Nvidia shares after cloud gaming launch

Nvidia (NVDA) on Thursday announced the launch of its GeForce NOW RTX 3080 cloud service for streaming high-resolution, ultra-low latency video games by using powerful AMD chips on Nvidia data centre servers. Nvidia and AMD shares rose on the news.

Nvidia (NVDA) shares, up 73.8 per cent YTD, were up 2.66 per cent at the close of trading on Thursday amid news of the launch of the GeForce NOW RTX 3080 cloud gaming service.

Streaming video games from Nvidia will be streamed in high resolution and ultra-low latency, giving gamers the ability to enjoy video games at up to 1440p and 120fps on PC and Mac, on some Android devices, and 4K HDR at 60fps on a TV using the SHIELD TV set-top box.

Industry experts call streaming video games the next generation and the future of the industry, as gamers do not need to buy games individually or have expensive, powerful video cards on their PCs or other equipment when using them.

According to Nvidia, its high-performance cloud gaming platform is powered by the world's most powerful gaming supercomputer, the GeForce NOW SuperPOD, and servers equipped with graphics processors based on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, using AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO CPUs that deliver industry-leading performance and bandwidth.

AMD (AMD) shares, up 44.2 per cent over the past half year, rose 2.5 per cent on Thursday and continued to rise 1.4 per cent after the close of trading. According to Nvidia, the GeForce NOW RTX 3080 service will initially be available to a limited number of users in North America and Western Europe by pre-order. Subscriptions are priced at $99.99 for six months.

Nvidia will compete in the video game streaming market with other technology giants Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOGL).

Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate streaming video game service costs from $15 a month and is available on PCs, mobile devices and the Xbox console. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that the total number of Xbox Game Pass subscribers had reached 18 million per month up 3 million from 15 million in September 2020.

Sales of subscriptions to Nvidia's streaming video game service will create an additional stable source of scalable revenue for the company, allowing it to better diversify its business and increase profits.