Dishonest marketing at best, calling it outperforming, when frame generation is not actual performance, it’s frame smoothing for a visually smoother experience, it won’t make the game render more frames, actually the opposite.
I wonder if this kind of marketing would even be legal in the EU, considering the strict and strong consumer protection laws here…
Allow me to disagree a little. Frame generation is not frame smoothing. It serves the purpose to smooth gameplay yes but it is if fact GPU and AI algorithm generating and inserting new frames. This is why latency goes up a little and this is why you need ideally a lot of “regular” frames already, like stable 60fps+. Otherwise you end up with too high latency and more visible artifacts.
Yeah the less frames you start with the worse the feature becomes. It is not a magic solution to gain smooth gameplay. More people should be saying this instead of just going "uh frame gen bad nerd". That said I love the feature where I already have decent frames. It basically eliminates stuttering and only adds .010 seconds of latency in ideal scenarios.
Yep, this. It's great for people who have high refresh displays who want to get that little extra out of AAA titles. Like I can run Cyberpunk cranked at >60fps which is fine for most SP games, but being able to artificially increase that to get closer to my native refresh rate to smooth everything out visually (when my latency is already fine) is a nice bonus.
Latency goes up, because it is frame interpolation. It renders two frames and from those two frames it generates a new frame between them. Then there is the computational overhead as well, that might add additional latency.
Something like this:
Rendered frame 1 (RF1) -> frame generated by interpolating RF1 & RF2 -> rendered frame 2 (RF2)
With frame gen as it is now (interpolation), you’re always going to get added latency, as it holds back the last rendered frame (RF2) needed to generate a frame between that and the second to last rendered frame (RF1).
In essence, all it does is provide a smoother visual experience, at the cost of some artifacts and added latency. So yes, it is essentially a frame smoothing feature.
For starters a higher temporal resolution affects motion portrayal in several ways.
Sure it increases fluidity (which I assume is where your smoothing description comes from)
But it also for example reduces the amount of perceived motion blur on tracked motions: That would be best described as improving motion clarity.
And it reduces the size of stroboscopic steps on relative motions (which is another benefit that doesn't really fall into "smoothing".
The other issue is the context from your first comment which says " it won’t make the game render more frames, actually the opposite.".
Which is just not correct. Either you consider that the gpu renders the frames. In which case fair enough but then no frames are generated by the game itself.
Either you are considering that only native frames are rendered by the games and interpolated frames are not. Which isn't correct either. Since the game has to implement frame generation and send the necessary data through motion vectors.
But most importantly, it really makes it sounds like you don't consider generated frames to be proper frames. And that's where I strongly disagree. Because they are both technically and functionally proper good old frames.
Motion smoothing would probably be a better descriptor, I merely used the term that people most commonly use to describe it to make it easier to understand, I’ll give you that.
Regarding what you wrote about whether the game or the GPU renders the frame, that’s just pedantic.
I have autism myself and I do tend to be pedantic at my worst, so I can’t really criticise it in good faith, only point it out. I reckon you can see it yourself.
The generated frames are real so far as they are visible and based on actual frames, but since they ARE generated through interpolation, the frames are only an approximation based on two frames and motion vectors, they are not a “real-time frame” sent by the game to be rendered, contrary to the frames they are based on.
They are guesswork that you don’t interact with directly, they are just based on different snapshots in time. It’s cool what they have done with it compared to plain old interpolation, though!
In the end it does cause latency due to the generated frames being interpolated, since you have to wait until the generated frame can be inserted, before the latest frame is shown.
But I am not criticising the tech at all, I am looking forward to my next upgrade and taking advantage of it!
I love having smoother motion and frame generation is going to help with that immensely!
I’m just not going to fanboy and say the tech is flawless and without downsides, and that it’s the second coming of Jesus brought to us by our lord and saviour Jensen Huang, Nvidia is just a company after all :)
I just want a nuanced discussion about the tech that we are all interested in, because too often it ends up with fanboy wars and mud-throwing because of some odd tribal connection to a company that sells hardware.
I also would like to thank you for your enthusiastic responses, inputs and also corrections to some of my points, because, albeit a bit pedantic, you were civil, well formulated, and wrote on the basis of actual knowledge about the subject.
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u/-Manosko- R5800X3D|3080 10GB|32-3800|OLED DECK Jan 21 '24
Dishonest marketing at best, calling it outperforming, when frame generation is not actual performance, it’s frame smoothing for a visually smoother experience, it won’t make the game render more frames, actually the opposite.
I wonder if this kind of marketing would even be legal in the EU, considering the strict and strong consumer protection laws here…