Some new upgrades are coming soon to Nvidia's GeForce Now streaming service. Nvidia says that the hardware powering the service is getting access to all of those surplus RTX 4080 graphics cards that aren't being purchased by consumers. This means that GeForce Now games will get to make use of DLSS 3 and offer players 240Hz refresh rates. You will need to be a Now Ultimate Member to make use of the 4080 hardware. Existing RTX 3080 Members will get a free upgrade to the RTX 4080 Ultimate tier soon.
DLSS 3 support is self-explanatory. The technology will generate additional frames to keep framerates high when compared to native resolution gameplay or even when compared to DLSS 2. The 240Hz mode needs a little bit of explanation though. Nvidia is calling this Competitive Reflex 240Hz Mode. This looks to be an extension of the already existing Nvidia Reflex technology that most of us are probably familiar with in a fair number of games. Nvidia is applying their Reflex technology to the cloud in hopes that it makes cloud gaming feel more responsive to the end user.
Nvidia says that with Competitive Reflex 240Hz Mode enabled, they are seeing 34ms end-to-end latency in games like Fortnite. Nvidia claims that this figure is actually faster than an Xbox Series X running in 60Hz mode. With latency, there are a lot of factors to consider but broadly speaking lower latency is better.
This rollout of these RTX 4080 Superpods is expected to begin rolling out to GeForce Now data centers starting later in January. Given the scale of this rollout, it could be a bit of time before all of the data centers are updated with this new hardware.
Nvidia also announced today that they are rolling out GeForce Now to additional global regions. These new regions include South Africa, Armenia, and Malaysia.
