GeForce NOW Streaming Service Launching In Russia

Cloud-based gaming is preparing to leap out of the news and to the forefront of the industry with the impending release of Google Stadia and Microsoft’s xCloud, while the beta is currently open for the GeForce NOW cloud-based gaming program. 

Today at the IgroMir Expo game festival in Moscow, the GeForce NOW Alliance from hardware giant NVIDIA announced a partnership with finance group SAFMAR to bring streaming services to Russian players. 

GeForce Now has been re-branded to GFN.RU for Russian players, with digital services provider Rostelecom handling the streaming aspect while M.Video will cover selling subscriptions.  

This Russian collaboration follows previous partnerships for the GeForce NOW program with SoftBank in Japan and LG U+ in South Korea. That latter country is known as a Mecca for eSports fanatics, with online games such as Starcraft 2 becoming cultural phenomena that rival standard sports games in the U.S. 

While the gaming industry is eagerly looking forward to streaming services allowing for better visuals with less up-front hardware costs for players, the streaming revolution is causing continued woes for brick-and-mortar retailers who still sell physical copies of games such as GameStop .

In other NVIDIA news, the company’s GeForce RTX 20 series is the latest generation of graphics cards on the market and will be utilized extensively for the GeForce NOW streaming platform. 

Those new cards put a major focus on ray tracing as the next big iteration of graphical improvement for both single player and multiplayer eSports titles. 

While most of the 20 series cards landed in the consumer market late last year, several upgraded iterations just arrived in recent months, with the RTX 2070 Super launching in July and the RTX 2080 Ti becoming available at the end of September. 

Aside from releasing improved graphics cards for enhanced gaming performance, NVIDIA has put a heavy focus lately on AI technology to be utilized outside the game industry. The company’s latest headlines have included farmers using deep learning tools to detect crop disease early, as well as grocery stores utilizing AI tools to find fraud at self-checkout stands in real time.  

NVIDIA execs will additionally be on hand to speak about AI improvements at the upcoming GPU Technology Conference in Washington next month.