Centurion: AfricUpdate – News Desk
Rain says it hopes to open the next wave of Nvidia GeForce Now subscriptions by the end of August 2025, after it sold out a day after launch in December 2023. The cloud gaming platform recently received a significant upgrade in South Africa, enabling subscribers on its higher-end plan to play games with a far more powerful graphics card.
“Our upgrade of the GeForce Now infrastructure from RTX 3080 to RTX 4080, enabling up to 4K resolution at 240 FPS, is now complete,” said Rain. It added that it was conducting extensive testing to ensure its Nvidia GeForce Now customers get the best possible experience. “We hope to open the next wave of seats by the end of this month, beginning with our earliest waitlist supporters, and will continue inviting additional users as capacity grows,” said Rain.
The network operator offers two Nvidia GeForce Now subscription plans in South Africa: Performance and Ultimate. The subscription plans have undergone a name change since launch. The Performance plan was originally called “Priority”, and the Ultimate plan was called “Ultra”. The lower-tier plan, which costs R200 per month, gives subscribers access to a dedicated gaming server with an Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card, enabling 1080p gaming at 60 frames per second.
At launch, the higher-tier plan gave customers access to a dedicated gaming server with an RTX 3080 graphics card, enabling 4K gaming at 60 frames per second, or 1440p gaming at 120 frames per second. However, the system has been upgraded to offer RTX 4080 graphics cards, making 4K gaming at up to 240 frames per second possible. According to Rain, even customers on the Performance plan will have access to the new GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards.
Subscribers to the performance plan can game uninterrupted for six-hour sessions, while the ultimate plan extends gaming sessions to eight hours. When a gaming session expires, customers must launch a new session, which could involve waiting in a queue if the servers are already occupied. MyBroadband tested Rain’s Nvidia GeForce Now product on a relatively low-specced laptop to see what kind of improvement the service offered.
While not precisely a “potato PC”, the laptop we used had 16GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7-7700HQ, and an AMD Radeon Pro 555 GPU with 2GB of VRAM. The laptop is a 2018 MacBook Pro, which manages to run games like Overwatch 2 and Fortnite locally on a Bootcamp partition running Windows 10. Gaming on the laptop didn’t offer a great experience, with poor frame rates on the lowest settings and scaled-down rendering.
We were then invited to Rain’s Nvidia GeForce Now beta, which we tested on the system despite initially being sceptical. In an early and short test, we noticed a severe input delay. However, this was caused by an unstable connection. We were also concerned that there may be severe in-game lag. However, more in-depth testing revealed that this wasn’t the case. After tweaking settings and connecting to a stable network, the experience was game-changing.
Performance on games that usually ran inconsistently at around 50 frames per second increased to around 100 to 120 frames per second, with minimal latency and negligible input delay. Regarding latency, we primarily tested games like Fortnite and Apex Legends and found that the games ran at pings of between 160 and 180 milliseconds. This was similar to the latency we experienced when playing these titles natively on the 2018 MacBook Pro.
However, the service offers more than just a better gaming experience for people with lower-specced or non-gaming PCs. It can also enable gaming on the go using other devices. We briefly tested Starfield on the GeForce Now mobile app on a Samsung Galaxy S22. Here, we experienced some challenges, including input delay and some graphical bugs.
