Review: Nvidia GeForce Now RTX 5080 (Blackwell)

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.

GeForce Now via Jacob Roach

The RTX 5080 upgrade brings more power to GeForce Now, but it also introduces low-latency streaming. You can play 1080p at 360 fps or 1440p at 240 fps, and with the latter, I saw around 28 milliseconds of latency in Silksong. And that's without touching the features that make the RTX 5080 unique for GeForce Now.

Nvidia expanded GeForce Now for faster frame rates at lower resolutions, but it also added a new Cinematic streaming mode. GeForce Now comes with a few preset modes, along with a custom mode that allows you to change your resolution, frame rate, and other details of your stream, from HDR to G-Sync support. The new Cinematic mode is optimized for 4K at 60 fps.

GeForce Now via Jacob Roach

It goes further with 4:4:4 color sampling as opposed to the 4:2:0 sampling GeForce Now typically uses, and Nvidia includes a couple of AI-driven filters for your in-game HUD and menus that help them look extra sharp, a common weak point when streaming games from the cloud. I booted up Cyberpunk 2077 to try out this mode on a MacBook Air, immediately cranking the graphics as high as they can go. It was locked at 60 fps. Despite a much lower frame rate than what I saw in Silksong, my latency still hovered between 35 and 40 milliseconds. The feel was spot-on; the quality, however, wasn't perfect.

It's almost as if Nvidia is pushing too much data through the pipeline. You can tell the extra visual quality is there, but on a high-resolution display sitting close to your face, the finer details are lost in what feels like a faint layer of frosted glass. If you're a couple of feet away (or even better, sitting on a couch with GeForce Now on your TV), you won't be able to tell. Up close and personal, the seams become more obvious.

Outside of Cinematic quality, the RTX 5080 comes with Nvidia's DLSS Multi-Frame Generation (MFG). It can generate up to three frames for every rendered frame, and I found it particularly useful in games that are a little more demanding but still competitive, like Marvel Rivals.

MFG introduces additional latency, which I assumed would be a death sentence in the context of GeForce Now. I was wrong. You can pick up on minuscule latency differences with MFG using it natively, but in the cloud, the network latency has a way of obfuscating that lag.

Doubling the Library

GeForce Now via Jacob Roach

Nvidia consistently adds new games to the GeForce Now library. It's so consistent that Nvidia established GFN Thursday, where it announces new games coming to the service every week, usually with at least half a dozen new titles. They've added up quickly, with GeForce Now supporting over 2,300 games. The Blackwell update doubles the library size to over 4,500 titles with Nvidia's new install-to-play (I2P) feature.

It breaks open the doors of support. Instead of games that are installed and ready to go, you can install them on a GeForce Now instance (the computer you're connected to for game streaming). Even massive, 100-plus GB games install in a few minutes. It turns out Nvidia has pretty fast internet at GeForce Now data centers.

I2P only works with Steam games right now, but Nvidia has built it uniquely. With a Performance or Ultimate membership, you get 100 GB of single-session storage. You can install a game and play it, but when you close the session, your game goes away (games with cloud saves still sync). You can buy extra persistent storage, and here's what they cost: 200 GB for $3 per month, 500 GB for $5 per month, and 1 TB for $8 per month.

This extra storage doesn't just give you more space. It's persistent, so your installed games will continue between sessions. Nvidia even keeps your saves safe in persistent storage if the title you're playing doesn't support Steam Cloud saves. It's like having your own little (but extremely powerful) gaming PC in the cloud.

The Gold Standard of Cloud Gaming

GeForce Now via Jacob Roach

Nvidia has, slowly but surely, cemented GeForce Now as the de facto cloud gaming service. Google's Stadia bombastically failed, Amazon's Luna slowly flopped, and Microsoft and Sony's efforts, although ongoing, are largely focused on gamers who already have a console. GeForce Now has persisted, and after testing the Blackwell update, it's easy to see why.

There's a ruthless pursuit with game support, which is only bolstered by I2P titles. Steam is there, but Nvidia also supports most games on Microsoft's PC Game Pass, along with a wide swath of titles on the Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect, and the EA app. There's even a native Steam Deck app.

Cloud gaming issues still apply. Particularly on Wi-Fi, I'd occasionally stumble on dropped packets and brief, intense stutters. In one such case, while playing Silksong, I was midway through a dense platforming section when the packet loss sent me to my death. There are certain realities of streaming a game over the internet that an RTX 5080 can't solve.

But this is an upgrade that still showcases how far GeForce Now has come. No, I can't cram an RTX 5080 into a MacBook. But GeForce Now gets pretty darn close.