Review: Nvidia GeForce Now RTX 3080

Nvidia's game streaming service GeForce Now has cruised past 12 million players, thanks in large part to the platform's free tier. After Google's Stadia's perpetual stumbles, and even Nvidia's own difficulties with courting some developers, it's an encouraging sign that some players are still willing to give cloud gaming a chance.

Now players might have their best reason to try it yet: They can actually play games using the coveted RTX 3080 graphics card.

Right now, Nvidia's RTX 3080 is among one of the best graphics cards you can('t) buy. It ranks towards the top of benchmark lists–and its Ti variant is the fastest graphics card according to PassMark right now. It's so sought after that months after its release, gamers were still camping out at retail stores just to spend $700 on one, while others have resorted to daring truck heists to steal them.

That context is crucial to understanding why GeForce Now's latest offering—a tier where players can pay $100 per six months to play games on an RTX 3080 rig in the cloud—is such a big deal. Cloud gaming comes with a lot of shortcomings. Gamers need to have decently strong internet connections and can afford to download huge amounts of data. Even in the best cases, they have to accept the occasional streaming hiccups. Normally, these might add up to dealbreakers, but we're not living in normal times.

First of all: It works! And pretty well! That's a massive compliment. It was only a couple years ago it wasn't clear if cloud game streaming would work at all. In retrospect, services like OnLive that were ahead of their time had crashed and burned trying to make it work. For all its failures as a platform, Stadia at least proved it was possible for the technology to work. But if Stadia was the prototype, GeForce Now is ready to ship.

I'm of the opinion that if something only works under ideal circumstances, it doesn't actually work very well. That's why, in addition to testing GeForce Now over high speed internet connections in the 100s of megabits per second, I also tried it out in hotel rooms—very explicitly against the advice of the app's network testing tool, at times. 

While traveling for a week, I brought my M1 MacBook Air to multiple different hotel rooms across the country and tried out GeForce Now on whatever Wi-Fi was available. If it was less than the 50Mbps recommended, or sometimes as low as 25Mbps, I tried anyway.

In theory, being able to take your high-powered, AAA games on the go with you—to places where you can't bring a console, or worse, a massive gaming PC—is one of the better pitches for cloud gaming platforms. And I was pleasantly surprised. On slower connections, I encountered the occasional, brief lag or graphical hiccup, but for the most part I couldn't tell that I wasn't playing a game on my own laptop.

In the same way that streaming Netflix isn't quite as high quality as playing a 4K HDR Blu-ray at home, streaming a game over a service like GeForce Now is an experience that requires some sacrifices. Video compression meant that sometimes movement got a little muddy, and occasionally there were blocky distortions, or a half-second moment where the game would cut out and need to catch up. 

On faster connections though—how I managed to get over-50Mbps speeds on hotel Wi-Fi, I'll never know—even these issues were few and far between. I spent time playing Cyberpunk 2077 and Control, both games that make prolific use of Nvidia's ray tracing and DLSS which gives the RTX 3080 a chance to shine. I was able to play long enough to forget that I was playing a game on a server hundreds of miles away.

That would be enough to make a compelling argument that, even if GeForce Now isn't going to replace your gaming rig right now, that it could be a decent option for anyone who doesn't want to buy or build their own. But now we have to deal with the supply chain crisis in the room.

$100 every six months for the RTX 3080 plan comes out to just under $17 per month. That means that streaming games from Nvidia's fancy graphics card in the cloud costs nearly as much as the most expensive Netflix plan, and you still have to bring your own games. Fortunately, Nvidia lets you use your existing library from services like Steam or Epic, but not all games are supported. It's a lot to ask when you could just buy your own for an MSRP price of $700.

Except, you can't.

We're serious. Buying many graphics cards–especially high-end cards like the 3080–isn't just “finding a Turbo Man doll on Christmas Eve” difficult. For the average person, it's downright impossible. Some commonly advised strategies on acquiring one include hanging out in Discord servers and YouTube streams dedicated to monitoring store stocks; camping outside retailers; and buying entire prebuilt gaming PCs just to salvage the card out of them. Alternatively you could just bite the bullet and shell out close to $2,000 for one from resellers.

When those are the only other options on the table, $200 a year starts to sound a lot more reasonable. It would take about three and a half years to spend as much on GeForce Now as an actual RTX 3080 would cost to own at its typical retail price, but only if you can get your hands on one. There's also the possibility that in this timeframe, GeForce Now's top tiers will get upgrades to newer, more powerful hardware.

In short, it's not only easier to rent an RTX 3080 via GeForce Now than it is to buy one yourself—and by “easier”, we largely mean “possible”—you might even save money in the long run by doing so. 

If you play GeForce Now on the free tier, it has a few drawbacks. Since the service's free tier could get unwieldy to host very quickly, players have to wait in a queue to get online, and play sessions are limited to one hour apiece. The Priority tier, the service's previous highest option, lets gamers skip ahead of the free tier users and play on some more advanced hardware for up to 6 hours.

However, only players who are subscribed on the RTX 3080 tier get access to the 3080 servers, and slots in this tier are limited. There are fewer people to compete with for play time, and game sessions are capped at 8 hours, which feels like more than enough. If you're playing a game for 8 hours straight, it's a fair bet that you probably need to go grab a sandwich before you re-queue.

All of this means that paying for the highest tier makes many of GeForce Now's flaws largely invisible. With one major exception: All of your games still aren't available. Publishers like Bethesda, Capcom, and Rockstar have all pulled some or all of their games from the service, and the platform's mere existence is controversial to some developers who believe they should have a say on which platforms their games exist. 

This means that, while GeForce Now has a healthy library of supported games that is steadily growing, it's unlikely it will ever support everything. So that's a point in favor of tracking down your own RTX 3080. At least if you have your own graphics card, you can play every game you own with it.

But for everyone else who can't cross that monumental hurdle, GeForce Now's new RTX 3080 tier is a nearly perfect stopgap. It's not just that gameplay is shockingly smooth, incredibly detailed, and–if you have a good internet connection–largely lag-free. For most people who want a 3080, it's the only option on the table. That might be worth putting up with a a few hiccups here and there.