You could be gaming on Ampere for $5/month as Nvidia eyes GeForce Now upgrade

Gamers should expect Nvidia Ampere graphics cards to arrive on GeForce Now, Nvidia has told PC Gamer. The next-gen GPUs from the green team are (some say) right around the corner, and it appears as though you won't need to physically buy a brand new graphics card to experience what the architecture has to offer—you can sign up to GeForce Now for $5/month instead.

"We want GeForce Now to be an opportunity for gamers to experience the latest gaming technology from Nvidia." Andrew Fear, Sr. product manager, GeForce Now, tells me. "Therefore, you can expect to see Ampere on GeForce Now in time."

The GeForce Now cloud gaming service first launched with Pascal generation graphics cards loaded into its servers—Nvidia's enterprise-grade Tesla GPUs most often. These were later replaced with RTX graphics cards capable of delivering the RTX feature set, such as real-time ray tracing and DLSS, via the cloud and down to your device.

However, that upgrade to the Turing architecture was some time after the architecture's initial late-2018 release—ray tracing and DLSS were first made available to Founders tier members of the GeForce Now service back in February.

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Nvidia offers two tiers of membership for its GeForce Now service: Founders and Free. RTX graphics, priority access, and extended session length separates the wheat from the chaff, and a $5/month introductory fee for 12 months.

When asked whether the introductory offer would expire anytime soon, thus raising the price of the Founders tier, Fear told me "we'll think about this next year."

Everything from heatsinks to 3DMark benchmarks have been cropping up across the web in recent weeks, suggesting that an Nvidia Ampere release date is near. Undoubtedly, the first to game on the next-gen will do so with physical hardware, but if Nvidia's aspirations for GeForce Now are met, I'd take a guess that Ampere will arrive in the cloud sooner than Turing made the leap.

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.