Nvidia is making a return to Gamescom this year, but the GPU manufacturing giant will be focusing on topics not involving new GPU hardware releases. Nvidia announced on its blog that it will be kicking off Gamescom 2025 with a live stream at noon PT, announcing "major" GeForce Now news, new GeForce features, and "some highly anticipated" PC games.
Nvidia went out of its way to make clear to the public that it wouldn't be announcing new graphics cards, explicitly stating that "no new hardware" would be announced at the convention. Nvidia's RTX 50 series GPUs launched just eight months ago, so this announcement isn't all too surprising. Nvidia typically waits a year or almost two years after a GPU launch before introducing new graphics cards, so we will likely see official announcements on the highly rumored RTX 50 series Super refresh in 2026.
GeForce On Community Update - YouTube
It is likely we will see a major upgrade to Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming datacenter hardware, at the very least an upgrade to the "ultimate" tier featuring Blackwell server GPU hardware. Nvidia's flagship GeForce Now datacenters are still using generation-old Ada Lovelace GPUs, and the current "ultimate" plan is still classified as an RTX 4080-class experience. Even DLSS support is limited to version 3 and has not been upgraded to DLSS 4, even though Ada Lovelace supports some DLSS 4 features.
We could also see further updates made to the GeForce Now experience that further improve the platform's gaming experience. Since the platform went out of beta, Nvidia has added improved refresh rate and resolution support, including 4k 240Hz compatibility, and extra features such as Cloud G-Sync, which enables variable refresh rate support through the platform. Upgrading to Blackwell hardware could give Nvidia an opportunity to push resolution and especially refresh rate support even higher for its top-level customers.
Nvidia also announced it will be providing updates on upcoming GeForce features for RTX GPU owners. It's hard to tell what those features might be, but we could see updates on a couple of Nvidia technologies we already know about. Reflex 2 was announced at CES this year, but has still not been released in the two games it was supposed to launch with, The Finals and Valorant. Neural texture compression is an unreleased technology that can drop the memory footprint of video game textures by almost 10x with AI. If Nvidia does provide updates on these technologies, we could see Reflex 2 finally get an official release date and a release date for neural texture compression, sporting a fancy new name to fit the GeForce umbrella.
If you happen to make it to the Gamescom, which is being held in Cologne, Germany, Nvidia will be giving away five RTX 5070 Founders Edition graphics cards and additional prizes. The only caveat is that it requires active participation; you'll need to visit booths, play demos, and, if you want a chance at the RTX 5070s, look for clues on X to find a Golden Ticket required to win one of the cards.
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