs at least $1,200.

I played Hitman 3 on a MacBook Air (through a monitor) at a rock-solid 120 frames per second, with every graphical setting notched as high as they could go. I casually logged a few impressive-looking battles in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, sitting on a couch with an iPad and a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller. I almost felt bad when Cyberpunk 2077 on an Nvidia Shield was delivering 90 fps of 4K gameplay to my 60 fps TV (save those extra frames for lean times!). Advertisement

Not everybody has the screen capabilities, or the interest in GeForce Now’s particular games library, to need the Ultimate tier. But if you have wider bandwidth on your Internet connection than in budgeting for a single piece of a gaming PC, or want to test the waters of max-spec PC gaming, GeForce Now Ultimate is mighty intriguing. Test-driving a monster GPU across the Northeast

What follows is a first impression of the service, not a full review covering every facet. That’s partly because my monitor’s refresh rate only (“only”) goes to 144 Hz (i.e. 144 fps), and partly because I tend toward single-player games, not twitchy multiplayer shooters. I was barely able to test Reflex mode, which is only available on a few select games, one of which I knew and had played a bit. My personal graphics card is an RTX 3050, a budget-minded model that couldn’t hit 60 fps at 1440p on ultra or max settings on our test games. I’m an enthusiast gamer with normal-ish-person hardwarepotentially just the type GeForce Now is targeting.

Still, I had some basis for comparison. I previously had a Founders Edition account that provided access to less-powerful card types (GTX 1080 and, on occasion, GTX 2060) and was familiar with the games’ performance on my local RTX 3050. I mostly stuck to games in my library that worked on GeForce Now, though I briefly dipped into Destiny 2 multiplayer to see how remote multiplayer felt. And I’ve been a regular user of Nvidia’s local-streaming GameStream, with the lowest latency you could hope for. GeForce Now’s latest server location and international partners. Nvidia The Ultimate 4080 membership promises to be a big upgrade for those already subscribed to 3080especially, for some reason, for Warhammer fans. Nvidia Games supporting DLSS especially come out on top with the 4080 membership, something I can testify to. Nvidia If you’re more about that speed and latency than looks, Reflex Mode offers some intriguing technology for whittling down the click-to-photon latency. Nvidia Page: 1 2 3 Next → reader comments with 0 posters participating Share this story Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Kevin Purdy Kevin is a tech reporter and product specialist at Ars Technica, with more than 15 years’ experience writing about technology. Advertisement Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Related Stories Today on Ars