As promised, Nvidia is launching its Blackwell upgrade today for GeForce Now, bringing RTX 5080-based machines to the cloud service alongside a whole slew of other upgrades.
With the move to Blackwell architecture, GeForce Now subscribers on the $20/month Ultimate plan will now have support for DLSS 4 directly in the cloud. It’s capable of streaming at 5K 120 FPS — though there are very few true 5K displays available on the market at the moment — alongside 360 FPS support when running at 1080p. I was able to take a test run prior to today’s launch, and so far, what I’m seeing looks (and feels) very promising.
That said, how you benefit from an upgrade to Blackwell might primarily depend on the games you play; as someone who primarily focuses on single-player RPGs — with a pretty deep backlog of older titles to boot — the upgrade isn’t quite as impressive as it might be, say, if your Steam library has doubled in size this calendar year alone. That’s not to say RTX 5080 machines can’t bring refreshed visuals or improved performance to older titles, but it won’t be quite as impactful as if you’re playing fresh AAA releases like Doom: The Dark Ages or Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Something that will affect titles, though, are the upgrades to visual performance coming to GeForce Now as part of this launch. A new “Cinematic Quality” setting is designed to optimize for visuals over all else, and assuming you have the network connection to handle it, it does deliver a noticeably improved experience over legacy quality settings. The specs sheet here is fairly impressive: 10-bit HDR with 4:4:4 chrome sampling, new AV1 encoders for improved network adaptation, and refreshed sharpness filters to help improve HUDs and on-screen text.
Generally, I’d say it’s a pretty big improvement, especially with a strong-enough connection. That said, on a big-enough display, anyone looking for imperfections can probably still find them. Text does look plenty legible, especially in games like The Witcher 3, where the HUD is fairly busy with plenty of information, and colors appear as rich and vibrant as if I was playing on, say, a PS5. But sitting close enough to a 32-inch 4K monitor, it’s still apparent that you’re watching a stream of a game, rather than the native gaming experience itself. That encoding sheen, for lack of a better phrase, is surprisingly downplayed, but it’ll likely even better with the right display — say, a television across your living room, or a Steam Deck in your hands.
Really, the biggest problem still affecting GeForce Now is its library support, and in this case, I’m not just talking about whether or not your entire Steam library syncs with your account. While that remains frustrating — a solid 50 percent of my own backlog can’t be played with the service — the upgrade to RTX 5080 hardware is starting off slow. In fact, at launch (and, as a result, during my testing period), only 20 games actually support RTX 5080 machines, with more to come during the service’s usual GFN Thursday updates.
That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker — GeForce Now has certainly collected plenty of fans running on that last-gen hardware, and at least in terms of the games I play, I’m not sure I would’ve immediately noticed the difference in performance if I wasn’t specifically looking for 5080-supported titles. In these early days, though, it would be nice for Nvidia to specifically denote games that run on Blackwell. For now, here’s the list:
- Apex Legends
- Assassin’s Creed Shadows
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Borderlands 4 (at launch)
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- Counter-Strike 2
- Cronos: The New Dawn
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Diablo 4
- Doom: The Dark Ages
- Dune: Awakening
- Dying Light: The Beast
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
- Grounded 2
- Hell Is Us
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
- Mafia: The Old Country
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
- Overwatch 2
- Titan Quest II
- Warframe
- The Witcher 3
Overall, I’m pretty impressed with just how good GeForce Now has gotten over the last couple of years. Cloud gaming has had plenty of ups and downs over the last half-decade, but when it comes to Nvidia’s service, it’s really the latency that continues to impress me. The improvements Blackwell is bringing to the table should continue to keep GeForce Now at the top of the list when it comes to the overall experience, but they’ll need to keep delivering upgraded games at a relatively quick pace to do it.
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