I was playing with Nvidia’s new RTX 5080 Geforce now Ultimate Tier, and I’m honestly blown away at how well it works. At least if you’re playing a single player game, it can really provide an alternative to upgrading your gaming PC.
Nvidia revealed plans for this new RTX 5080 GeForce during Gamescom, and has promised that this new Premium Tier can run the game at up to 360fps. One of the best graphics card choices in the buying guide is that you have already down your RTX 5080, but how does it form through the cloud?
I chose to use Cyberpunk 2077 as it is an epic single-player game and a fast-paced online shooter, as only a small portion of the RTX 5080 tier games were enabled during testing. The RTX 5080 Tier Test was only live on a limited number of servers, so for testing purposes I was playing on GeForce Now Server in France, not in my local UK. Nevertheless, the ping hovered at about 13ms during testing and never exceeded 20ms.
Either way, my time at Cyberpunk 2077 was amazing. I go straight to the deep edge and raise all the graphics settings to the highest level (yes, that means tracing overdrive presets). These settings returned an average frame rate of 165fps in 4K, equivalent to the actual frame rate of around 45fps without frame Gen, and were extremely smooth to play.
However, please note that even if your GPU is stirring up higher frame rates in your benchmarks, the maximum frame rate that you can stream to your system in 4K is 120FPS. Therefore, there is space to get the same experience even if you reduce the amount of frame GEN used.
Changing the resolution to 2,560 x 1,440 increased the average frame rate to 229fps, and at 1,920 x 1,080 it increased to an average of 263fps. The 1440p and 1080p caps are 240fps and 350fps, respectively. Impressively, I had no obvious delays throughout the gameplay.
This low latency is the result of NVIDIA’s unique reflective technology combination efforts to incorporate L4S (low latency, low loss) technology, especially when running GeForce now, and a direct collaboration between NVIDIA and the Internet Service Provider (ISP).
The Cyberpunk visuals seemed far better than what I looked native on my RTX 4070. There were no obvious ghosts or blurry in the images.
As for Apex Legends, this battle royale game also ran very well through GeForce, with frame rates of 121fps in 4K, 197fps in 1440p and 209fps in 1080p. Apex is a much faster game and it was expected to find GeForce’s weaknesses as it produces a lot of input in a short amount of time, but my experience generally really responded.
The only exception was when I ran into several instantaneous stutters in one Apex Legends session. I looked at the end of session report where NVIDIA evaluates all connection points of GEFORCE all connection points out of 100, but did not report less than 98 for this session.
In any case, if you’re serious about fast-paced, competitive online games, it’s hard to recommend GeForce as a complete alternative to local play, unless you have full trust in broadband connections to maintain a strong connection with your local GeForce Now Server. In this situation, compared to previous GeForce Now Tiers, this certainly helps in this situation, but if you know that the connection is unreliable, GeForce will simply add additional distortion to the bandwidth.
Nvidia has also introduced a new film profile. It is designed to focus on image quality while streaming, and Nvidia even says the profile is “comparable to local PC games.” Supporting YUV 4:4:4:4:4 Chroma, you will not lose color information in the stream, but using AV1 video codecs using Resampling Reference Image (RPR) creates a stable stream with smooth resolution shifting. There is also an AI video filter that cleans up motion, resulting in less digital noise and artifacts around moving objects.
I found it looked surprisingly sharp in my time test, but it also eats bandwidth at its 100Mbps bitrate. For this reason, the only way to remove the cap is to be capped at 60fps and (assuming you have a very fast broadband connection) is to create a custom streaming profile that allows you to copy all your settings from the movie profile only without a frame rate cap. This increases the data rate from about 15GB per hour to 17GB per hour.
However, one minor complaint is that you currently need to adjust the resolution within GEFORCE as you don’t adjust the frame rate cap you set by changing the in-game resolution. This is an additional step that gets frustrated while trying to test a service at multiple resolutions, but realistically it shouldn’t be a problem for the average GeForce Now player who rarely changes the solution from the monitor’s defaults.
Overall, I’m now really impressed with GeForce’s RTX 5080 Ultimate Tier. Yes, the increase in performance is driven primarily by NVIDIA DLSS 4 and more specifically, multi-frame GEN, but the surprising lack of lag means, along with sharp image quality, this cloud-based gaming service is really beginning to maintain its potential. If broadband connections can deal with it, it is now an alternative to buying a physical GPU upgrade.
This level of online GPU power also has great significance for steam decks. This means that even if the deck itself doesn’t need to do heavy lifting, the game can look fantastic on a small screen. To that end, Nvidia has also introduced a new GeForce handheld mode. This allows you to run games at 90fps in sync with the screen’s 90Hz refresh rate.
Considering that the RTX 5080 Ultimate Tier is also replacing the RTX 4080 tier, the value is also very competitive as you will need to buy an entirely new gaming PC or laptop to access this level of performance, rather than being presented as another more expensive upgrade. Now we’ll have to wait for more games to be available in this tier.
Would you consider using a cloud-based game streaming service with an expensive gaming PC upgrade? Please let us know via Community Discord Server.
