The Lotto-sized price of GeForce Now

Offering Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service in South Africa comes with a significant price tag, comparable to twice the Lotto Powerball jackpot.

That is according to feedback from a major Internet service provider (ISP) which held talks with the graphics giant over potentially becoming a second GeForce Now Alliance Partner in South Africa.

GeForce Now was launched locally in December 2023 following a limited-invite beta period running over several months.

The cloud-based game streaming service effectively replaces local hardware with dedicated gaming PCs sitting in a data centre.

These machines are called SuperPODS and feature powerful rendering and networking hardware to run and stream games to any device that supports the GeForce Now app or browser-based interface.

That includes low-power computers, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.

Instead of paying for a physical system, GeForce Now subscribers pay a month-to-month subscription fee to play games through the service.

In South Africa, pricing starts at R200 for the Priority plan with an RTX 3060 GPU capable of playing many of the latest games with a 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second.

Users still need to buy the games or subscribe to a gaming subscription, but being able to play on older or more affordable hardware can save a lot of money.

A high-quality cloud gaming experience requires low latency, which means GeForce Now servers must be located as close to users as possible.

In countries where Nvidia does not plan to roll out directly, it partnered with mobile network operator Rain to roll out the necessary infrastructure in South Africa.

However, the service has been at full capacity since its debut, with little evidence of people who have subsequently signed up to the waiting list being admitted.

Rain recently told MyBroadband it was aware of the significant demand for GeForce Now and would be adding new slots to the service “soon”.

Calls for a second South African partner

Just a few months after Rain rolled out GeForce Now, MyBroadband forum members who had grown impatient with Rain adding further capacity appealed to Afrihost to offer the service.

While an Afrihost representative initially said that the team was too busy with other projects, they eventually confirmed they reached out to Nvidia on 6 February 2024 to begin discussions and look at a proposal.

Around a week later, the rep confirmed they had a meeting with Nvidia but had signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), so they could not reveal further details.

The representative remained quiet about potentially rolling out the service until November 2024, when they responded to another forum member’s question about the cost of the SuperPODS.

“Imagine winning the Powerball jackpot after it rolled over once,” they said. “The price was in that range and excluded the half a million rand monthly power licences for the data centre,” they stated.

While the rep did not give any specific numbers, the Powerball jackpot is typically R10 million after rolling over once.

While that sounds like a lot of money for gaming services, it is important to consider the specifications of each GeForce Now SuperPOD.

The top-end GeForce Now Ultra tier currently offered in South Africa uses a system consisting of more than 1,000 RTX 3080 GPUs delivering more than 39 petaflops of graphics horsepower.

Each player’s instance can support 35 teraflops, meaning the actual GPU count should be around 1,114 per SuperPOD.

These are paired with 8-core, 16-thread AMD Threadripper Pro CPUs, 28GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, and PCIe Gen 4 SSDs.

If the Afrihost rep was referring to the RTX 3080 SuperPOD’s price in their response, the effective cost of each instance was around R10,000.

At face value, that is actually a bargain when considering an RTX 3080 GPU costs over R15,000 on its own. Adding the CPU, RAM, and SSD could easily push its price to around R30,000.

MyBroadband asked the Afrihost rep for more clarity on the costs, but they had not responded to the feedback by the time of publication.

Recovering the cost

Rain charges R400 per month for a GeForce Now Ultra subscription, which uses the RTX 3080 SuperPOD.

It has not revealed the number of subscriptions it has available for each of the two GeForce Now tiers.

However, it would have to sell more subscriptions than the 1,114 instances for the investment into an RTX 3080 SuperPOD to make sense.

If it only sold as many subscriptions as the available instances, the subscriptions would bring in R445,600 per month.

That would be less than the R500,000 distribution centre electricity bill that the Afrihost rep mentioned.

However, if Rain sold three subscriptions for every instance, it would be making R1.34 million per month on just the GeForce Now Ultra tier.

Deducting the cost of the electricity, the monthly GeForce Now revenue would be about R840,000, which would make up for the initial SuperPOD cost in about a year.