It"s been a little over a year since Nvidia launched the GeForce Now cloud gaming service out of beta, and today the company announced some changes that it"s making as the service approaches 10 million members.
Most notably, this will include a new subscription tier, called Priority membership. This is the same as what Nvidia has been calling the Founders tier, except it now costs $9.99 per month, instead of $4.99, though you can opt for annual billing and pay $99.99 for a full year.
That"s not a small increase, but for those that have a Founders subscription, there"s some good news. Nvidia is also introducing the Founders for life program, which will allow you to keep your current $4.99 price forever, or at least as long as your account is "in good standing". That means that you have to keep your payment information current and make payments in a timely manner, and it also means you can"t interrupt your subscription. If you do, you"ll have to subscribe again with the new price.
Aside from the dramatic change in price, Nvidia also announced some improvements to the GeForce now service, coming with an update to version 2.0.28, which is rolling out now. One of those is a new V-sync technology that synchronizes frame rates on the server at 60 or 59.94 frames per second to match your display, thus reducing stutter and latency in games that support this. Additionally, there"s a new de-jitter technology aimed at improving performance on less reliable networks.
Nvidia is also working to add things like account linking for certain major games on the platform so that you can jump into the games much more quickly. The company didn"t specify which games would benefit from this, though. The company is also making some changes to game preloading, promising to cut load times roughly in half, but this will be coming in the next one or two months.
The last of the technology improvements is increasing the server capacity in its busiest regions, which includes a new server in Phoenix, Arizona, and its first Canadian server coming to Montreal after that. naturally, this should help the service accommodate more players. It"s also bringing the service to new regions, with Turkey and Saudi Arabia launching recently, and Australia coming soon.
Finally, Nvidia is promising to increase the rate at which it adds new games to GeForce Now. Throughout 2020, Nvidia says it added about 10 new games per week, and it hopes to increase that pace by 50% in 2021. This week, seven new titles are being added, including GoNNER, Loop Hero, and System Shock: Enhanced Edition.