Nvidia intros GeForce Now RTX 3080 membership streams

[HEXUS]

This top tier streams games at up to 1440p at 120 FPS on PC or Mac (6 months for $99/£89).

Read more.

[crazy95]

8 hour session limit, limited quantities, £180 per year? I'm sorry, what a joke of a service. the GPU shortage is still a joke and now Nvidia want to keep them for themselves to then rip the user off another way. I'm happy I bought a 3070 when I could, I can play as long as I want, at higher resolution and FPS, and when I'm not using it, it mines crypto for me and is half way to being paid off now.

[Corky34]

Maybe that's their master-plan, do a bait and switch by jacking up prices after launch so everyone thinks they've not got a chance of getting a graphics card at MSRP so you can push people into subscribing to your streaming services.

Would love to know if there's any substance to the rumours that Nvidia have (all ways intended) to increase what they charge AIB's after the first few batches of chips were shipped, effectively making early chips a loss leader.

[lumireleon]

LIKE it or not cloud gaming is 'possibly' the future but the current subscription prices and fuzzy internet is a still big issue. Sorry I prefer the series X for now.

[Kovoet]

I realise cloud is the future but for me not yet. I think are slowly but surely forcing gamers over to it. Then they'll be having monthly subscribers by the millions.
Think then I'm going over to console gaming lol

[vicar]

No thank you very much.

[Saracen999]

I realise cloud is the future but for me not yet. ....

Nor me .... except, forget the "yet" bit.

It may be the future in general, but I'm not doing subscription software in general, let alone gaming, and nor am I doing cloud anything much, or gaming via streaming services. The number of things I'm willing to even contemplate on subscription is very limited indeed, and will only ever be either something I need and have no choice about, or where given my preferences, the case is overwhelmigly good. Gaming is neither.

[lumireleon]

I realise cloud is the future but for me not yet. ....

Nor me .... except, forget the "yet" bit.

It may be the future in general, but I'm not doing subscription software in general, let alone gaming, and nor am I doing cloud anything much, or gaming via streaming services. The number of things I'm willing to even contemplate on subscription is very limited indeed, and will only ever be either something I need and have no choice about, or where given my preferences, the case is overwhelmigly good. Gaming is neither.

There is a 'particular' advantage on cloud gaming; (1) I only game when I need to meaning no need to invest on expensive hardware that I only use during holidays (2) Games are updated on the fly plus I get to game on the very best of Nvidia. Get this you possibly bought that expensive 1080ti but barely 3 years 3080 is here! so do I sell the hardware? these are some of the challenges.

[Kovoet]

There is a 'particular' advantage on cloud gaming; (1) I only game when I need to meaning no need to invest on expensive hardware that I only use during holidays (2) Games are updated on the fly plus I get to game on the very best of Nvidia. Get this you possibly bought that expensive 1080ti but barely 3 years 3080 is here! so do I sell the hardware? these are some of the challenges.

Problem is I game for minimum of at least 3 hours a day on Call of Duty. When I'm off work the next day like today I will game from about 19h00 till at least 04h00. I'm so spoilt at home the Mrsa actually brings my dinner to my desk whilst gaming. My online squad mates cannot believe how spoilt I get. So this cloud gaming will hopefully wait forever.

[QuorTek]

I see it like an open robbery... does that mean we get all the games for free?

[Saracen999]

There is a 'particular' advantage on cloud gaming; (1) I only game when I need to meaning no need to invest on expensive hardware that I only use during holidays (2) Games are updated on the fly plus I get to game on the very best of Nvidia. Get this you possibly bought that expensive 1080ti but barely 3 years 3080 is here! so do I sell the hardware? these are some of the challenges.

Oh, I don't dispute that there are advantages to streaming, but there are disadvantages too, and for me, the latter significantly outweigh the former. One of those is I have an inbuilt aversion to buying a pig in a poke. I want to know what something is going to cost me before I commit to it, and not sign up to an on-going charge. For a start, I may have a mad month where I do little but, in this case game but it could be oher things like edit photos. Then, I might got game (or edit photos) for 3 months, or a year. So in the case of editing photos, I've been using Photoshop for a couple of decades and about every other year, I look at what a new version offers, what the cost to uograde will be and decide yes, or no. If yes, I eat that cost once, right now, and then no further cost until, and if I upgrade again. But often, the advantagds don't justify another large bill, so I carry on with what I have, at zero extra cost.

My last major PC upgrade was somethng like 13 years ago (though the laptop and this Surface Pro are more recent, but not for gaming). I'm currently spec'ing (or over-spec'ing) my nest and probably last gaming-capable PC and that same logic applies here. It looks like x570 board and R9-5900, 32GB (or more) RAM and a very fast PCIe 4 SSD, abd it won't be cheap BUT, once done, odds are I'll never upgrade that video/photo/gaming PC in any significant way ever again.

Go down the subscription route, and where does it stop? A sub for this, a sub for that, and I get nibbled to financial death by subscriptions. Yes, most of them I can stop, start, stop again provided I remember, which means I have to keep track of what I want next month. Nah, not interested.

My solution is something non-subscription. In the case of Photoshop, that means my old perpetual licences are still valid, but I get old-level Photoshop capabilities. For those things where I might need more moern stuff, I looked around at what was available elsewhere, either open source, or chargeable but on perpeual licence, and ended up with ACDsee instead of Lightroom, and Affinity (Serif) Photo instead of Photoshop. Cost? About £120 for both (several licences), IIRC, but it's a one-off and unless I want upgrades (ACDSee, at least, charge) it'll still be that one charge in 10 years, whether I use for software all the time, or not at all. I haven't yet used ACDSee, about 4 moths after buying, even once.

So sure, for some/many, maybe subscription and/or cloud streaming services work. For me, they don't.

Oh, and if you're cloud streaming a game and constantly change games, fair enough. I have some games I still play years and years later. If the cloud streamer suddenly decides they're no longer supporting version 20xx, then you have to change to 20-current (like with the recent FIFA thing, which isn't my bag at all), whether you want to or not. I only buy things that wll run on my hardware now, but if I still have that hardware, will still run on it in 20 years, whether the cloud sevice and/or publisher like it or not. Hence, only buying, or playing, DRM-free games, and never, ever Steam (or similar) games.

My stance might not sui many/most gamers, but it works for me, which is why I won't game or cloud-subscribe.

Moreover, I don't want ANY cloud-reliant stuff on my systems. Not for data storage, not for backup, not for general purposes and sure as hell not for gaming. Most of my gaming is done on machines that are air-gapped and can't connect to cloud, or anything else on the net, even if they want to. That kills cloud-gaming stone dead for me.

[AGTDenton]

So nVidia has scalped it's own GPU's

[sjaxkingpin187]

Nice. They are finally updating the aging GFN hardware and decided they should charge more for it. Shouldn't hardware updates be something the normal subscription pays for since all of the games are purchased by the customer already Lame AF!!!