FRAME GENERATION WAS ONLY INTENDED, AND ONLY REALLY WORKS WHEN YOUR BASELINE IS AT LEAST 60FPS
It's been said before, obviously, but I feel like we need to scream this from rooftops for people to realize.
That's why the Wilds system requirements are bs. Recommended say you will get 60FPS AFTER enabling framegen. Minimum says you NEED FRAMEGEN TO REACH 30FPS.
This is not how framegen works. Framegen gives you about 50% more fps on top of your current performance (e.g. if your native is 60, you'll be running about 90). It does not double your frames.
And it CANNOT look or perform well when you're rendering less than 60fps without it. You will have terrible ghosting and horrendous input lag.
The insidious thing that the GPU manufacturers are doing here (and yes, it's them, they've been pumping money into promoting this shit and doubtless sponsored some of the development. this is standard practice.) is that they've slapped this on a game that's otherwise shaping up to be great, and is so highly anticipated.
That's the problem. Most of us aren't willing to boycott this particular game no matter how much they cripple it. We've been hunters for years. We're more likely to buy a whole new computer just to play the next MonHun. And even if we did boycott it, the vast majority of the people who bought World (which is at what, like 18mil now?) would not. Crapcom has this in the bag.
But that means all the "AAA" developers will consider this proof that this is okay. Wilds sold like crazy, surely we can sell games that don't even run on anything but NASA hardware.
I don't have an answer here. Suits run game development these days, not developers. If it sells, it's good. If it gets them money, it's good.
The devs didn't sell us out. But Crapcom the company absolutely did.
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For generations, gamers have understood that improving FPS also improves "the feel" of gaming. Not anymore. Don't get scammed by Frame Generation. It improves FPS without improving input latency.
I'm gonna go on a nerd rant about DLSS/FSR frame generation and about how it's completely worthless.
As a quick intro:
"DLSS" (Deep Learning Super-Sampling) is used to refer to a set of software tricks that Nvidia graphics cards can do, with the core features being upscaling, anti-aliasing and frame generation.
FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) is a competing set of technologies from AMD that also offers upscaling, anti-aliasing and frame generation at slightly lower quality overall, but it's usable on any modern graphics card instead of just Nvidia's own, as it does not require specialised hardware like DLSS does.
Details, explanations and opinions below the cut.
It's specifically frame generation that I have a serious problem with. The upscaling tech is fine as long as your game doesn't depend on it to not run like garbage, and the anti-aliasing option is just TAA but less shit. It's fine. Frame gen is the problem.
How frame gen works in a mostly-understandable level:
For each frame your graphics card renders, the information of what that frame looks like is kept, alongside with information on the direction that everything on the screen is moving in.
The next frame is also rendered, and the same information from both frames is kept.
These pieces of information are then used to predict where everything on the screen is going to be in the frame between frame 1 and frame 2.
The predicted frame is generated.
You are shown real frame 1, then predicted frame 1, then real frame 2.
This is also effective even if the game is limited by your CPU instead of your GPU, because the generated frames are handled entirely by the graphics card and the game itself is "bypassed".
That all sounds pretty nice, right? Well yeah, it'd be neat, if it wasn't trash at its job. Here's what it actually looks like - Anything that's moving quickly is bound to get mispredicted and turn into a blurry mess.
It doesn't actually increase your framerate: The framerate the game is actually running at is the same at best or lower at worst, and the generated frames are interpolated (shoved) in between. If frame gen doubles your framerate, that's because your game's internal framerate has stayed the same and one generated frame has been stuffed in after each real one.
Now you might be thinking "Oh, I won't notice this, it's only a few milliseconds of blur!", but you will, for two reasons. One, a few ms of blur is absolutely enough for your eyes to notice (you're way faster than you think), and two, those few ms happen every other frame - so, literally half the time. Anything in your screen that's quickly moving will be a blurry, incoherent mess 50% of the time.
Here's a few more big issues with it, in no particular order:
It doesn't work on UI elements: If frame gen is applied before the UI is rendered, anything such as an on-screen marker or UI element will NOT also be interpolated. The upside is it'll still look clear, the downside is that you'll *easily* notice the blurry mess cutting out around those UI elements and they'll be moving at half the smoothness that everything else is. Transparent UI elements are the most vulnerable, cause you can see everything remain clear behind them as the screeen around them fades into a blur. If frame gen is applied AFTER the UI is rendered, it *also* turns into an incomprehensible mess.
It doesn't make the game run "faster": Your input lag goes up, because as I said the actual framerate your game's running at is in fact lower. This isn't always that big of a deal, but if your actual framerate is below 60 then it can start to be an issue.
It holds back the render queue by one frame: Frame Generation needs two frames in order to do its work, meaning there are always two frames sitting in the queue that have not been shown to you yet. At 60 FPS of real framerate, that's 16.6ms more latency.
It looks like garbage: Sure, stable shots with no camera movement will look fine. The moment you quickly turn around to aim at an enemy behind you, your entire screen's going to turn into soup.
It's a cheap trick being used as an excuse: Nvidia's 40 series (ie, the one that introduced frame gen) is entirely corner cut, cheaply built trash. The 4090 is the only card that isn't dogshit for its price, and that's intentional. The story seems like it'll be getting worse with the 50 series, as the rumour mill's saying the 5080 will be half of the 5090.
It's another shitty way for companies to avoid optimising their games: Upscaling tech already partially suffers from this problem - Plenty of modern AAA games run horribly on powerful hardware and you're just expected to use some form of upscaling to make it playable. Native rendering should be the default as it always has been, and any other fancy options should be your choice to use or not use. You can't really get better than native quality in most cases anyway.
Frame Generation is just the sequel to motion blur - A cheap, ugly, blurry and messy looking excuse to hide the fact that we don't have hardware powerful enough to render all the cool things we want to in real time. The only difference this time around is that the hardware is also intentionally being kneecapped and this frame gen "solution" is used to present fake performance improvements as real.
It would be neat as an option to sometimes get a little more out of some games, but instead it's being presented as if it's some sort of real performance improvement when it's absolutely not. Nvidia in its presentation was bragging about how "Between super resolution and frame generation, DLSS 3 uses neural rendering for seven out of every eight pixels on screen"
You take a moment to think about how anything would turn out if you did 1/8 of the work you were supposed to do for something and then guessed at everything in between. Even if you're incredibly good at guessing, it's still not going to be as good as if you'd just done your job - Even if you get it out there a bit faster.
Fuck frame gen, fuck motion blur 2, give me native rendering and hardware that isn't shit. You ask me to pay as much money as you do, you'd fucking better give me something that isn't trash.
Or so do some of my IRL friends ask me. To which my response is twofold.
On the one hand, the game's official mod tools aren't out yet. We're seeing the early goings of a scene that'll find its footing in the coming months or years - but for now it's all jiggery-pokery based on the fact that external tools have matured and that Bugthesda is stubborn in its refusal to update its goddamn engine or its production pipeline. It's workable, but ephemeral. Update the Script Extender and everything breaks, edit an INI file a bit too much and everything breaks, some mods work well with Vortex and others don't, which makes it a bit of a slog. Waiting seems wiser, on the whole.
On the other, there's something to appreciating Bethesda jank as it is, before fans inevitably pour over the several dozen tiny-to-brazen oversights that make up its palette of bugs and elevate the product from Merely Serviceable to Actually Enjoyable.
I'm also curious to see what an official implementation of DLSS 3 and Frame Generation will look like, seeing as the unofficial one sometimes shits the bed in hilarious fashion. Wanna see a six-limbed Sarah Morgan flicker in and out of existence while the AI catches up with the vanilla FPS after intensive loads? There's a mod for that.
