GeForce NOW RTX 3080 Membership Sounds Impressive But Costly

RTX 3080 graphics cards are still tough to find, and if you've had no luck finding one for your own rig, then you might want to turn to GeForce NOW streaming. Today, NVIDIA announced a new RTX 3080 membership tier for GeForce NOW, which will be its highest-performance streaming tier. NVIDIA is making a lot of big boasts about the RTX 3080 membership tier, but that enhanced performance comes at a fairly significant cost.

For starters, NVIDIA says that the RTX 3080 membership will allow subscribers to stream games at up to 1440p on the PC and Mac clients and 4K HDR on NVIDIA Shield. Framerates can reach up to 120 fps with the PC, Mac, and Android apps, so it sounds like players will be able to stream the experience of gaming on a high-end PC.

NVIDIA says that RTX 3080 cloud gaming rigs use AMD Threadripper PRO CPUs, 28GB of DDR-3200 RAM, and gen-4 PCI SSDs. NVIDIA also says that its SuperPODs now house more than 1,000 GPUs each that are responsible for 39 petaflops of GPU power. Thus, each "instance" – presumably these cloud gaming rigs NVIDIA also references – offers 35 teraflops of performance, which is around 3x the power of an Xbox Series X.

While latency is always a concern with cloud gaming, NVIDIA says that these 3080 streaming rigs should help on that front, too, by putting Adaptive Sync to use. In addition, those who subscribe to the RTX 3080 membership tier will also get longer session lengths.

All of this sounds great, but if you want to use one of these RTX 3080 gaming rigs with GeForce Now, you're going to have to pay up. NVIDIA has priced the RTX 3080 tier at $99.99 per six months, which is significantly more expensive than the Priority membership that runs $9.99 per month. Pre-orders for the RTX 3080 membership are open today for GeForce NOW Founders and existing Priority members, and they'll open up to everyone later this month. The RTX 3080 membership will launch in November in North America and December in Europe, with NVIDIA saying quantities are limited.