The downside of streaming services is that you’re always paying for something, but owning nothing, and terms can suddenly change. Nvidia offers GeForce Now, where games over the Internet are compressed and streamed from a virtual GPU to your device without having to have gaming graphics. But a year ago, this service became more expensive, and another revision of the terms is coming: The previously unlimited playing time will now be like mobile data – if you go over it, you will pay extra.
GeForce Now has three types of membership – one is free, which can be understood mainly as a trial and has always been heavily limited (one game session can be a maximum of one hour), now it also shows ads. The higher paid subscriptions, and especially the more expensive Ultimate subscription that was added later, used to be presented as unlimited – although one game session could be 6 or 8 hours at the most, but the total playing time could be as long as you wanted, or rather managed. But that ends now.
Nvidia has announced that even paying customers will now have a limit on how much time they can spend on games per month in addition to the limited time per game session. This time will be 100 and is the same for both the lower subscription and the “premium” Ultimate tier.
Calculated, it still works out to more than three hours a day. Therefore, it is not exactly a drastic limit, according to Nvidia, only about 6% of players skip playing over this time, and the rest should therefore not know anything. On the other hand, the claim that the company must introduce this measure so that it does not have to increase the price of subscriptions collides with it a bit – if it is applied to only 6% of users, the potential savings should also be quite limited (on the other hand, there is probably not just some a simple linear relationship, if this allows the number of servers to be reduced, the savings may be higher than you would expect). The question is whether only the middle subscription could not be limited, and the higher level could not have an additional benefit of unlimited time (when it is already “ultimate”).
It is possible that Nvidia also wants to use this opportunity to “monetize” the 6% of subscribers more. If you use up the limit, you will have to buy additional hours, just like with mobile data, but as is usually the case, the fee for them is less favorable than for 100 hours as part of a flat rate (or, more precisely, prepaid, since it is no longer a flat rate). For the basic subscription, 15 hours costs an extra 3 dollars (CZK 90 in our case), double that (CZK 180) in the Ultimate mode.
Anyway, after this adjustment, it’ll be a bit stronger again that if you play a lot, it usually makes more sense to buy some real physical graphics and use that, because the one-time investment will pay off sooner or later in saved ongoing expenses (and then you keep the graphics card as a bonus).
The quota of 100 hours of play for one month has a small exception – part of the unused time can be transferred to the next month, the maximum is 15 hours. So if a person does not regularly play all the way through the month and only hits the limit occasionally, this will help.
From January 1
This limited playing time will apply to subscribers who subscribe from next year (from 1.1.), until the end of this year it should still be possible to buy or extend the subscription under the old conditions and thus still get the old unlimited total for the year 2025 playing time (however, the length limit of one session still applies). The condition is that the subscription must be active before the end of this year.
Priority subscription renamed, higher resolution
So that the news is not only negative, there is also one improvement. That lower level of paid access has been changed, and while it was originally limited to 1080p resolution, it will now also support 1440p gaming (typically 2560×1440 pixels). Widescreen (21:9) monitors should also be supported. Whether this means also with a resolution of 3440 × 1440 (WQHD) is not entirely clear, but probably not, and because of the larger number of pixels, this subscription could probably still be limited to a resolution of 2560 × 1080 (Nvidia specifically states 1440P QHD, which is 2560 × 1440) .
Increasing the maximum resolution doesn’t necessarily mean that the instances on the servers you’re streaming from now have more powerful GPUs – it could just be a simple resolution increase that the system lets you set, and FPS will depend on how demanding the game is or whether you set some upscaling.
Due to this change, the subscription has been renamed from Priority Membership to “Performance Membership”. The highest level of the subscription continues to be named Ultimate and there have been no changes to it except for the limited playing time.
Finally, the graphics settings can be saved
According to Nvidia, another novelty is the ability to save graphics and other settings in the game across sessions, so you don’t have to fill them in again the next time you log in (I admit, I didn’t even know this wasn’t possible automatically a long time ago). This applies to both paid plans, but not the free / ad-sponsored plan.
Source: Nvidia
Source: www.cnews.cz
