NVIDIA Ampere RTX 3080 picture-2

Nvidia may leverage its new “Ampere” lineup of GPUs in its GeForce Now service for just $5 a month


In a recent statement to PCGamer, Nvidia has told them that gamers should expect ‘Ampere’ graphics cards to arrive on the ‘GeForce Now’ streaming service. Nvidia plans to potentially make the benefits of these cards available to gamers without requiring them to pay for an upgrade.

NVIDIA GeForce Now is one of the best cloud gaming platforms you can currently access. It allows you to play your favorite games for $5/month. Now, Nvidia has confirmed that its next-gen Ampere architecture will be coming to this cloud streaming service. PC gamers will now be able to access the power of the Nvidia Ampere architecture, without having to buy a new GPU, all thanks to the company’s GeForce Now service.

In a statement to PC Gamer, Sr. Product Manager, Andrew Fear said, “We want GeForce Now to be an opportunity for gamers to experience the latest gaming technology from Nvidia. Therefore, you can expect to see Ampere on GeForce Now in time.”

This is good news for Gamers who subscribe to this GeForce Now service, since they will be able to access the new technology soon, if not earlier, than those who plan on purchasing these latest graphics cards when they are released.

Currently, GeForce Now supports the ‘Turing’ GPU architecture, allowing gamers to take advantage of ray-tracing/RTX and DLSS on this cloud platform. Hopefully, the switch to the Ampere architecture will give Nvidia’s Cloud Gaming platform a major boost in gaming power. With ray tracing still in early deployment, Nvidia is providing gamers the advantage of potentially testing the RTX Ampere architecture via its GeForce Now streaming service, without having to physically buy a brand new Ampere graphics card. The big question, of course, is the ‘latency’ issue, whether your PC can connect smoothly to Nvidia’s servers to make good use of GeForce Now, in the first place.

Though, it seems unlikely that Ampere will be available on GeForce Now platform any time soon. Even though first Ampere-based GPUs are expected to launch in September this year, it’s worth remembering that the Turing architecture didn’t arrive on this streaming service until a few months after the architecture’s late-2018 debut.

But PC Gamer speculates that if Nvidia’s aspirations for GeForce Now are met, Ampere will arrive on this cloud service sooner than Turing. Nvidia currently offers two tiers of membership for its GeForce Now service, Founders and Free, with Founders getting priority access, RTX graphics, and an extended gaming session. When asked whether the introductory offer would expire anytime soon, thus raising the price of the Founders tier, Andrew Fear, Sr. told PCGamer, “we’ll think about this next year.”