Mega GeForce NOW upgrade: The best game streaming service just got better

GeForce NOW is already the best-quality game streaming service by our estimation, but it's about to get what Nvidia calls its “biggest update yet.”

There are three core strands to this GeForce NOW upgrade, among other bits, so let’s dig in.

First up is a major boost in power. Your virtual PC in the cloud — which is actually real computer hardware in a giant PC farm somewhere — gets an upgrade in graphics power from the RTX 4080 level to RTX 5080.

This requires GeForce NOW’s Ultimate tier subscription, but there’s no jump in price. It was a £19.99 a month sub before, and remains so now.

Nvidia promises up to “2.8x faster” frame rates compared to the old power ceiling, and says we’re getting power three times that of a PlayStation 5 Pro. Try to make your own PC with this kind of grunt and you probably won’t get all that much change left from £3000.

The new architecture also enables DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation, meaning you’ll be able to get even higher frame rate gains in supported titles than the raw jump in power would suggest.

Nvidia has lifted the ceiling on its max frame rates to match. GeForce NOW will let you reach up to 360fps at 1080p resolution, 240fps at 1440p resolution and 120fps at not just 4K but 5K resolution too. Good luck getting your home Internet to keep up with that sort of streaming.

Install-to-Play

Big upgrade number two is GeForce NOW’s Install-to-Play feature. This allows for a way larger roster of supported games, boosting the numbers from “over 2,000” titles to upwards of 4,500. For now, these additional titles are all on Steam.

The catch if you have to install these extra titles to your own cloud storage, this is not unlimited. If you have an Ultimate or Performance tier membership, you get 100GB of space for these Install-to-Play titles. But it gets wiped after each session.

To keep those games installed on your cloud SSD, you’ll have to — you guessed it — pay a bit more. $2.99 a month gets you 200GB, $4.99 a month provides 500GB, and it’s $7.99 for 1TB. UK prices are to be confirmed, but switch the dollar sign for a pound one and you won't come away disappointed.

On the positive side, the speed at which these games download to Nvidia’s servers is probably going to be radically faster than your home internet could manage.

Streaming magic: QCS

Our last big GeForce NOW upgrade is called Cinematic-Quality Streaming, or CQS. This apparently represents a “noticeable leap in graphics fidelity,” using a whole raft of behind-the-scenes techy smarts.

For example, we get 4:4:4 Chroma subsampling and 10-bit colour. And while you don’t need to understand what that actually means, it involves the use of much less colour compression in your stream, for a higher-fidelity final image.

There are AI filters to make the picture look sharper, and auto-optimisation of the resolution of the feed to match the device you use. Nvidia says this is particularly useful for high-resolution laptops, of which there are many these days.

Nvidia says this major back-end upgrade will “begin rolling out in September.” Can't wait.

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