By GamingTrend
Publication Date: 2025-11-17 16:00:00
Every year, I check the state of cloud gaming, and every year I’m disappointed — muddy graphics and input lag besmirch the experience. Then came 2025. I was tasked with reviewing the ROG Xbox Ally; figured it would be a good time to perform my yearly test. I don’t know what happened between 2022 and 2025; I don’t know what witchcraft these engineers have done, but cloud gaming is in an amazing place. I’m going to dare to say that cloud gaming is at the point where it can replace hardware. The market isn’t ready yet, but half the job is done. And Nvidia GeForce NOW leads the pack. When you can stream games at framerates above 120, in 4K, with imperceptible input lag, and they look like they’re playing natively on your machine, you objectively have the best technology. That’s Nvidia GeForce NOW.
GeForce NOW has presets that make it easy to open a game with excellent settings, which you can tweak further in-game. From my experience, it can take anything. I tested Watch_Dogs: Legion, a historically unoptimized game, using the Balanced setting to launch it, focusing on 1080p60 gaming at max settings. Everything looked its best and performed as if it had no issues. I tried playing it using the Cinematic preset, which focuses on 4K60 gaming. I cranked all the in-game settings to max, and it still looked marvelous–even more so. The framerate fluttered between 58 and 60 FPS, but I…