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GeForce Now RTX 4080 upgrade at no extra cost. Insane value?

NZXT30

NZXT30

NZXT30

Soldato
Joined
3 Aug 2010
Posts
3,153
Especially with the current energy prices. How can Nvidia afford to do this?

At £15 a month if you game 2.5 hours a day due to energy costs GeForce Now becomes essentially free and anything above that you actually save money while also getting a 4080 rig for free.

Are we traditional native gamers getting utterly fleeced? And how can Nvidia afford to offer this without hurting their profit margins?

I will be definitely giving this a shot come April energy price hike.
 
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I'd be more than willing to try it out, but would need to be at the ultimate tier and not at £18.

For instance, how Microsoft does the £1 first month for the Game Pass - if they did something like that I'd be very happy to try it out and if it worked well I might subscribe for a month here and there if I particularly wanted to play a GPU heavy game.
 
Worked well on my iPad, definitely better for games where the whole screen isn't changing quickly (e.g. car driving)
Shared hardware makes it profitable as one GPU can run multiple games and one server can run many many games.
 
Bought my wife ‘ultimate’ tier about 5 months ago ( was 3080 previously ) when i got her a mac since we like to play tf2 together and it has no native support so gfn was the only choice.

Tf2 is obviously a joke to run, but it’s fast paced ( flicking, 1st person shooter etc).She plays in 5k on her mac and streaming image quality is pristine ( no macroblocking, no visual artifacts, nothing ).

So in theory considering the only ‘issue’ is the streaming quality, on our gigabit connection it’s as good as running the games locally.

Disadvantage is, if the games you want to play arent on GFN. Then you’re outta luck.
 
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Jamie Gilbert said:
Worked well on my iPad, definitely better for games where the whole screen isn't changing quickly (e.g. car driving)
Shared hardware makes it profitable as one GPU can run multiple games and one server can run many many games.
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Also the usage rate makes it cheaper.

When you buy a 4080 for gaming, as an example maybe you spend a couple hours a day gaming, other 90% of the day your gpu is doing nothing but when it's in a server like this the utilisation rate is much much higher


It's the same idea as shared car services, you spend 50k on a car that you use for 1 hour a day, what a waste of money right but if that car was shared like an Uber the. The utilisation goes up massively and the cost per person tanks
 
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NZXT30 said:
How can Nvidia afford to do this?
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Well, they can't really. I was seeing a presentation on game streaming and the guy was saying the costs per user were ~$0.5/hr (https://youtu.be/8lS6iUOx3fM?t=1880), presumably even more today. My guess is they're taking a loss on it but its mitigated by the fact that they probably use the hardware for the other type of AI/HPC workloads they're used to running so it might get mitigated falling under R&D. Plus they're still heavily under the user acquisition phase so losses are not necessarily taboo atm, with the hope of expanding monetization option later once the noose can tighten around a much larger overall market for themselves.

On the user side the issues are more to do with how poor the experience is quite often, with server issues, games/launcher issues, the actual hardware is very weak on the CPU side (which actually ends up mattering much more than the extra GPU grunt), ofc no real modding, loads of saving issues, limited game selection, HDR only for use with Nvidia Shield, etc. The list is honestly a mile long. I enjoyed it when I could play XCOM 2 initially (then that got taken off) and that was the biggest selling point for me, and it also did ok with Assassin Creed games, but it was HORRIBLE in Division 2 and some others, so it's very hit or miss latency-wise.

Energy costs have increased its appeal somewhat but tbh when GPU mining was still possible game streaming would've actually LOST you a LOT of money compared to just having your own PC and running that when in downtime. So GFN has really only had a year or so of being even close to decent comparatively.
 
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NZXT30 said:
Especially with the current energy prices. How can Nvidia afford to do this?

At £15 a month if you game 2.5 hours a day due to energy costs GeForce Now becomes essentially free and anything above that you actually save money while also getting a 4080 rig for free.

Are we traditional native gamers getting utterly fleeced? And how can Nvidia afford to offer this without hurting their profit margins?

I will be definitely giving this a shot come April energy price hike.
Click to expand...

Prob cos its losing them money and this is the last death throes. I thought I had read it was closing down. They all seem to be eventually.
 
NZXT30 said:
Especially with the current energy prices. How can Nvidia afford to do this?
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If no one was buying the 4080s maybe this was the only thing they could do with them ;) :p :D

When I last tried it using one of those codes that came free with Ampere cards it wasn't particularly impressive from a quality standpoint, things could have changed since then. Personally I wouln't mind a trial of the various tiers to see how the tech is coming along (or not!).
 
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