Nvidia GeForce Now priority members can't play every game at 60fps

jsilva

Posts: 325   +2
What just happened? Nvidia's GeForce Now game streaming service is limiting what the service provider calls Optimal Playable Settings (OPS), also known as frames per second, on 12 games for all priority members. The game streaming platform made the decision to ensure that all priority members have "a consistent, high-quality experience."

Depending on your GeForce Now membership, specific OPS settings are applied, affecting the game's performance, graphics, and streaming quality. If you're a priority member, you can override the default OPS profile with custom settings in most games, but that's changing according to Nvidia.

A support document found by a Reddit user on Nvidia's website states that there "are some exceptions that … do not run well enough at 60 FPS on the GPUs used by Priority members." To solve this issue and ensure that all priority members have a consistent gaming experience, Nvidia won't allow priority members to override the OPS profile on 12 games.

Games like Outriders and Dauntless—probably the less graphic-intensive games in this list—will run at a maximum of 55fps. Other more demanding games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey will be limited to running at 45fps. You can see the complete list of games and respective OPS in the table below:

Game OPS Date added
Dauntless 55 FPS Jan 2020
Immortals Fenyx Rising 48 FPS November 2020
Cyberpunk 2077 45 FPS December 2020
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey 45 FPS December 2020
Jurassic World Evolution 50 FPS February 2021
Dyson Sphere Program 50 FPS February 2021
Valheim 50 FPS February 2021
Path of Exile 50 FPS March 2021
Outriders 55 FPS March 2021
Kenshi 50 FPS May 2021
Biomutant 50 FPS May 2021
Dying Light 50 FPS June 2021

Although priority members will run these 12 games at less than 60fps, Nvidia will continue to stream them to your device at 60fps, most likely to ensure your gaming experience remains as smooth as possible. Moreover, the tech company stated it continues to evaluate these titles and adjust the OPS accordingly.

Considering Nvidia's explanation, it's unexpected to see games like Path of Exile and Dying Light on this list. Despite having relatively low system requirements, these games will be limited to 50fps, while Outriders, which is far more graphically demanding, can run at 55fps.

What is also surprising is that the Guardians of the Galaxy game is missing from this list. The Redditor that found Nvidia's support document reported that this game was also limited to 50fps, even after changing the graphics settings.

This news comes less than a month after Nvidia announced a new GeForce Now tier that gives members access to its low-latency "SuperPODs" equipped with AMD Threadripper Pro CPUs and RTX 3080 GPUs, allowing you to play at a 1440p resolution and up to 120fps.

At the moment, GeForce Now supports over 1,100 games, and the library keeps increasing. Today, Nvidia added six new games to the platform, including Bright Memory: Infinite, Epic Chef, Jurassic World Evolution 2, MapleStory, Severed Steel, and Tale of Immortal.

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Not sure if it's a move to push people over to the 3080 service or if Nvidia is running out of GPUs to allocate even for their own service.

My money is on the first but the second wouldn't surprise me either.
 
OUCH ...... would that be considered bait & switch? What did they originally promise users?
 
When you connect to this service, are you given the exclusive use of a regular GPU for while you're playing? If so, who cares what settings you use, you won't be impacting any other users anyway?

Or are there trying to share 1 GPU among multiple gamers simultaneously? That doesn't seem too feasible for current titles?

Just curious what's behind this.
 
When you connect to this service, are you given the exclusive use of a regular GPU for while you're playing? If so, who cares what settings you use, you won't be impacting any other users anyway?

Or are there trying to share 1 GPU among multiple gamers simultaneously? That doesn't seem too feasible for current titles?

Just curious what's behind this.
You're usually not getting a full exclusive graphics card, but share a part of a bigger cloud GPU with (possibly) a couple of other users. It is possible and supported in hardware. You can split a single big physical GPU into a couple of smaller, virtual GPUs that can access only some of the shader cores, memory etc. Hardware and software support for that allows for predictable performance without fighting for resources - the GPU might be running four games at a time, but each game only gets its own 1/4 of the GPU, memory, bandwidth etc.

The allocation of GPU power should be static for the whole session, but limiting max FPS in some games might allow for smaller GPU shards to be allocated for some game sessions, which would allow them to cram more users into the same hardware. Still, it's a **** move IMO, they promised 1080p60 before.
 
To ensure that all priority members have "a consistent, high-quality experience."
How is less than 60fps in 2021 considered a "high-quality experience"? I don't know if I am overreacting here but come on..
 
I'm surprised that other people are surprised that the more popular an online gaming streaming service becomes, the less bitrate you'll be given for your 'slice'. It's been painfully obvious all along that cloud gaming that requires a unique real-time rendering & compression feed per user is nothing remotely like Netflix or Spotify where a pre-compressed unchangeable source can be multicast to multiple people simultaneously, reused indefinitely, or cached on CDN's. Cloud gaming is "cheap" now as a loss leader to get it off the ground. If it ever becomes popular, expect 1. Prices to massively rise or 2. The "experience" of more gamers shared per GPU = fps caps and / or compression artifacts.
 
I wonder if that was the plan, artificially limit supply of GPU's so people have to buy them virtually.
 
I am sure their setup works similar to Aster Multiseat where two users can use the same GPU at the same time for gaming, based on the FPS limit, game, settings and GPU it will determine both user's experience. By limiting the FPS your limiting the total load on the gpu so there's extra headroom for higher loads or an extra user.
 
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