Can’t buy an Nvidia RTX 5080 or 5090 GPU due to stock shortages? If you were hoping GeForce Now might provide a good alternative, we’ve got some bad news

No subscription plans are available at all right now, although day passes will be back in a couple of weeks. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service is currently not open to any new subscribers – on any of its plans – and apparently that situation is not going to change anytime soon. Polygon reports that it has heard from Nvidia spokesperson Stephenie Ngo that day passes are coming back before too long, with Ngo informing us that new sign-ups for the single day experiences should return in “roughly two weeks.”.

However, it’ll be a good while longer before the full subscriptions (monthly and biannual) that most gamers want come back into play, and we aren’t told exactly when. So those who are fed up with not being able to buy an RTX 5080 or 5090, and are thinking about going to the streaming side of the gaming pond instead, are rather out of luck. We are given a reason for this disruption via an official announcement delivered on the GeForce Now subreddit. It’s because Nvidia is transitioning from a third-party payment processing system to take over these duties itself.

The firm said: “We expect the transition will take a minimum of 5 weeks.”. Ouch. There’s good news for existing subscribers, though, who won’t be billed during this period. Nvidia noted: “Starting January 31, 2025, billing will be waived while we transition payment services. Even though you won’t be billed, your account remains in good standing.”. Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.

Aside from the free time given to existing subscribers, which is clearly a nice bonus for those using the streaming platform already, this is also good news (in theory) for the service longer term. The hope is that it shows a commitment to GeForce Now, as bringing this system in-house is no small matter for Nvidia, as we can see from the length of the downtime here. In other words, it’s a move that was doubtless not taken lightly.

Still, that’ll be small comfort to those who might want to sign up for a subscription plan right now or in the near future. There’s no clarity as yet as to whether GeForce Now subscribers will have to re-enter payment details for their subscription, but this shouldn’t be much of a hassle, even if it is required with the new system. All this comes off the back of Nvidia temporarily halting most subscription plans a couple of weeks ago, seemingly due to high demand on the servers. Given this, it seems perhaps an odd time to also shift payment providers, but maybe Nvidia is taking the opportunity to perform server or infrastructure upgrades at the same time as repositioning its payment system.

Who knows, your guess is as good as mine – but hopefully after this next month or two of bumpiness in terms of subscription availability, it’ll be back to business as usual for GeForce Now and those who’d like to fully join the cloud gaming club. Quite possibly before there’s any big jump in the stock levels of Nvidia’s high-end Blackwell graphics cards, to be fair. Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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