Google Stadia shut down overnight, but it’s far from the end of cloud gaming. Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service has already surpassed Stadia and many other rivals with its RTX 3080 tier, and now it delivers an upgrade to RTX 4080 graphics alongside support for HDR and ultra-wide resolution.
That means all the usual performance upgrades you’d expect with a modern GPU you’d buy for a PC and a major advancement for latency: 240fps. While the old RTX 3080 tier was able to run at 120fps, a doubling in frame rate is noticeable, both in terms of performance and latency. It makes GeForce Now the most advanced cloud gaming platform to date and even almost makes you feel like you’re running games on your own PC.
I tested this new competitive 240Hz mode from GeForce Now Ultimate on a 32-inch Samsung Odyssey G7 monitor (1440p, 240Hz), and my colleague Sean Hollister tested it on a similar 240Hz monitor. You’ll need such a 240Hz display to really take advantage of the new mode, but you’ll still get some of the latency benefits even on 120Hz and 144Hz panels, thanks to Nvidia’s Reflex technology that evaluates and reduces system latency in games .
New 240 Hz competitive mode
I’ve been a critic of Stadia’s sluggishness for mouse and keyboard, but GeForce Now Ultimate offers the kind of latency improvements that almost make me think I’m playing the game on my own gaming PC.
I usually play shooters like Lot 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensiveand Apex Legends, and I’ve found them to be the biggest test point for cloud gaming latency. I’ve played Apex Legends, CS:GOand Fortnite on Nvidia’s RTX 4080 servers over the past week. The 240Hz mode currently only works at 1080p and only delivers up to 240fps in supported games. The list of games that support 240Hz mode is not very long:
- Apex Legends
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- Fortnite
- Rocket League
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
- War frame
Nvidia says it plans to add more games over time and may even add Reflex and the ability to support 240Hz mode in games where developers haven’t implemented it.
That being said, Fortnite was the most impressive of the range of 240Hz games I tested, especially since it supports all of Nvidia’s ray-tracing options, DLSS, and the Reflex latency improvements. The game also lends itself well to streaming thanks to its cartoonish art style. The latency improvements are huge for keyboard and mouse players, and I found it hard to notice any lag most of the time.
However, it didn’t run reliably at 240fps. It was buttery smooth in creative mode, but it was easy to notice that the frame rate dropped as you hop off the battle bus and slide into battle royale mode. Once I was on the ground, I rarely saw the frame rate drop, and the input latency felt super impressive most of the time.
In Apex Legends, the latency can be more noticeable during a lot of action where you need to make quick decisions, but it still feels more impressive than when I tested the RTX 3080 tier servers over a year ago. And in CS:GO, it mostly locked at 240fps and felt super smooth.
Nvidia’s RTX 4080 servers feature 64 teraflops of performance (about five times an Xbox Series X), full ray tracing, and DLSS 3. The competitive 240Hz mode can deliver end-to-end latency of less than 40ms in some games, which is better than playing an Xbox Series X at 60 Hz.
I could switch between a Fortnite session running on my own PC with an RTX 4090 and one in this RTX 4080 cloud world, and the only noticeable difference was the quality of what I could see on screen. I’ll have my colleague Sean Hollister explain the visual differences.
Visual quality
Hey, I’m Sean. You may remember me from earlier stories about cloud gaming, like why GeForce Now just pranked Google Stadia. I totally agree with Tom that the latency is fantastic; I’m really not sure I can still tell the difference in responsiveness between GeForce Now and a desktop gaming PC. I definitely appreciate almost a 30 percent performance gain in my Cyberpunk 2077at.
I wish Nvidia had made such a big leap in image quality – because there’s one dead giveaway that makes me recognize a cloud game every time. Tom and I call it “the blur” because that’s how it manifests itself in GeForce Now. It feels like there’s a blur between you and what you’re looking at almost every time you move.
Let’s illustrate: here are two cropped screenshots of it CS:GO at 1080p and 240 fps. In the first I stop. In the second I started moving, as I will constantly in most games. To blow up this one Pictureszoom in and look at the wall textures: very different, isn’t it?
If you want to get more technical, this is image compression artifacts, and it’s not unique to GeForce Now – every cloud gaming service suffers from it because they all have to shrink their images small enough that they send 60, 120 or even 240 of them per second through your internet connection, while reacting almost instantly to your movements.
In some games, such as Fortnite, the haze is just not that noticeable. I suspect it’s because Fortniteis a very colorful game; grays and blacks are often where you see compression artifacts at their worst. But it’s also particularly bad at 1080p resolution, the only resolution you can use for GeForce Now’s new 240fps mode. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce the haze.
Playing at 4K resolution will drastically reduce this, even if you don’t have a 4K screen. Be here two more full size images of CS:GO streaming at 4K to a 1080p monitor. Cropped you can see it’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better, and I love that GeForce Now lets you choose.
Unfortunately, 4K is not yet available on all GeForce Now clients. You can’t get it on the web, which means you can’t get it on Chromebooks or the Steam Deck. You’ll need a Mac, Windows PC, Nvidia Shield TV, or certain recent smart TVs. But I’m glad it’s an option on PC at all – Nvidia only added that in May last year, and it’s now my preferred way to stream games. It’s definitely a leap from the old 1440p streaming, as you can see in my Check comparison images below.
At 4K 120, even the darkest jungle areas enter Shadow of the Tomb Raiderwhich looked almost unintelligible be the last time I wrote about GeForce Now pretty clear now. I saw myself playing the whole game that way.
Things to keep in mind when streaming games
Tom here again, and it’s time to talk about the biggest drawbacks of Nvidia’s GeForce Now service: game availability, pricing, and internet connectivity. Nvidia supports Steam and the Epic Games Store, but many games are still unavailable. Publishers like Bethesda and Activision Blizzard pulled their games from GeForce Now, so none of the Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, and Duty titles are available. That’s a huge drawback for GeForce Now Ultimate, even though it’s the most impressive cloud gaming platform to date.
Price is also a barrier to whether GeForce Now Ultimate is right for you. Google lets you easily test Stadia for free (with a short 4K trial period), but there’s no way to try out Nvidia’s best RTX 4080 experience without signing up for the $19.99 monthly subscription. That’s disappointing, because I think a lot of people will be impressed with this new 240Hz mode or even playing games at 120fps in 1440p or 4K resolution.
I suspect a lot of people will turn down $19.99 a month for game streaming, but I think there’s a lot of value here. If you’ve built an equivalent PC, you’re looking at $2,000 or more and then the energy cost to play. A $2,000 PC for five years works out to about $33 a month, with electricity costs on top of that. It’s certainly an enticing prospect if you’re considering upgrading your PC, especially when games you buy on GeForce Now through Steam or the Epic Games Store are always yours, whether or not you subscribe.
GeForce Now Ultimate won’t convince the most competitive and hardcore PC gamers to switch, but that’s not really the point. For everyone else, this feels like a compelling option if your games are there and you’re temporarily out of a gaming PC or don’t want to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade right now.
There is also the issue of connectivity and data usage to consider.
You have to be close to Nvidia’s servers and hope they’ve been upgraded. Ultimate subscribers in and around San Jose, Los Angeles, Dallas and Frankfurt, Germany will be the first to get the RTX 4080 tier, with weekly upgrades.
This new competitive mode also consumes about 13GB of data per hour, so if you’re on a capped internet connection, this probably isn’t the service for you. I tested GeForce Now Ultimate using a 1 Gbps fiber connection with less than 5 ms latency to Nvidia’s EU West servers. It’s the perfect connection for streaming games, but many people won’t have much luck with connectivity, so your mileage may vary.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.