Nvidia made it possible to gain access to machines in the cloud powered by its GeForce RTX 3080 in 2021 despite the global chip shortage that brought GPU production to a halt at the time. The RTX 3080 was regarded as the company's most significant GeForce Now upgrade in years, promising incredibly low latency and stellar performance that outperformed many game consoles and PC gaming rigs. Bringing the power of this GPU to consumers via subscription made life easier for those who struggled to buy one physically, and it’s now doing the same favor with the RTX 4080. Nvidia is upgrading GeForce Now with RTX 4080 GPUs, and it comes with a new subscription tier called “Ultimate.”

The new tier is the successor to GeForce Now’s RTX 3080 plan, giving subscribers access to improved streaming performance and double the frame rate with no additional cost for existing RTX 3080 tier customers. This means you’ll continue to pay the same $19.99 monthly fee (or $99.99 for six months), with access to a few improvements, including full ray tracing, DLSS 3, and 240 frames per second. The new RTX 4080 "SuperPODs" offer each user over 64 teraflops of graphics performance, which Nvidia claims is nearly twice that of the RTX 3080 tier and five times that of the Xbox Series X.

If you’re an existing RTX 3080 subscriber, your plan will be automatically upgraded to the Ultimate tier starting this month, depending on your location due to limited capacity. The upgraded plan will come to more data centers in North America and Western Europe throughout the first quarter of this year, with expanded coverage expected in the following months.

Those who are among the first to receive RTX 4080 GPUs via the cloud will have access to the Ada Lovelace architecture's ray tracing power as well as Nvidia's DLSS 3 frame generation technology. DLSS 3 significantly reduces input lag by lowering CPU usage to optimize server pod performance. Nvidia, on the other hand, is introducing a new upgrade to further reduce lag: the Reflex 240Hz Mode. According to the company, this new mode can reduce input latency to less than 40ms, a first for cloud gaming.

Nvidia Reflex has been available on the desktop for quite some time now, and it's great to see the technology bring its latency-busting capability to the cloud, making the game experience in this environment much less laggy.

In addition to your devices, GeForce Now's PC game catalog will soon be available in a few car models, including Hyundai, Polestar, and China's BYD, with the in-car version of the cloud gaming platform supporting both Android and web-based infotainment systems (via Engadget).