over 200 milliseconds for a laptop with Intel's UHD graphics. In Destiny 2, for example, NVIDIA says that GeForce NOW RTX 3080 has a total of 56 milliseconds of click-to-draw latency, vs. Speaking of latency, NVIDIA's own internal lag measurements say that GeForce NOW has less "click-to-draw" latency than the integrated graphics found in many typical laptops.
There are some bandwidth and latency requirements that come along with this, which we will get to shortly.
The maximum supported resolution and frame rate on PC and Mac with the RTX 3080 tier is 2,560 x 1,440 at 120 Hz, while the NVIDIA SHIELD with an HDMI 2.0b connection can play at up to 4K and 120 Hz, with HDR. The latest entry, the GeForce NOW RTX 3080 tier, extends sessions to 8 hours, but more importantly eliminates some of the previous performance limits.
Both of those tiers have access to 1080p gaming at 60 fps.
The next tier up is Priority, which allows those who pay $9.99 a month or $49.99 per six months to jump up in line ahead of free players, and play for up to six hours at a time. That's plenty to whet someone's appetite without clogging up the lines for paying customers.
That free tier gives access to those F2P games along with the subscriber's own game libraries for one-hour sessions. There is a free tier so users can take it for a trial. To get started, download the GeForce NOW app from NVIDIA's website and sign up for an account. Plenty of other popular AAA titles are available too, including hits like Battlefield 1, Control, and MechWarrior 5. It's also worth noting that when Far Cry 6 shipped, it was available on GeForce NOW at launch. NVIDIA says it's working with publishers to get more experiences like this for its subscribers. While gamers still need to buy the game in order to play it, GotG's presence on GeForce NOW means that they don't also have to fight the hordes for an in-demand graphics card if they don't already have one. This is a major coup for NVIDIA, since the games are what make the service. However, there's a pretty sizable chunk of our own library available, including the high-profile, day one release Marvel's Guardian of the Galaxy from Square-Enix. Not every game on each service is available for play. The first time you launch a game on a given service, you'll need to provide your own account details if you don't own the game, you can't play it unless it's a free-to-play title. When a game is available on multiple storefronts, the app lets you choose which service to log into. To gain access to a game, you simply have to own it on one of the supported platforms. The idea is that you can play those games from almost anywhere on virtually any device without the need for expensive discrete graphics cards or high-end CPUs, since all of the heavy lifting takes place in the cloud. GeForce NOW has a selection of free-to-play games as well, but the focus is on games that players already own. The games that are available to play come from users' own game libraries, spanning multiple services including Steam, Epic, GOG, and more. NVIDIA's game streaming service is effectively a low-latency remote session running on a virtual gaming rig hosted on a GeForce NOW SuperPOD in one of the company's datacenters. GeForce NOW veterans are probably familiar with the service, but let's take a moment for the uninitiated. Game streaming services like GeForce NOW can really enhance the functionality of these PCs, assuming it works as billed. Neither machine is a real gaming rig: one, a 2020 Mac mini with Apple's M1 processor, and a desktop with a Ryzen 7 5800G featuring AMD's integrated Vega graphics. We got to take the newest version of GeForce NOW for an early spin and chose to do so on a couple of systems that seem to be meant for the service.
Regardless, gamers that had put together most of a high-end gaming PC build, but lacked a powerful GPU, due to crazy current market conditions, may still be able to at least get some value from their fancy high-end displays one way or another with this new GeForce NOW tier. We could end things right here, but there's a lot more to this upgrade, including support for variable refresh rates and improved latency characteristics. Replacing those previous top-end limits now, in the RTX 3080 tier, are a higher resolution of 2560x1440 at up to 120 FPS. Gone is GFN's previous limit of 1920X1080 FHD resolution running at 60 frames per second. Announced last week, NVIDIA is bringing a whole new tier of graphics horsepower to its service, dubbed GeForce NOW RTX 3080. NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is not a new product, but today the company's game streaming service is expanding in a couple of key ways to bring more performance and better visuals to gamers everywhere.