With all the signs that Nvidia will unveil the GeForce RTX 3080 this year, its powerful next-generation GPUs are not going to come cheap. But there will be another way to access the performance that Nvidia's new Ampere GPU architecture will bring to graphics.

Nvidia has confirmed to our gaming sibling site PC Gamer that it plans to bring Ampere graphics technology to its GeForce Now game streaming service. And since Ampere is the core architecture behind the next wave of GeForce graphics cards, this could mean that GeForce Now will be able to harness the power of the RTX 3080.

"We want GeForce Now to be an opportunity for gamers to experience Nvidia's latest gaming technology." Andrew Fear, senior product manager for GeForce Now, told PC Gamer. So expect to see Ampere on GeForce Now at some point."

GeForce Now features GPUs based on the Turing architecture, which introduces dedicated ray-tracing hardware for games that support realistic rendering techniques. According to previous rumors, the GeForce RTX 3030 is expected to offer a 20% performance boost over the powerful GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. In other words, its performance can be expected to carry over to GeForce Now.

This means that better graphics, frame rates, and visual capabilities will be available for Nvidia's game streaming service, and with the imminent arrival of the PS5 and Xbox Series X, games that push the gaming hardware more than ever are expected, this is quite promising.

There may be some caveats to this ampere upgrade. GeForce Now is currently offered as a free and paid service. The latter option, with an introductory price of $5 per month, gives users priority access to the service and all the graphics features offered by Turing GPUs, but the free version is more basic. Therefore, we expect that Nvidia will require GeForce Now users to pay for access to the performance and feature enhancements that Ampere brings to the table.

We expect the new generation of GeForce graphics cards to be available around September. Therefore, we will have to wait a little over a month to hear exactly what Nvidia is planning next for the Ampere architecture.