GeForce Now Ultimate: The ultimate gaming experience in a subscription model? Yes, but… Between Oha! and bottleneck

Who wouldn’t want to play games with a GeForce RTX 4080 in a deeply relaxed manner and at the same time save themselves the expensive purchase of a powerful computer with a suitable CPU substructure that they don’t need around the clock anyway? Today’s article is based on an experience report by our community member Olligo and presents the GeForce Now Ultimate service from NVIDIA from his perspective as a customer and real end user. Full-bodied advertising promises vs. bitter reality on German servers and yes, there is certainly still a lot to improve for NVIDIA, in addition to the well-known highlights. But I’d rather let the user have his say, because after all, he has struggled with it long enough and paid well.

What is GeForce Now Ultimate and what do I need for it?

On October 1, 2015, GeForce Now opened the doors of the cloud gaming service as a beta version and was able to gain more and more users after that. According to NVIDIA, the cloud gaming service already had over 20 million users on its platform in 2022. So far, so unspectacular. Over the years, I personally checked in from time to time and curiously observed the progress of the then still free version.
Initially, the image quality of the beta version was already at a halfway acceptable level, but it only became really interesting when the cloud gaming service had the first offer with an RTX 3080 server version in its portfolio from October 2021.

In order to keep the latency of the games as low as possible, it is therefore usually advisable to always book the largest package with the thickest hardware, logically. However, in order to get the best possible gaming experience, you should know and meet your own requirements in terms of a stable internet connection, the use of an Ethernet cable, a good router and the minimum hardware requirements. These requirements themselves are actually nothing that the modern user in 2024 should be afraid of, so I have written them down here as an introduction for us PC users.

NVIDIA itself requires at least a dual core X86-64 CPU with 2.0 GHz clock speed, 4 GB RAM, a DX11-capable GPU from the NVIDIA GeForce 600 series, NVIDIA GTX 800m, AMD Radeon HD 3000 or Intel HD Graphics 2000 series as minimum hardware requirements for a gaming experience at 1920×1080 resolution and 60 FPS. Of course, this also includes every recent Intel Ark graphics card that saw the light of day in 2022. For the large “Ultimate Package”, on the other hand, which is supposed to enable streaming with 3840 x 2160 pixels resolution and 120 FPS or even a whopping 240 FPS at 1920 x 1080 pixels, a GPU is required that was released in 2015 according to NVIDIA, because these graphics cards are in most cases capable of outputting 3840 x 2160 and 120 FPS, at least in streaming. NVIDIA writes the following as the recommended internet speed on its homepage for different quality levels, and I quote:

• 45 Mbps for 4K resolution at 120 FPS (3840×2160)
• 35 Mbps for UW QHD & QHD resolutions at 120 FPS (3840×1440 or 2560×1440)
• 35 Mbps for FHD resolutions at 240 FPS (1920×1080)
• 25 Mbps for FHD resolutions at 60 FPS (1920×1080)
• 15 Mbps for HD resolutions at 60 FPS (1280×720)

 

A simple cost calculation? That depends…

In this report, I’m referring to the two Extreme packages, i.e. the free trial version of GeForce Now and the large Ultimate package with the 4080 server version. The medium “Priority Package”, which is supposed to deliver up to 1080p and 60 FPS, costs 4.39 euros for a daily pass, 10.99 euros per month or 54.99 euros for 6 months. Unfortunately, an annual subscription is not currently available from the streaming provider. According to some users, this mid-range package, just like the free trial version of GeForce Now, only has an RTX 2080 server version under the hood, which is powered by an Intel CC150 8 Core CPU.

For the “Ultimate” package with the RTX 4080 server version and an AMD Ryzen 16 Core CPU, NVIDIA charges a whopping 8.79 euros for the day pass, 21.99 euros per monthly subscription or 109.00 euros for 6 months. Sounds too much? Well, if we do the math, we get, at least on paper, a daily average that costs us 8.79 euros for the daily model, another 0.733 euros for the monthly subscription and only 0.605 euros per day for the six-month version. Given the ever-increasing energy costs in Germany, the purchase costs of the new hardware and the ongoing operating costs can be offset against each other. At first and second glance, it doesn’t seem that stupid.

In my case, I currently pay €0.3408 per kilowatt hour from my electricity provider in Bremen, excluding the basic price. Depending on the game and the hardware installed in your own system, you can consider whether it’s worth switching to a cloud gaming provider. Not everyone “can” or “wants” to spend over €2000 on a decent gaming computer, so a current average of €0.605 per day for the 6-month subscription model of the RTX 4080 sounds pretty tempting.

The acquisition and operating costs of a powerful gaming computer in Germany are definitely not negligible, because my own PC with an Intel 9900k, an RTX 4080, 32 GB Ram, a 27-inch 144 HZ monitor and the rest of the peripherals draws an average of 430 to 465 watts with Cyberpunk 2077 at maximum settings in 3840×2160. Measured with a cheap watt meter at the socket, which measures the entire setup here, but of course does not come close to the usual quality measurements of Igor’s own laboratory equipment, of which we should be clearly aware! But it is what it is, because it is the rotation of the meter in front of the socket that counts!

The more economical and energy-saving your own setup is, the more tempting Geforce Now becomes, at least if it meets your own quality requirements in the end. You should therefore clearly consider which games you want to play and how high your own demands are, because according to NVIDIA, a quieter single-player game at 60 FPS or 120 FPS can run quite well with the Ultimate version. But let’s just test it out for ourselves.

Let’s first take a look at my local computer

Among other things, I tested Shadow of the Tomb Raider at maximum settings in Ultra HD (“4K 120 FPS streaming”), where the server version of the RTX 4080 including the rumored AMD Ryzen 16 core performed well and I had a system latency of only 20 ms at an internal 165 FPS, which Geforce Now itself limits at 3820 x 2160 to save resources. Anything under 30 ms of latency to the Geforce Now server is quite playable for a single-player streaming experience, as there is almost no noticeable delay in the input via controller or keyboard and mouse in games that you play comfortably on the couch with a controller.

To give you an idea of the system latency, I’ll use my PC system latency from Counter Strike 2 as a comparison. With an average 250 – 160 FPS and a 144 Hz monitor, this is around 7 to 10.5 ms depending on the scene with NVIDIA Reflex activated in boost mode and an RTX 4080, plus the latency to the respective server at the end, which in my case is always around 10 ms (ping) to a Counter Strike 2 server from home (Bremen) to Frankfurt. And I’m not really that bad either.

The click latency of my mouse, the Logitech Pro X Superlight 2, varies on average between 0.9 ms and 1.01 ms per button click at a polling rate of 2000 Hz in wireless mode. In the worst-case scenario, I therefore have a total latency of 20.61 ms on a local computer until my click for a headshot in Counter Strike 2 arrives on the server. However, my own RTX 4080 is slowed down considerably in lower resolutions by the Intel Core i9-9900K, which is now getting on in years. Let’s just call a spade a spade: it’s a miserable CPU bottleneck that hampers my local RTX 4080 enormously. So you can see that even a transfer latency of less than 30 ms in GeForce Now for single-player games is absolutely impressive.

But what happens when you really need and want to go all out? The god of pagination has placed mouse-based page turning in front of this realization, so please click on with the necessary latency!