• A beta test of GeForce Now by rain which started in September will end of 4th September.
• The ISP says that it will announce an official launch date “soon”.
• While local gamers could access the beta test for R1, the ISP hasn’t announced how it will price the game streaming service when it launches.

Since September, internet service provider rain has been beta testing a local deployment of NVIDIA’s GeForce Now and next week, that beta test ends.

The ISP has sent out an email to testers announcing that on 4th December the beta test will come to an end.

“Thanks for all the game play. The GeForce NOW Powered by rain beta phase is ending on 4 December 2023. Keep an eye on your inbox for news on the official launch date, coming soon. You’ll be able to choose a membership plan that works for you to get your game on,” rain said in an email.

The beta test required a payment of R1 to access and while rain initially said that the test would last around 30 days, we’ve had access for months now. Mind you we’re not complaining as the service has been fantastic.

We’ve been using GeForce Now on a 100Mbps fibre line from Vox and our latency to the nearest server is 4ms. We do experience minor packet loss at times but overall, the experience is fantastic, especially if you don’t have or can’t be at your PC.

While GeForce Now lets you access your Steam, Ubisoft and Epic Games library, you won’t be able to play every game you own. Of our 1 802 games, we can only play 82 on GeForce Now.

The service also recently added Xbox Game Pass support which is a nice way to access more games if your other libraries are a bit on the emptier side.

As this is a game streaming service, its performance will live and die on the internet connection you have. To that end, NVIDIA recommends a connection with a speed of at least 50Mbps and a latency of less than 40ms for the best experience.

It’s unclear at this stage which GeForce Now tiers will be available locally. In other markets, there are three tiers for the service, a free tier as well as Priority and Ultimate. South Africans have been placed on the Priority plan which features a rig with an RTX GPU, a max resolution of 1080p, a max frame rate of 60FPS and a six-hour session.

We’re eager for the official launch of GeForce Now in South Africa from rain and we highly recommend you give it a test if you haven’t been able to during the beta test phase.