Games events are always packed with a shed load of marketing bluster. Companies figure out the most impressive way to showcase their wares and then, well, deploy that. Some of that is more strait-laced; other times the truth is stretched.
With all that in mind as Gamescom 2025 gets underway in earnest, I have to give credit to Nvidia. The PC hardware monolith, currently enjoying a massively buoyant period thanks to the AI boom that’s seeing data centers plead with it for more GPU architecture, nevertheless remains quite focused on gaming. In a pre-Gamescom event, the company showed off what I can only describe as the single most audacious demo of a gaming technology I have ever seen.
The setup was as follows: Nvidia had placed two identical TVs next to each other. Both state-of-the-art LG C5 OLEDs, both clearly configured properly to give the best possible image in the demo room. Both displayed a live running copy of Cyberpunk 2077, idling away in Night City’s Afterlife bar. But there was one difference between the two images: one TV was running a locally downloaded copy of the game on a PlayStation 5 Pro. The use of a Pro is more than a little cheeky, because it should be noted that this isn’t a game with specific Pro enhancements. Still, it’s a high-end game on PS5 – and this was then compared to the adjacent screen. The other TV was running the same area of Cyberpunk 2077 in the cloud via GeForce Now – and without any additional hardware, as Nvidia’s game streaming service can be played via an app in the latest LG TVs, as well as on sets from other manufacturers now and coming soon.
Eurogamer has written about GeForce Now before, and honestly not much about the service has changed with Nvidia’s Gamescom reveals. It’s just gotten a little bit better. That means everything I wrote last month about enjoying using the service on Steam Deck stands, obviously. But nevertheless, that demo struck me.
You don’t see many direct comparisons in games. Publishers, developers, hardware manufacturers – all tend to shy away from it. Who can blame them, really, when us players can often get lost in the weeds with obsession over black-and-white comparison. Forums and comment threads will deep-dive into preview-to-release ‘downgrades’, the advantages of one port versus the deficiencies of another, and so on. But here, as I say, was Nvidia, with audacity, putting these two things side-by-side and inviting all to compare and contrast.
They wouldn’t be making the comparison if it wasn’t favorable, obviously. Which is to say: yes, that streamed version of Cyberpunk definitely looked equivalent to and in places better than the locally installed PS5 version. Though a bustling demo room isn’t necessarily the best place to make truly in-depth comparisons, the equivalence and difference was plain to see. In that, the demo is an equally loud proclamation of what those who have dabbled in GeForce Now before likely already know: in this form, game streaming has truly arrived.
Nvidia’s Gamescom was centered around the service, plus announcements of a slew of upcoming games that’ll be supporting the company’s various game-enhancing bells and whistles.
Nvidia is wise to use big-name titles like Cyberpunk 2077 – a game that can look significantly better on PC than on consoles. | Image credit: CD Projekt Red
For one, it was confirmed that in September the GeForce Now service will be upgraded so that those with the top-tier subscription will see graphical performance equivalent with a GeForce RTX 5080, a £1000 graphics card. There’s no price increase attached to that – existing subscribers will just notice they can push their streamed games a good deal harder settings-wise.
The other big headline-grabber was the ability to individually install games. Currently, GeForce Now operates with a list of 2000-some games that have been carefully curated and tested by Nvidia for compatibility. That game list is pre-installed on the GFN server machines, which means each game launches instantly when you boot it. Games will continue to be added to this list – but Nvidia has now announced ‘Install to Play’, where you can choose to stream other games outside of that carefully crafted and compatibility stress-tested list.
You’ll have to manually install them onto the remote GFN machines, and there are caveats – it’s limited to a list of 2200 additional games, and you can only install up to 100GB of stuff without paying for additional storage – but this has effectively doubled the number of GFN-compatible games. Meanwhile, newer titles like The Outer Worlds 2 and Borderlands 4 will continue to go straight into the properly curated game list.
Third, and in my opinion most important, shipping alongside these updates are tweaks and upgrades to improve latency and image quality. This was also demonstrated with a side-by-side comparison, this one of Black Myth Wukong running in the same context as it would on GFN currently versus what it’ll soon look like with the new tech. The funny thing is that the current version isn’t bad, but in that classic march-of-technology way once you’ve seen the new version, with better colour precision, sharper detail, and less HUD and UI weirdness, it’ll be hard to go back.
Nvidia isn’t quite going all in trying to replace consoles, but the argument for GFN over a console is a solid one. | Image credit: Eurogamer
I keep coming back to that demo, though. The almost arrogant side-by-side, which is by its very nature a gauntlet tossed at the feet of consoles. This is not something a company sets up unless it is confident in its technology to the extreme. It is clear that GeForce Now is no longer just a novel experiment – it is truly viable. In fact, the room was full of balls-to-the-wall demos, from a commitment to supporting twitchy racing games with steering wheel support to being willing to publicly demonstrate GFN’s latency by using an LDAT (at super high-end latency-testing device used by monitor manufacturers and the like) to showcase its rapid response time.
With that said, it still doesn’t feel like Nvidia is pitching GeForce Now as the primary place anyone should play games. The fact you need to piggyback on a game library from another service has always set this apart from experiments like Stadia or Microsoft’s XCloud efforts, which felt intended to supplant dedicated hardware entirely. GeForce Now feels like a complimentary addition, not a replacement – but the argument here is more plain than ever: even if it were a replacement, the technology is progressing at such speed that it really can compete.
I’m still not convinced that streaming is yet ready to be the ‘future’ it was frequently touted as during the game streaming gold rush of 2018/19. But whatever the make-up of the future is, I’m increasingly convinced that GeForce Now, and services like it, will be an indelible part of it. Demos like this only serve to solidify that opinion.