Nvidia hasn't broken the limitations of time and space, but its GeForce Now platform is now close enough to having an RTX 5080 inside your MacBook. Starting with a handful of locations, Nvidia is upgrading the servers of its cloud-based game-streaming service with RTX 5080 SuperPods, replacing the RTX 4080 models available with the Ultimate subscription tier.
If you subscribe to GeForce Now, you'll get to enjoy the upgrade without paying an extra cent. It's not just a slight bump in GPU speed, though. The RTX 5080 Ultimate membership has extra perks that significantly improve the cloud gaming experience.
A Mistake (and a Revelation)
Photograph: Jacob Roach
After installing the new GeForce Now app, I booted up Hollow Knight: Silksong. It's not the kind of game you'd normally have to play in the cloud, and it's nothing more than a light breeze of rendering in the face of an RTX 5080. But that's all I've been playing. I can feel the cadence of platforming and combat in my bones. If latency is going to kill the experience, I'd be able to tell with Silksong.
And kill the experience it did. Stutters led to missed jumps. Weighty inputs meant combat was imprecise. It was playable, but it showcased the worst aspects of cloud gaming. Tough games with precise inputs just aren't made to handle round-trip network latency, even if that latency is (relatively) minor. I closed the game, and I realized I made a mistake.
GeForce Now sent me to one of the server locations that hasn't gotten the RTX 5080 treatment yet. Nvidia plans to upgrade the full GeForce Now network, but that's an ongoing process. I swapped to an RTX 5080-enabled server and booted the game back up. You could've convinced me that I just switched to a native version of the game.