The Morning After: NVIDIA's GeForce Now Ultimate is a high-end cloud gaming service

If you have the connection and the right location.

While Google shut down Stadia for good this week, other cloud gaming services are expanding their offerings. NVIDIA is upgrading its GeForce Now service with a bunch of features, thanks to the addition of new SuperPODs equipped with RTX 4080 GPUs. This seems to be the first truly high-end cloud gaming experience. The renamed Ultimate plan now includes support for refresh rates up to 240Hz at Full HD or 4K at 120fps and an expanded set of usable widescreen resolutions (3840x1600, 3440x1 440 and 2560 x 1080).

NVIDIA is also adding better HDR support on Macs and PCs, as well as the ability to use full ray tracing with DLSS3 in supported games. This elevates GeForce Now above rivals like Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is capped at 1080p/60 fps. There are the usual caveats for cloud gaming: NVIDIA's recommended minimum bandwidth for gaming at 1080p at 240 fps is 35 Mbps.

If you want to max out at 4K/120fps, Engadget's Sam Rutherford notes that you'll need at least a 45Mbps connection. These new SuperPODs also have limited availability. At launch, the new servers with 4080 GPUs will be spread across four locations: San Jose, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Frankfurt, Germany. This means that only users in the United States and Central Europe will benefit from NVIDIA's best cloud gaming experience for now.

– Mat Smith

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