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On the eve of Gamescom 2025, NVIDIA announced an upcoming major upgrade to the GeForce NOW cloud gaming experience. The new server hardware, which upgrades from RTX 4080-class Lovelace to RTX 5080-class Blackwell GPU and an AMD Zen 5 8-core CPU, is now available for Ultimate subscribers accessing the RTX server SuperPODs in San Jose, Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark in the US, Frankfurt, Germany, and Paris, France. More cities will be gradually upgraded; you can track this progress on the official NVIDIA page.
The hardware itself offers a noticeable performance boost, especially for games that support DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation. Here’s a list of the 23 PC games currently leveraging the more powerful GeForce NOW hardware:
– Apex Legends
– Assassin’s Creed Shadows
– Baldur’s Gate 3
– Black Myth: Wukong
– Borderlands 4
– 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
NVIDIA has introduced a new suite of features called Cinematic Quality Streaming (CQS), which includes YUV 4:4:4 chroma sampling, 10-bit HDR, AV1 support with RPR, and AI-based sharpness filters to reduce noise and improve HUD clarity. Custom Mode allows up to 5K@120FPS, but it is limited to 60 FPS due to the full suite of CQS algorithms being available only in Cinematic mode.
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Testing at home revealed that while the visuals with CQS are top-notch, frame rate limitations mean a slight loss in clarity and sharpness when selecting Custom Mode. The CQS settings work best for highly detailed games like Black Myth: Wukong to combat compression artifacts.
Even with improvements to latency such as Rivermax-powered hardware packet pacing, playing on the cloud is still noticeably laggy. For most users, network conditions are unlikely to improve significantly. Ethernet connections and wired controllers ensure optimal performance, but wireless setups would increase lag even further.
NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW has become one of the best cloud gaming platforms, with near-local visual quality and a silent, energy-efficient experience. Cloud gaming remains more suitable for casual players who won’t notice latency issues too much.
