Hands-on: Nvidia’s GeForce Now RTX 5080 is better and worse than I hoped

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.

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.

And to get the huge framerate gains that Nvidia’s promising from RTX 5080, you’d need to have its servers generate three fake frames for every real one — which, when you combine it with the lag of cloud gaming, dramatically slows the speed a game reacts to your movements. I didn’t need to spend long trying 3x and 4x frame gen in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to find it was a non-starter for me: the game portrays Indy in his prime, but he suddenly felt like a sluggish old man.

But I’ll admit 2x frame gen actually felt pretty viable over a cloud connection, at least when plugged directly into my desktop over ethernet.

On the speedier side of things, my colleague Tom Warren tried out Overwatch 2 in Nvidia’s new 360Hz mode, and says he found it “easy to be competitive with,” but unfortunately that mode’s only limited to 1080p resolution. “Streaming at 1080p on a 4K monitor wasn’t the best,” he says.

It’s important to note the point of buying a 360Hz monitor is typically for better reaction times in esports games, not the smooth framerate itself, and Nvidia is getting you nowhere near a true 360Hz (2.78ms) reaction time this way. But Nvidia claims it can get you down to 30 milliseconds, which is incredible for cloud gaming and should be better than a console in your living room. In the Overwatch 2 example, Nvidia says it’s only adding 1.8ms of encode, 0.3ms of decode, and 9ms of game engine activity and rendering, to the time it takes for you to press a button and send data across the internet to Nvidia’s servers and back.

Meanwhile, though the 90Hz Steam Deck app is unequivocally an upgrade for the Steam Deck OLED’s 90Hz screen, making a smoother experience overall, I was surprised to find an RTX 5080 doesn’t necessarily improve performance beyond that. In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the RTX 5080 wasn’t enough to run the game at 4K on max settings any more than the RTX 4080 was, so I tested at 1440p, and saw roughly the same framerate of 55fps (outdoor battle) to 90fps (indoor environment) regardless of which GPU I was using.

(Yes, I do recommend streaming at much higher resolutions than 800p to the Steam Deck’s 800p screen, because oversampling makes for a clearer and crisper image with fewer cloud gaming artifacts.)

Last but not least, I tested Nvidia’s new “Install-to-Play” feature, which should drastically increase the number of games you can play on GeForce Now by letting you install any game that’s opted into Valve’s Steam Cloud Play, even if Nvidia hasn’t taken the time to test. There, GeForce Now basically just exposes its copy of Steam so you can install and launch any game you own that wasn’t supported before:

Those games install even faster than I imagined: it took 17 seconds to install the 1.4GB Aces and Adventures; 53 seconds to install the 8GB 1000xResist, the game I haven’t stopped thinking about all year, 1 minute 22 seconds to install 2.2GB worth of Knights of the Old Republic, and and 2 minutes 9 seconds to install Sleeping Dogs’ 10.5GB of data.

But while Install-to-Play works, and quickly enough it might even be OK not to bother paying extra to avoid having to reinstall them every session (persistent storage is $3 for 200GB, $5 for 500GB, or $8 for 1TB per month), it doesn’t yet fill in the majority of GeForce Now’s gaps the way I’d hoped.

It only added 21 more games to my GeForce Now library. Without Install to Play, I could only access 162 out of my 472 Steam games via Nvidia’s cloud, and that number has only slightly budged. Now I can play Deus Ex and System Shock 2 and Tomb Raider Anniversary and the Golden Idol games, sure, but realistically I’d just play those natively on the Steam Deck. Perhaps I’d feel differently if I only had a phone or a Chromebook, though. And perhaps we’ll really see the advantage going forward, as it lets Nvidia add new titles far more quickly than before.

Just don’t expect Sony or Rockstar to bring their PC games to the service.

Lastly, while I expect this is a symptom of the pre-launch test servers, I ran into unusual bugs testing GFN RTX 5080 and Install-to-Play. The client sometimes forgot my streaming settings; GeForce Now sometimes thought I was trying to log in from Virginia and Steam blocked that login; I had other sign-in issues and an occasional black screens, issues syncing games with Steam and Uplay, found some games wouldn’t launch right away anymore after I clicked them, and so on.

If you see those same issues, or if you find Install-to-Play brings surprising new gems, let me know!