GeForce NOW turns 6
It actually started in 2013
To be precise, it is not entirely correct to say GeForce NOW is six years old. The service is older than that. Readers who have followed VideoCardz from the start may recall that NVIDIA introduced GRID GPUs designed for cloud game streaming. This was part of a broader push for the SHIELD lineup, including set-top boxes, a controller, and the tablet. That dates back to 2013.
NVIDIA later rebranded the service as GeForce NOW and launched it as a beta in 2015. By that definition, the brand is about nine years old. The six-year anniversary refers to the out-of-beta launch, which took place on February 4, 2020.
The earliest GRID era was built around Kepler-based NVIDIA GRID boards. For the later GeForce NOW PC era before the RTX tier naming, hardware varied by region and over time, and NVIDIA did not publish one single fixed “server GPU” for all users. That said, many users could see “Tesla P40” reported in session diagnostics, including on NVIDIA’s own GeForce NOW forums, and the Tesla P40 itself is a Pascal-based accelerator per NVIDIA documentation. So it was a mix of many architectures over this time.
GeForce NOW now supports Linux, Source: NVIDIA/VideoCardz
1 billion hours streamed
NVIDIA says users have streamed over 1 billion hours since the service launched, and February will add 24 games, starting with 10 new titles available this week. One of the featured games is Delta Force from Team Jade. NVIDIA says the game is now available to stream, with support for cloud play across supported devices without local installs on the player’s hardware.
NVIDIA is also adding PUBG: BLINDSPOT, a 5v5 top-down tactical spin-off set in the PUBG universe from Krafton. The company positions it as a round-based team game focused on map control and coordinated play, and it joins the service as a new release this week.
RTX 50 upgrade and introduction of 100 hour ‘limit’
NVIDIA has been rolling out GeForce RTX 5080-class servers for the Ultimate tier since September 10, 2025, alongside existing RTX 4080-class capacity. NVIDIA now targets up to 5K at 120 fps and up to 360 fps at 1080p in a competitive mode for Ultimate, plus 1440p at 60 fps for the Performance tier.
NVIDIA now caps Performance and Ultimate at 100 hours of monthly playtime, with up to 15 hours rolling over, and users can buy more time in 15-hour blocks or continue on the free tier once they hit the cap. The free tier has also been ad-supported since March 5, 2024, with up to two minutes of video ads shown before a session starts while in queue, and NVIDIA says ads do not run during gameplay.
One of the positive changes is a native client for Linux, something gamers were asking for quite some time.
Source: NVIDIA PR
