Bug makes it look like GeForce Now beta testers must buy Rain One at R559 per month

Update — Monday, 9 October 2023

This issue experienced by the MyBroadband reader appears to have been a unique bug.

Following the report, other readers said they could still sign up for the beta for R1 per month for Rain customers and R3 per month for non-Rain customers.

We tested the signup process ourselves and were able to select the R3 per month option for non-Rain customers.

However, the system still seems to be very buggy. For example, once I had signed up for the R3 per month option, I was presented with a message saying:

“Your 5G home router and 4G mobile SIMs will arrive within 3-5 working days.”

South African gamers who want to try Rain’s GeForce Now beta will have to fork out R559 monthly for a Rain One package.

A MyBroadband reader received an invitation to the beta and noticed that Rain removed the option to sign up without buying its broadband service.

When the beta first launched, Rain users who signed up had to pay a R1 monthly fee during the beta, while non-Rain users paid R3.

“Great news! Get your game on with Nvidia GeForce Now, with unlimited 5G home Wi-Fi from rainone,” the invitation reads.

“With rainone you get unlimited 5G home Wi-Fi, plus two 4G mobile SIMs, each with 60 free minutes, two free gigs and 100 free SMSs every month, with national 4G mobile coverage on our new 4G mobile network.”

Below the message, there are only two options: “request a sales call” and “buy now”.

Rain didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.

Rain announced its plan to bring Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service to South Africa in November 2022.

Nvidia GeForce Now leverages cloud technology to stream PC games from powerful GeForce-powered servers at ultra-low latency.

Users can stream titles they already own from digital gaming stores such as Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, and Origin without needing a powerful gaming PC.

The network operator said the service would launch in the first quarter of 2023 — between January and March — but it only started internal beta testing in April 2023.

This was after the first South African GeForce Now server went live.

In September 2023, Rain told MyBroadband that it had opened beta testing to selected Rain and non-Rain customers from the pre-registration process in 2022.

“During the beta phase, we will listen to feedback from the users,” Rain said.

“Nvidia engineers are working with our Rain engineering team to ensure the network and GeForce Now GPU cluster are optimised before commercial launch.”

One MyBroadband forum member tested the service by playing Bethesda’s recently released space RPG Starfield.

While testing, he had the game on medium settings, and he saw frame rates of  50fps or higher, with some drops to about 35fps during moments in spaceflight.

He said Starfield on the cloud gaming service performed better than natively on his system, which features an Intel Core i3-12100F processor and AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT.

The services’ latency also seems solid, with the forum member reporting a latency to the GeForce Now South African server of 19–25 milliseconds.

Another forum member shared details about the GeForce Now tiers that will be available in South Africa.

The table below outlines the GPU specifications, session lengths, and expected performance of the Priority and Ultimate tiers.

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