Enlarge / GeForce Now works on all of these devices. But you’ll want to double check whether your ideal combination of hardware, screen, and Ethernet connection will get you up to either 1440p resolution and 120 fps, or 2160p resolution and 60 fps. If so, GeForce Now’s new 3080 subscription tier might be perfect for you. (credit: Nvidia)
The prospect of buying a reasonable new GPU in 2021 remains a crapshoot, and that says nothing about your hopes of buying a higher-end option anywhere near MSRP values . In a chip-shortage universe , there’s not a ton we can do to change this unfortunate reality, outside of asking greedy cryptominers to please donate their high-end GPUs to people who want to play games with the things.
For some people, cloud gaming might be a good alternative. This concept lets gamers connect their much weaker hardware (netbooks, set-top boxes) to supercomputer farms. So long as they can maintain a decent broadband connection and endure hits to button-tap latency (and bandwidth overages ), they can, on paper, expect higher-end gaming. But so far, we haven’t seen impressive computing power in that marketplace. Stadia in particular launched as a woefully underpowered service , while the biggest PC-centric cloud option, Nvidia GeForce Now, has a mix of power limitations and usability frustrations .
This week, Nvidia moves forward with its most intriguing cloud-gaming service upgrade yet: GeForce Now 3080, named after its powerful RTX 3080 GPUs. Preorders for that service are now officially live , and depending on your willingness to compromise, you might want to look into it.
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