Rain plans to expand Nvidia GeForce Now access

Rain says its Nvidia GeForce Now product has been a big hit among South African gamers, and it plans to expand access to the service later this year.

Registrations have been closed since the day after Rain’s official Nvidia GeForce Now launch, with subscriptions selling out on day one.

“The Nvidia GeForce Now subscriptions were sold out on the first day, due to much anticipation in the South African gaming community,” Rain told MyBroadband.

“We realise there is increased demand for the service, and we are planning to be able to expand the service offering & capacity later in the year and will keep you posted on the developments.”

The mobile operator says it limits registrations so those who have signed up can get the best possible Nvidia GeForce Now experience.

“To date, we have offered 3.6 million minutes of Nvidia GeForce Now Cloud gaming, since the launch,” it said.

Rain added that the most popular games played via its Nvidia GeForce Now service include Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, and Fortnite.

Rain officially launched the Nvidia GeForce Now service in December 2023, following a successful beta test that lasted several months.

The Nvidia GeForce Now service offers users without a high-end gaming PC the ability to play the latest titles.

It lets users stream games on Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS smartphones, smart TVs, and Android TV boxes.

The most affordable option for South African gamers is the Priority Plan at R200 per month. These customers get access to a dedicated gaming server with an Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card.

This makes playing games at a maximum 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second possible. Priority Plan subscribers’ gaming sessions are limited to three hours.

Once the gaming session ends, the user must restart the game they were playing and wait in a queue if no gaming servers are available.

Rain also sells a higher-end Ultra tier for R400 per month. The Ultra plan extends gaming sessions to eight hours and gives users access to GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards.

This makes it possible to stream games at 4K resolution at 60 frames per second or 1440p at 120 frames per second.

MyBroadband tested the service during the beta and after its official launch in early December 2023 and was impressed with its performance.

For our tests, we used an Acer laptop and a 250/250Mbps fibre-to-the-home connection through RSAWeb on MetroFibre’s network.

Our Counter-Strike 2 and Apex: Legends testing provided a pleasant gaming experience.

With all graphics settings maxed out, we had no issues playing both games at the maximum supported frame rate of 60fps on the Priority plan.

However, only the Priority Plan was available during the beta period, which limits frame rates to 60 frames per second.

We achieved in-game frame rates of 100–130fps for Counter-Strike 2 and 100–120fps for Apex: Legends.

We also tested the service with single-player games Starfield and Atomic Heart.

As a newer and resource-heavy title, Starfield struggled on the Nvidia GeForce Now Priority Plan, achieving between 15 and 22 frames per second with the graphics settings maxed out and rendering at a native 1080p resolution.

On the “High” profile with native rendering, the frame rate increased slightly to about 20–25fps, and at “Medium”, about 25–30fps.

However, Atomic Heart performed markedly better, consistently achieving 60 frames per second with the maxed-out “Atomic” graphics setting.