is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Today, Nvidia is soft-launching its latest gaming GPUs in the cloud — upgrading its $20-a-month GeForce Now Ultimate cloud gaming service with RTX 5080 graphics for select games, with more to come down the road. At the same time, it’s also adding thousands more titles to the bring-your-own-games service by letting you install them yourself, while also unlocking a 360Hz mode for ultra-fast desktop monitors, launching a 90Hz version of its Steam Deck app, and more.
Do all these changes make GeForce Now fundamentally better? Absolutely, and it was already pretty good! But while playing I couldn’t escape the thought: it’s a good thing Nvidia isn’t charging extra for most updates, because they’re a little underwhelming right now.
Cyberpunk 2077 is playable with all the Nvidia eye candy — if you use all the Nvidia tricks.
What is GeForce Now? For the uninitiated, Nvidia’s GeForce Now is a game streaming service that farms the graphical processing power out to the cloud. Instead of controlling a game running locally on your Steam Deck or MacBook or phone, you’re effectively remote-controlling an RTX 5080 or 4080-powered* gaming rig in a server farm many miles away, which you sync with your existing Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox, and Battle.net accounts to access your games and savegames from the cloud. *Nvidia’s GeForce Now also technically has a free tier, and a “Performance” tier, but I recommend you ignore both. For me, it was the difference between playing many games through a clean window or a dirty window, the difference between playing Alan Wake II and Indiana Jones with full ray tracing or none at all, the difference between comfortably stretching to 4K or not.
Don’t get me wrong, more power is always welcome, and more power is what I saw. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Cyberpunk 2077’s built-in benchmarks, two of the few I was able to run, Nvidia’s cloud-based RTX 5080 offered anywhere from 25 to 50 percent gains over the old RTX 4080 servers at 4K resolution.
That’s enough to play the former at near-max settings on a 4K TV, and the latter at 4K if you either sacrifice ray tracing or let Nvidia’s DLSS 4 frame generation add an extra fake frame for every real frame to smooth things out. My Cyberpunk framerate is better than we saw with the physical card!
But I quickly discovered that, like with that physical RTX 5080, the company’s marketing is moving faster than its tech can actually go.
There are so few RTX 5080-enabled games as of launch that I had a hard time finding them, and there’s currently no way to tell until after you launch Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 or Shadow of the Tomb Raider that it’s still running on a 4080-class GPU instead.
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