Rain wants to expand sold-out Nvidia GeForce Now service

Mobile operator Rain says it is aware of the demand for the GeForce Now streaming service in South Africa.

Rain launched its locally-hosted Nvidia GeForce Now service in November 2023 and it has proved popular among South African gamers, with packages selling out shortly after the launch.

“Nvidia GeForce Now powered by Rain subscriptions sold out shortly after launch due to much anticipation in the South African gaming community from both Rain and non-Rain customers,” it told MyBroadband.

“We realise there is increased demand for the service and will keep you posted on future server updates.”

It added that since launch, the games with the most playtime on its servers include Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and Rocket League.

This is similar to the feedback it provided in March 2024, when it said it planned to expand the service offering and capacity later in the year.

Rain added that it limits registrations to provide the best possible cloud gaming experience for those who have signed up to its Nvidia GeForce Now offerings.

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

At the time, the most popular games on the service were Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.

Rain launched the service in late 2023, offering a Priority Plan priced at R200 per month and an Ultra tier that costs R400 per month.

The cheaper plan limits gaming sessions to three hours, and users can benefit from Nvidia’s RTX ray tracing technology for supported titles.

Customers on the Priority plan can play games at 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second via a dedicated gaming server with an RTX 3060 graphics card.

When a gaming session expires, users will have to restart the game they were playing and might face a queue to reconnect if no gaming servers are available.

The Ultra tier extends gaming sessions to eight hours and lets users play on GeForce RTX 3080 servers at up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second or 1440p resolution at 120 frames per second.

A game changer for gamers with less-powerful machines

We tested Rain’s Nvidia GeForce Now service shortly after it launched to see how it compared to my current setup, which features an ageing MacBook Pro running Windows 10 on a Bootcamp partition.

While the laptop had decent specs for the time, including 16GB of RAM, an Intel Core i7-7700HQ, and an AMD Radeon Pro 555 GPU with 2GB of VRAM, it struggles to run most of the games I play smoothly.

The titles I enjoy are primarily first-person shooters like Overwatch 2 and Fortnite, neither of which are particularly demanding on low graphics settings.

They are playable on the laptop. However, I face low frame rates and frequent stutters.

Playing on Nvidia GeForce Now servers took my gameplay experience from juddery graphics with low frame rates to a steady frame rate of up to 120 frames per second in games like Fortnite and Apex Legends.

This was combined with minimal latency and minimal input delay.

My monitor maxes out at 75Hz, so I don’t get the full benefit of the higher frame rates, but even the jump from 50 frames per second made a noticeable difference.

Performance improved significantly, and the games ran at far higher graphical fidelity.

While I could still enjoy games on my laptop despite the low frame rates and rendering, it was nothing compared to my experience using Rain’s Nvidia GeForce Now service.