Nvidia upgrades GeForce Now’s $10 tier to 1440p and Ultrawide, but Ultimate users only get a 100-hour limit.

Nvidia has made some major changes to GeForce Now in the last week. The $9.99 paid membership level can now stream in 1440p or Ultrawide resolutions. It's also doing this without increasing the membership fees.

Unfortunately, and apparently to pay for this upgrade, Nvidia also announced a 100-hour limit on its game streaming service. The company says that "GeForce NOW can continue to provide unparalleled speed, as well as short or no queue times, to all paid members without increasing membership fees."

It does seem a bit tight to introduce a time limit on play for a company that is listed as the most valued company in the entire world with a value of over $3 trillion. But I guess if you take care of the pennies, the trillions will take care of themselves.

You can still play a few hours on a 1080p PC to get a sense of what GeForce Now offers. GeForce Now, as a service, is a really, really good one. I'm a huge fan of Nvidia's service for streaming games. I played my entire Baldur's Gate 3 game on GFN, either on my home projector in high definition or on a handheld computer.

I only used the controller layout. Fight me.

Nvidia's features for packet synchronisation ensure that streams are almost indistinguishable when compared to a local gaming environment. This is obviously network-dependent and your mileage may vary if you are running on a poor service. We've played with poor internet in hotels and convention centres and still had impressive gaming performance.

The new Performance tier replaces the Priority Tier. This has been upgraded with the ability to stream up to 1440p at 60 fps. I'm still waiting to hear from Nvidia whether this also means that the RTX hardware available for the Performance tier is upgraded.

You can now also access the Ultrawide resolutions, which were previously only available to the Ultimate tier. Users can still stream up to 4K in 120 fps, and 1080p in 240 fps with an RTX-4080-powered server.

Nvidia suggests that the Ultimate tier (alongside the Performance tier), will now be allowed to save their ingame graphics settings. However, this feature has been available on GeForce Now since a long time. In the app's settings, you can toggle whether you want to use Nvidia's recommended streaming settings or save your own graphics changes for the next time you start up.

The Ultimate tier doesn't get anything new, except for a time limit, but it won't be charged more. The Performance tier will remain $9.99 per monthly, while the Ultimate tier will be $19.99. The six-month plans are also the same price.

Nvidia has frozen its prices until the new monthly time limit of 100 hours is implemented. Nvidia's FAQ states that, "rather than raising prices for everyone," the implementation of a monthly maximum playtime will keep the pricing the same in the near future.

This cap is only going to affect 6% of GeForce Now customers, so most gamers won't notice. This is around three hours per day of gaming, so I'm not surprised that most GFN users don't reach this. If you are that dedicated to PC gaming, you probably play those games on your local rig. I admit that I may have exceeded this limit three times with my own Baldur’s Gate last year. However, the analytics are currently down so I cannot check.

You can always purchase more hours if your monthly limit is reached. If you don't reach the maximum, you can carry over 15 hours per month. PS3.

It's obvious that if only 6% GFN users play for more than 100hrs, they aren't doing it in such a way that would harm Nvidia financially. Why is this limit being implemented if it doesn't affect 94%?

I suppose it's possible that some of those 6% are somehow betting the system, maintaining a stream artificially for some reason and dubious benefits.

Nvidia's explanation isn't very convincing: "To maintain GeForce NOW’s low or no queue times, and a quality experience for premium members, we provide them with a maximum monthly playtime of 100 hours."

GFN's ability to quickly kick you out if it notices that you haven’t inputted anything and are idle makes it seem like it has a pretty robust way of ensuring capacity. Nvidia's GPU-filled servers have become more valuable than just gaming and game streaming. So maybe it is refocusing its efforts to more profitable businesses.

If you sign up before the end of the year, you have a 12-month grace period. However, if you sign up after January 1, 2025, your playtime will be limited to 100 hours. If you sign up by the end of the calendar year, you get a 12-month grace. But if you join after January 1, 2025 you will be stuck with a 100-hour cap.