Right out of the gate, I’ll admit that I’ve never been a big fan of cloud gaming. A native and local gaming experience trumps anything that requires a stable internet connection to work well, and my desktop PC remains my primary choice for gaming – especially since I’m using one of the best GPUs on the market.
However, if you don’t have a powerful rig – or maybe no desktop PC at all, as you prefer to use a handheld instead – you should be all over Nvidia’s GeForce Now (GFN) streaming service.
With its freshly upgraded RTX 5080 Ultimate membership ($19.99 / £19.99 / AU$27.50 a month), it’s quite possibly the best upgrade – of sorts – for all handheld gaming PC users. Indeed, my first impressions with using this new plan on the Lenovo Legion Go S (Z1 Extreme) make me worried I’ll never be able to return to normal (local, non-streamed) gameplay on the device.
Games like Indiana Jones: The Great Circle, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Black Myth Wukong – which all utilize heavy doses of ray tracing (especially The Great Circle and Shadows) and are very demanding on handheld hardware – run with little to no blemishes or major hiccups on GeForce Now.
Not only should you get great performance in all these games, but you’ll also save a significant amount of battery life on devices like the Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, and other portables. I don’t think GFN will completely replace native gameplay, but I’d be lying if I told you it doesn’t have me considering that prospect, especially on my handheld.
The RTX 5080 upgrade makes top-tier performance and Path Tracing a reality on a handheld
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Handheld gaming portables are likely a very long way off managing to cope with Path Tracing with playable frame rates. I mean, even a powerful desktop RTX 4080 Super gaming PC is brought to its knees attempting to use it in Cyberpunk 2077 and Indiana Jones: The Great Circle, so don’t expect much joy even on the most powerful handhelds.
However, GeForce Now’s RTX 5080 subscription plan makes Path Tracing on handhelds a reality, and my Lenovo Legion Go S’s immersive 8-inch display is the perfect fit for that. I’m lucky enough to have a solid internet connection with high speeds significantly surpassing GFN’s requirements, so I had no problems customizing the gameplay settings for the best visual fidelity and frame rates.
In short, GeForce Now feels as close to native gameplay as you could imagine, with very little latency and input lag disrupting gaming fluidity. The same applies when enabling Frame Generation in-game, and I was concerned this could be problematic – but thanks to the high base frame rates of the RTX 5080, using the frame rate boosting tech isn’t an issue.
Sure, you could stream directly from your gaming PC to your handheld, assuming you’ve got a powerful desktop rig, but GFN is still going to save you electricity – and likely a significant amount of power if you’re using an RTX 5080 or RTX 5090 graphics card in your gaming PC.
The images and GIFs I’ve shown off here don’t do GFN justice, because the image quality using DLSS is nothing short of phenomenal, especially on a smaller handheld display. If you’re using GFN on a bigger screen, it might be a little easier to notice a game is being streamed, but the new Cinematic Quality Streaming (CQS) feature cleans up any image flakiness and sharpens the quality.
You might wonder if I ran into the odd stutter or lag spike every now and then, but fortunately, I can report that nothing of the sort occurred – aside from waking up my device from sleep mode. In these instances, it took GFN a few seconds to reconnect, but that’s to be expected.
Running GFN on the Lenovo Legion Go S running Valve’s SteamOS was a breeze as well. It’s easy enough to install the GFN app on SteamOS – it’s added to the non-Steam applications section – and I can only imagine how great this will be for Steam Deck owners.
Nvidia GeForce Now is the perfect companion for Steam Deck owners
There’s one major benefit for handheld owners using GFN that I touched upon earlier, and that’s better battery life. It may seem obvious, but the only concern you’ll have when gaming with GFN is your internet connection – as the only hardware at work is Nvidia‘s RTX 5080 GPU running in the cloud.
This means you can set the TDP – the power usage – on your handheld as low as you want, and save plenty of battery because of that, while still getting fantastic gaming performance.
Since I’m using the Legion Go S with the Z1 Extreme chip, native performance isn’t so much of a concern, even in more demanding games where graphics settings can be tuned to get reasonable frame rates.
However, with a less powerful device like the Steam Deck, for the games where you want the best visuals without using lots of power and draining the battery – or for poorly optimized games that are very demanding on your hardware (like Dragon’s Dogma 2) – GFN is a great solution.
Recently I’ve been talking about handheld gaming PCs becoming niche again due to their incredibly high pricing in some cases – notably the upcoming Lenovo Legion Go 2. In that light, GFN is a fantastic alternative to spending desktop gaming PC money on a handheld (a portable that doesn’t offer much better performance than its predecessor, to boot).
If you use a handheld as frequently as I do, and you’re at least curious about what cloud gaming has to offer, in my experience, there are no regrets to be had with GFN – and certainly not with its Ultimate RTX 5080 membership plan.
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