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

At present, Nvidia is soft-launching its newest gaming GPUs within the cloud — upgrading its $20-a-month GeForce Now Final cloud gaming service with RTX 5080 graphics for choose video games, with extra to come back down the highway. On the similar time, it’s additionally including hundreds extra titles to the bring-your-own-games service by letting you put in them your self, whereas additionally unlocking a 360Hz mode for ultra-fast desktop screens, launching a 90Hz model of its Steam Deck app, and extra.

Do all these adjustments make GeForce Now essentially higher? Completely, and it was already fairly good! However whereas enjoying I couldn’t escape the thought: it’s a superb factor Nvidia isn’t charging further for many updates, as a result of they’re slightly underwhelming proper now.

Don’t get me flawed, extra energy is all the time welcome, and extra energy is what I noticed. In Murderer’s Creed Shadows and Cyberpunk 2077’s built-in benchmarks, two of the few I used to be capable of run, Nvidia’s cloud-based RTX 5080 supplied anyplace from 25 to 50 p.c features over the outdated RTX 4080 servers at 4K decision.

That’s sufficient to play the previous at near-max settings on a 4K TV, and the latter at 4K if you both sacrifice ray tracing or let Nvidia’s DLSS 4 body technology add an additional faux body for each actual body to easy issues out. My Cyberpunk framerate is healthier than we noticed with the bodily card!

However I shortly found that, like with that bodily RTX 5080, the corporate’s advertising is transferring sooner than its tech can really go.

There are so few RTX 5080-enabled video games as of launch that I had a tough time discovering them, and there’s presently no approach to inform till after you launch Name of Responsibility: Black Ops 6 or Shadow of the Tomb Raider that it’s nonetheless working on a 4080-class GPU as an alternative.

And to get the massive framerate features that Nvidia’s promising from RTX 5080, you’d must have its servers generate three faux frames for each actual one — which, if you mix it with the lag of cloud gaming, dramatically slows the pace a recreation reacts to your actions. I didn’t must spend lengthy attempting 3x and 4x body gen in Indiana Jones and the Nice Circle to search out it was a non-starter for me: the sport portrays Indy in his prime, however he all of a sudden felt like a sluggish outdated man.

However I’ll admit 2x body gen really felt fairly viable over a cloud connection, no less than when plugged immediately into my desktop over ethernet.

On the quicker aspect of issues, my colleague Tom Warren tried out Overwatch 2 in Nvidia’s new 360Hz mode, and says he discovered it “simple to be aggressive with,” however sadly that mode’s solely restricted to 1080p decision. “Streaming at 1080p on a 4K monitor wasn’t the most effective,” he says.

It’s vital to notice the purpose of shopping for a 360Hz monitor is usually for higher response instances in esports video games, not the graceful framerate itself, and Nvidia is getting you nowhere close to a real 360Hz (2.78ms) response time this fashion. However Nvidia claims it can get you right down to 30 milliseconds, which is unbelievable for cloud gaming and ought to be higher than a console in your front room. Within the Overwatch 2 instance, Nvidia says it’s solely including 1.8ms of encode, 0.3ms of decode, and 9ms of recreation engine exercise and rendering, to the time it takes so that you can press a button and ship knowledge throughout the web to Nvidia’s servers and again.

In the meantime, although the 90Hz Steam Deck app is unequivocally an improve for the Steam Deck OLED’s 90Hz display, making a smoother expertise total, I used to be stunned to search out an RTX 5080 doesn’t essentially enhance efficiency past that. In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the RTX 5080 wasn’t sufficient to run the sport at 4K on max settings any greater than the RTX 4080 was, so I examined at 1440p, and noticed roughly the identical framerate of 55fps (outside battle) to 90fps (indoor setting) no matter which GPU I used to be utilizing.

(Sure, I do suggest streaming at a lot increased resolutions than 800p to the Steam Deck’s 800p display, as a result of oversampling makes for a clearer and crisper picture with fewer cloud gaming artifacts.)

Final however not least, I examined Nvidia’s new “Set up-to-Play” characteristic, which ought to drastically enhance the variety of video games you possibly can play on GeForce Now by letting you put in any recreation that’s opted into Valve’s Steam Cloud Play, even when Nvidia hasn’t taken the time to check. There, GeForce Now mainly simply exposes its copy of Steam so you possibly can set up and launch any recreation you personal that wasn’t supported earlier than:

These video games set up even sooner than I imagined: it took 17 seconds to put in the 1.4GB Aces and Adventures; 53 seconds to put in the 8GB 1000xResist, the sport I haven’t stopped interested by all 12 months, 1 minute 22 seconds to put in 2.2GB price of Knights of the Previous Republic, and and a couple of minutes 9 seconds to put in Sleeping Canine’ 10.5GB of knowledge.

However whereas Set up-to-Play works, and shortly sufficient it would even be OK to not trouble paying further to keep away from having to reinstall them each session (persistent storage is $3 for 200GB, $5 for 500GB, or $8 for 1TB monthly), it doesn’t but fill within the majority of GeForce Now’s gaps the best way I’d hoped.

It solely added 21 extra video games to my GeForce Now library. With out Set up to Play, I may solely entry 162 out of my 472 Steam video games through Nvidia’s cloud, and that quantity has solely barely budged. Now I can play Deus Ex and System Shock 2 and Tomb Raider Anniversary and the Golden Idol video games, positive, however realistically I’d simply play these natively on the Steam Deck. Maybe I’d really feel in another way if I solely had a cellphone or a Chromebook, although. And maybe we’ll actually see the benefit going ahead, because it lets Nvidia add new titles way more shortly than earlier than.

Simply don’t anticipate Sony or Rockstar to convey their PC video games to the service.

Lastly, whereas I anticipate it is a symptom of the pre-launch take a look at servers, I bumped into uncommon bugs testing GFN RTX 5080 and Set up-to-Play. The shopper generally forgot my streaming settings; GeForce Now generally thought I used to be attempting to log in from Virginia and Steam blocked that login; I had different sign-in points and an occasional black screens, points syncing video games with Steam and Uplay, discovered some video games wouldn’t launch immediately anymore after I clicked them, and so forth.

For those who see those self same points, or when you discover Set up-to-Play brings stunning new gems, let me know!