GeForce Now celebrates its sixth anniversary, but it actually looks much older

Nvidia marks the sixth anniversary of its cloud gaming platform GeForce Now

The service that is today called GeForce Now actually has been around longer. It first appeared in 2013 as Nvidia Grid – a platform for the Shield series gaming devices (Shield Tablet, Shield Portable and home console). In 2015 Grid was renamed and received a beta version of GeForce Now; the full release occurred on February 4, 2020, which is why the “six years” milestone is noted.

How the service began
* The early years involved working with Shield devices that used the Kepler graphics architecture.
* In later periods GeForce Now expanded to PCs, but hardware varied by region and time: before the RTX series of servers were introduced, Tesla P40 accelerators (Pascal architecture) were used. Thus, in its initial phase the platform relied on several different graphics architectures.

Key figures
* Over 1 billion hours of streaming since launch.
* This month, 24 new games will be added to the library, 10 of which are already available now. Among the new titles are *Delta Force* from Team Jade and the isometric tactical shooter *PUBG: Blindspot* (5‑v‑5) from Krafton.

Pricing and technical capabilities
Plan Servers Resolution / FPS
Ultimate RTX 5080 + RTX 4080 up to 5K at 120 fps, up to 360 fps at 1080p (competitive mode)
Performance 1440p at 60 fps

From January 1 users in Performance and Ultimate modes are limited to 100 hours of play per month, but can carry over up to 15 hours to the next month. Additional time is sold in increments (15‑hour blocks). After reaching the limit, users can continue playing on the free tier.

Advertising
* Starting March 5, 2024 the free tier will include ads: up to two minutes of video advertising appears in the queue before a session starts. No ads appear during gameplay.

New for Linux users
A significant step is the launch of a native GeForce Now client for Linux – a long‑awaited change that many gamers have been looking forward to.