Perth's Pentanet to expand Nvidia cloud gaming service

Perth telco Pentanet has announced it will launch a new tier for its Nvidia GeForce cloud gaming service to Australia in 2023, based on the GPU vendor’s top consumer offerings.

Pentanet said it will acquire an unspecified number of Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 SuperPODs ahead of the launch, providing 1000 RTX 3080 GPUs in each SuperPOD to improve its GeForce NOW cloud gaming service, as well as add a new membership tier. The company said the purchase will be funded by its five year loan facility with Westpac.

Pentanet launched the GeForce NOW service in October 2021 following a $20 million placement in June that year. The company said the cloud gaming service now has 270,000 members across its membership tiers.

“When we first launched ‘GeForce NOW Powered by Pentanet’ in Australia, we were setting out to prove that a high-bandwidth, latency-sensitive application could run on Australia’s internet,” Pentanet managing director Stephen Cornish said.

“With hundreds of thousands of members and a steady growth rate each month, we’ve demonstrated that not only is cloud gaming achievable, but there’s a growing appetite for it into the future.”

Pentanet said the RTX 3080 SuperPODs will deliver 39 petaflops of graphics processing power, with each instance providing 35 teraflops of performance. The SuperPODs are also configured with AMD Threadripper PRO CPUs, 28GB of DDR-3200 memory and PCI-GEN4 SSDs.

The company said members can run games at up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second or 1440p resolution at 120 frames per second on PCs and Macs, as well as on Nvidia’s Shield TV streaming media device and on some Android devices.

Following the official launch next year, Pentanet will also officially expand the service into New Zealand as a “serviceable territory”, with “additional nearby countries” set to follow.

“Expanding our collaboration with NVIDIA is the next stage in the evolution of ‘GeForce NOW Powered by Pentanet,’ with new regions having a highly engaged gaming community,” Cornish said.

“We already have some subscribers in New Zealand who have been with us since our beta program, and they’re loving the platform. The foundations are set for us to explore further activity in more regions to engage the audience of gamers who are keen to get onboard with cloud gaming.”