Nvidia has announced today that it is adding a new membership tier to its GeForce Now cloud gaming service. The new membership will allow subscribers to experience gaming with an RTX 3080 graphics card without having to physically buy one.
GeForce Now's RTX 3080 membership tier will allow gamers to play games in the cloud with an RTX 3080 PC gaming rig. Nvidia says that each cloud on GeForce Now's supercomputer consists of over 1,000 RTX 3080 GPUs with 39 petaflops of graphical horsepower. Each GPU offers 35 teraflops — nearly triple the performance of Microsoft's Xbox Series X, which has a GPU with 12 teraflops.
Nvidia notes that the GeForce Now RTX 3080 membership will allow games on the cloud service to run at up to 1440p resolution on PC and Mac clients or 4K resolution when streaming on Nvidia Shield. With up to 120 FPS with the PC, Mac, and Android versions of GeForce Now.
The RTX 3080 membership tier announcement comes at an interesting time for Nvidia as the company has struggled over the last year with trying to keep up with the unprecedented demand of its RTX 30 series graphics cards, which debuted in late 2020. Due to the ongoing chip shortage, which may continue well into 2023, this new membership tier for GeForce Now will allow users to get a taste of the RTX 3080's power without having to purchase a full PC gaming rig equipped with one of the GPUs.
GeForce Now's RTX 3080 membership will cost $99.99 for six months and be available in North America sometime next month, while European gamers have to wait until December. GeForce Now Founders and Priority members have early access to preorder the service beginning today.
Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.