AMD rules out competitor for NVIDIA GeForce Now, with 5080 performance upgrade just around the corner
AMD has put to bed rumors that they may be releasing a competitor to NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW cloud gaming service, a Radeon NOW, if you will. At a roundtable discussion during the IFA conference in Berlin, Jack Huynh (a Senior Vice President at AMD) said that the company has no plans for such a service.
Although some might puzzle at this decision, it becomes more understandable when you consider that many existing cloud gaming services already use AMD hardware. Both Xbox Cloud Gaming and PlayStation Plus cloud gaming use AMD APUs (processors with powerful integrated graphics), and even NVIDIA, the company’s big rival in the GPU space, uses AMD processors (Threadripper CPUs specifically) for its cloud gaming servers.
GeForce NOW upgrades on September 10th
Nvidia has confirmed that RTX 5080-level performance will be introduced to GeForce NOW, along with 48GB of VRAM, starting on the 10th of September, 2025. To note, this will not actually use RTX 5080 cards (which only have 16GB GDDR7 VRAM) but will provide similar performance using Blackwell B60 GPUs.
At present, the service comes with three tiers: Free, Performance ($9.99/month), and Ultimate ($19.99/month or $99.99 for six months), with Ultimate currently giving users performance equivalent to an RTX 4080 with 24GB VRAM. As of the 10th of Sept, Ultimate will be upgraded to the new hardware mentioned above, though not all regions will get it immediately.
Prime Day may have closed its doors, but that hasn’t stopped great deals from landing on the web’s biggest online retailer. Here are all the best last chance savings from this year’s Prime event.
*Prices and savings subject to change. Click through to get the current prices.
Is cloud gaming worth it in 2025?
The biggest issue with cloud gaming, including GeForce NOW, is latency. It’s a bit difficult to generalize performance in this area as it depends on a couple of different factors, namely your internet speed and your distance from the data center/server that is providing your service.
GeForce NOW has definitely improved in terms of latency in 2025 compared to previous years, and in optimal conditions, you can even play competitive first-person shooters with no problems. In less-than-optimal conditions, single-player titles or less fast-paced multiplayer games should also pose no problems, unless your internet is particularly poor or you particularly suffer from a large distance from the servers.
That being said, some users still report drops in graphical quality and FPS at certain peak times (such as in the evening), and even being kicked from games in extreme circumstances. The best course of action is to trial it for a month to see how it works for you and then decide if you want to extend your subscription.
