Nvidia's GeForce Now adds killer upgrades: RTX 5080, DIY game installs

Nvidia improves virtually all aspects of its GeForce Now gaming service, from the server to storage to visual presentation.

- MARK HACHMAN

Nvidia's GeForce Now service is offering its Ultimate tier subscribers an enormous upgrade today: GeForce RTX 5080 servers, cinematic visual upgrades, and a new "install to play" service that will "download" new games directly to the cloud, making them instantly ready to play.

Nvidia is leaving the price of the GeForce Now Ultimate tier unchanged at $19.99 per month, $99.99 for six months, Nvidia said at the Gamescom show. Nvidia is also adding an annual GeForce Now Ultimate subscription for $199.99. A GeForce Now Ultimate daily membership will be available at launch, Nvidia said, presumably for the current price of $7.99. Session lengths will remain at eight hours for Ultimate subscribers.

The point of Nvidia's GeForce Now service (fave.co/3CbTcJz) has always been to deliver a cloud gaming experience (fave.co/3UK2rsS) that's as close as possible to what a gamer would experience on a PC. The price of graphics cards, of course, has climbed to astronomical heights, making GeForce Now a way of partially offsetting the hundreds of dollars a gamer would need to shell out for the latest RTX 4000 or 5000 series cards.

Of course, playing a game in the cloud has traditionally meant forcing certain restrictions upon the subscriber: a limited resolution and image quality to minimize the amount of data sent back and forth over a broadband connection, and some level of latency or delay between a user's input and a corresponding response from the game running on the server. Nvidia's GeForce Now upgrades attack all of those angles to improve the experience.