I tested the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GeForce Now tier, and it's phenomenal

I've had a play around with Nvidia's new RTX 5080 GeForce Now Ultimate tier, and I'm honestly blown away by how well it works. It could genuinely offer you an alternative to upgrading your gaming PC, at least if you're mostly playing single-player games.

Nvidia revealed plans for this new RTX 5080 GeForce Now tier back during Gamescom and promised that this new, premium tier could run games at up to 360fps without latency becoming an issue. We already have the RTX 5080 down as one of the best graphics card picks in our buying guide, but how does it shape up via the cloud?

Only a small selection of games were enabled for the RTX 5080 tier during our testing, so we opted to use Cyberpunk 2077, as it's an epic single-player game, and Apex Legends, as it's a fast-paced online shooter. For the purposes of the test, I was also playing on the French GeForce Now server, rather than my local United Kingdom one, as the RTX 5080 tier test was only live on limited servers. Despite this, the ping only hovered at around 13ms throughout testing, and never went higher than 20ms.

Either way, my time with Cyberpunk 2077 was remarkable. I dove straight into the deep end, cranking up all of the graphics settings to their highest levels (yes, that means the ray tracing overdrive preset), while also enabling 4x multi-frame gen and enabling DLSS on the Auto (Balanced) setting. These settings returned an average frame rate of 165fps at 4K, equating to an actual frame rate of around 45fps without frame gen, and it was remarkably smooth in play.

It should be noted, however, that the maximum frame rate that can be streamed to your system at 4K is 120fps, even if the GPU is churning out higher frame rates in your benchmarks. As such, there's room here to reduce the amount of frame gen used and still get the same experience.

When changing resolutions to 2,560 x 1,440, the average frame rate rose to 229fps, while at 1,920 x 1,080 it rose further to an average of 263fps. The caps for 1440p and 1080p are 240fps and 350fps, respectively. Impressively, I found the game remarkably responsive in action at all resolutions, despite using multi-frame gen and streaming via the cloud, with no obvious lag throughout my time playing the game.

This low latency is a result of the combined efforts of Nvidia's own Reflex technology and a direct collaboration between Nvidia and internet service providers (ISPs) to incorporate L4S (low latency, low loss) technology in their services, specifically when running GeForce Now.

Cyberpunk's visuals also looked incredible, much better than I'm able to get them looking natively on my RTX 4070. There was no obvious image ghosting or blurring, and everything ran exactly as I would expect, as if I were playing directly on an RTX 5080 rig.

As for Apex Legends, this battle royale game also ran incredibly well via GeForce Now, with average frame rates of 121fps at 4K, 197fps at 1440p, and 209fps at 1080p, all while having every graphical setting maxed out. As Apex is a much faster-paced game, with a ton of inputs happening in a short space of time, this is where I expected to find a weakness in GeForce Now, but my experience was generally really responsive.

The only exception was when I encountered a few momentary stutters in one Apex Legends session. I had a look at the end-of-session report, where Nvidia rates all the connection points of GeForce Now out of 100, and it didn't report anything lower than a 98 for this session, suggesting it may have been an EA server issue.

Either way, if you're serious about fast-paced competitive online games, it's tricky to recommend GeForce Now as a complete alternative to local play, unless you have full faith in your broadband connection to maintain a strong connection to your local GeForce Now server. The lower latency is certainly helpful in this situation compared to previous GeForce Now tiers, but if you know your connection is unreliable, GeForce Now will only add additional strain on your bandwidth.

Nvidia has also introduced a new Cinematic profile, which is designed to focus on image quality while streaming, with Nvidia even stating that this profile "rivals local PC gaming." It supports YUV 4:4:4 Chroma, so you don't lose any color information in the stream, while the use of the AV1 video codec with Reference Picture Resampling (RPR) makes for a stable stream with smooth resolution shifts. There's also an AI video filter to clean up motion, resulting in less digital noise and artifacting around moving objects.

I found it looked amazingly sharp in my time testing with it, but it also eats bandwidth with its 100Mbps bit rate. For this reason, it's capped at 60fps, and the only way to remove the cap (assuming you have a really fast broadband connection) is to create a custom streaming profile where you can copy over all of the settings from the Cinematic profile, only without the frame rate cap. This will increase the data rate from around 15GB per hour to 17GB per hour, though.

One slight frustration, however, is that resolution adjustments need to be made within GeForce Now, as making changes to the in-game resolution won't adjust the frame rate cap you've set. It's an extra step that's frustrated me while trying to test the service across multiple resolutions, but realistically, it shouldn't be an issue for the average GeForce Now player who is rarely going to change resolutions away from their monitor's default.

Overall, I find myself really impressed by the RTX 5080 Ultimate tier for GeForce Now, though. Yes, the performance increases are largely driven by Nvidia DLSS 4 and, more specifically, multi-frame gen, but the surprising lack of lag, along with sharp image quality, means this cloud-based gaming service is really starting to live up to its potential. It genuinely is an alternative to buying a physical GPU upgrade now, if your broadband connection can cope with it.

This level of online GPU power also has huge implications for the Steam Deck, meaning games could look fantastic even on the smaller screen when the Deck itself isn't having to do the heavy lifting. To that end, Nvidia is also introducing a new handheld mode for GeForce Now that it says will allow you to run games at 90fps in sync with the screen's 90Hz refresh rate, which I hope to test at a later date.

Given that the RTX 5080 Ultimate tier is also replacing the RTX 4080 tier, rather than being presented as a separate, more expensive upgrade, the value is also quite competitive vs having to buy an entirely new gaming PC or laptop to access this level of performance. Now we just need to wait for more games to become available for this tier.

Would you consider using a cloud-based game streaming service over expensive gaming PC upgrades? Let us know over on our community Discord server.