GeForce NOW @ GTC 2019

By: AlanV

NVIDIA had plenty to talk about at this year’s GPU Technology Conference, including its GeForce NOW service. The service is getting a nice bump in performance courtesy of NVIDIA’s newly announced RTX blade servers. With these new servers gamers will now see performance equal to that of running an RTX 2080, which is the current PC gaming champ.

These new servers will do more than just turn the pretty upto eleven, though. It will also enable Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality tobe rendered in the cloud. “We’re also working together to support CloudVR,enabling virtual reality apps to be rendered on RTX servers in cloud datacenters and streamed to the HTC VIVE headset without a local PC or cables toenable a mobile, high-end VR experience” said NVIDIA.

The problem of latency and connectivity also got attention,with NVIDIA developing new partnerships with service providers. Their currentroster of data centers in North America and Europe will be bolstered by theaddition of data centers in Japan and Korea. These new data centers will berolling out later this year.

It’s exciting to see NVIDIA continue to work on improvingGeForce NOW. To be able to get the experience of ray tracing, which really requiresa graphics card as beefy as the RTX 2080, is awesome news. Especially consideringthe eye watering price tag that card carries.

The news regarding VR and AR support is also a nicesurprise. NVIDIA is making the barrier to entry on these two technologies lower,which is a good thing for fans of these kinds of gaming experiences. I’m notsold on this making the needle move for mainstream gamers but, it’s nice to seea company the size of NVIDIA show so much support for these technologies.

The addition of new data center and partnerships withtelecommunications companies is also a bright spot. One of the biggest issuesfor the service is consistency, which will hopefully be resolved as thesepartnerships continue to blossom.