Terrible News, Cloud Gaming is Good Now

Quick Overview

NVIDIA's GeForce Now RTX 5080 tier delivers an impressive cloud gaming experience that is nearly indistinguishable from local hardware for many users, achieving low latency results (e.g., 25.6ms average in Apex Legends with competitive settings) that significantly outperform older cloud tiers, despite some minor visual artifacts in highly detailed scenes like Borderlands 4 with film grain enabled.

Key Points: The GeForce Now RTX 5080 tier provides performance that is often indistinguishable from local hardware, particularly in competitive shooters like Apex Legends. Latency testing in Apex Legends showed an average of 25.6ms (min 22.4ms, max 33.3ms) with competitive settings, a significant improvement over previous tiers. Testing Borderlands 4 showed higher latency (71.7ms average during the shoot test) when using the visual 'film grain filter', suggesting compression overhead affects image quality more noticeably in certain titles. The local setup used for comparison featured an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU and an MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12G OC GPU. Frame Generation is a key feature of the new tier, which, when enabled, can significantly boost in-game FPS (e.g., 261 FPS in Borderlands 4) even if the stream output is limited (e.g., 120 FPS). The high-end tier supports up to 4K at 120 FPS, or 1080p at 360 FPS, provided the user has the necessary network bandwidth (up to 100 Mbps recommended for 4K/120Hz). The video implies that the cost of the subscription ($20/month or $200/annually) over five years ($1000 total) is vastly cheaper than upgrading a local PC with an equivalent RTX 5080-class GPU.

Context: The video evaluates the new NVIDIA GeForce Now RTX 5080 cloud gaming subscription tier, comparing its performance, particularly latency and image quality, against playing games locally on high-end hardware. The testing involves running demanding titles like Borderlands 4 and Apex Legends while using NVIDIA's LDAT tool to measure actual end-to-end latency, contrasting the results with previous cloud service tiers and local hardware performance.