The very bad news is, Nvidia says turning DLSS 5 on will currently reduce performance by 50-60%. And that’s across the board—no matter the game.
I wouldn’t use it, even if it was adding performance. Nvidia really found a new technology that is even worse than Frame Generation.
DLSS5 looks bad, but after using for a little while frame generation does have some use cases. It requires a high refresh monitor to be worth anything first and foremost to ensure there’s space for the interpolated frames between a high base frame rate. I use a 144hz monitor, so with 2x frame rate I still get a perfectly playable 72fps based latency.
I found it to be good while playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 because it let me turn up the other settings while consistently looking smooth. It’s a slow enough game that the increased latency isn’t noticeable.
It’s especially helpful for CPU bound games like Helldivers 2 and Victoria 3 because the interpolation happens after the main rendering. I could not get HD2 above ~90fps with my CPU, but with frame gen on the CPU only had to render 72fps. [EDIT: The latency was actually worse than 72fps for the reasons Juki listed below] It also meant I could turn DLSS scaling off, which meant the generated frames were based on native renders and everything looked better. Victoria 3 went from a painful 20-30fps to a much more tolerable 4-60.
All that said it does have serious issues. The increased latency means I’ll never use it for a reaction time based shooter like Enlisted or Deadlock. A few games just don’t look good with it. Star Wars Jedi Survivor had poor performance anyway, but turning frame gen on both makes it feel like it plays worse while also adding terrible ghosting effects and artifacts.
I’ve been interpolating movies and tv shows since 2015, so I think I was better able to set my expectations for the downsides of interpolation.
While I don’t disagree that frame gen at high refresh rates does look pretty decent, I feel the need to correct the input latency part… In your 72fps example you actually have the latency of effectively 36fps because the GPU has to hold back a frame in order to have two frames to interpolate between. It doesn’t (currently?) do extrapolation so this holding back a frame is a hard limit and applies pretty much equally from 2x frame gen all the way up to 6x. This isn’t exactly catastrophic for single player or PVE multiplayer but I would steer clear in PVP
Nvidia reflex 2 should sorta kinda tackle this by taking the updated input => camera position and reprojecting the image before rendering but 1) this will require the game to support it (e.g. declaring UI, crosshairs etc to exclude) and 2) only serves to tackle the game feel portion of the problem - in pve you’ll still be working with old pixels and your response times will still suffer accordingly.
Again, great tech but worth knowing the limits!
Okay, thank you for describing that, I drew a couple charts to help me think through the situation. The lettered frames represent the image sitting on the gpu. It’s called B1 because it’s a frame that needs to be interpolated from frame B, so frame B needs to be rendered first before interpolation can occur. The numbers represent units of time, so in the first chart at time unit 2 Frame A is being displayed on the screen while Frame B is being rendered by the card.
The first chart I drew I made an assumption that the interpolation is basically free due to my understanding that the DLSS functions use specialized cores that could be running in tandem with the rendering of frame B. Then I realized that was an assumption and went over it again assuming frame B needed to be fully rendered and so interpolation would need to take a unit of time before displaying.
I think this illustrates what you’re saying.
I’ve been interpolating movies and tv shows since 2015, so I think I was better able to set my expectations for the downsides of interpolation.
why???
Because when I do it on a dedicated GPU instead of a cheap TV processor to hide the artifacting I like how it looks.
AI frame generation makes sense on lower hardware but to turn your games into slop? Why the hell? Why not enhance the 3d rendering or ray tracing with this ** crap.
Wasn’t the original premise of DLSS to add performance and now they even falling on that?
I’m not as familiar with it, but from what I understand DLSS was switching rendering to a lower resolution then used algorithms to upscale the video to make it look as if it is high res.
The original, original premise of DLSS became DLAA.
It’s in the actual name - Deep Learning Super Sampling - it was supposed take your native res rendering, run it through that and get fake supersampled output.
Then they realised they could use it to run sub-native resolutions.
It is. According to Nvidia, DLSS is a family and brand now, consisting of different technologies. So the name DLSS started as upscaler only, but now it contains the image styling and other techs in the same name. Which is great, because it confuses everyone.
Looking at the basic performance charts Nvidia has provided us so far, the ultra-high frame rate figures are based on 6x Multi Frame Generation.
Let this sink in for a moment.
Looking at the basic performance charts Nvidia has provided us so far, the ultra-high frame rate figures are based on 6x Multi Frame Generation. So, while the little RTX 5060 can churn out a 258 fps result in NBA 2K27 at 1080p Ultra settings with ray tracing and DLSS 5 enabled, the game underneath will actually be running at around 43 fps.
I can feel the molasses from here.
Just generate more fake frames with a second 5090!
Nvidia’s new SLAI technology!
i miss when GPUs just rendered the game, and that was all.
None of this upscaling, AI graphics altering bullshit that is there ultimately to distract from the impotent promises of 4k gaming, which is unnecessarily ridiculous to begin with.
While I do agree, upscaling is nice when your primary monitor is 4k, because playing 1080 on a 4k monitor looks like a pixel art game.
This is kinda weird since 4K monitors have no trouble drawing at 1080p and don’t look worse than 1080 monitors doing so.
Depends on the scaling algorithm. Most renderers are probably going to apply some filtering causing the whole image to be a blurry mess, rather than use a crisp nearest neighbour.
This just isn’t even slightly true. I have 2 4K monitors and a 1080p one. I can visibly see that using either 4K monitor looks similar to the 1080p other than having slightly superior color fidelity on the 4K. That is the 4K looks BETTER than the 1080p.
Intuitively I feel like you can trivially draw 1080p on a 4K panel by literally drawing 4 pixels for every 1 in the source whether that is the exact mechanics or not it is just plainly obvious that this isn’t so. I feel like people are thinking of older monitors drawing at non-native resolutions which are not exact multiples of native. I have literally never seen anyone’s 4K display be blurry displaying games running at 1080p which is common for performance reasons.
Part of the reason why I don’t do 1080 screens above 22"
And I mean you bought the 4k monitor, so for it not to be a good choice for gaming needs to be addressed. Can’t have that money go to waste. Not your fault you fell for the marketing again.
At least movies will look good on it.
Pretty L sarcastic take tbh. I work on my pc, I also have 3 screens at my pc, 4k is invaluable as I can get so much more done more easily when I don’t spend my time scrolling through code. Working on anything below 1440 feels cramped.
I guess movies could look good, I wouldn’t know tho.
Cool, yet my point on gaming still stands. Most places I installed screens at had us (mostly done by the roll up software) turn the res down (so people can read it). You can use 4k I am sure, knock yourself out, but we are in crazy land where your need to have 4k has left us all in a nightmare of shit performance and fake frames.
“Such a L take” is funny from the people with more money then sense who always seem to revert to a “get gud” defense when confronted with the idea that maybe spending more is not always a good idea.
If you had to turn the res down so people can read it then you failed at basic computer usage. Resolution doesn’t dictate font size.
HA! But it does! try setting your 4k display to 1080p… Look! Bigger letters!
Keep in mind this was also due to most places wanting the same settings with all pcs, so hey the shittiest res becomes everyones! YAY!
Your favorite desktop OS has scaling settings which uses more pixels to draw the same characters bigger whilst letting you enjoy a smoother and better looking desktop
Eh, okay dude, sure thing, I usually have my browser set by default to 80% zoom on lower res screens and my font is quite small on the 4k, I also disable any kind of scaling.
Believe it or not, not everyone sees the world like you do.
It sounds like you made up your mind though, which is cool for you I guess.
I appreciate advances in tech, especially stuff like display tech, you kind of remind me of my dad the time he told us we’d never need a hard drive bigger than 2gb, lol.
I’m just gonna go be gud over here, you do you over there…
I’ll also add that anti aliasing is not as important nowadays because realistically, it was a way to hide lower resolutions by smoothing edges, now edges can be smooth at native resolutions without it. (there’s nuance to that ofc) I’m not sure if you hated AA too.
You have literally disabled the feature that makes fonts look correct on 4k and further shrunk the text by setting zoom to 80%. It’s not really a matter of opinion you are just wrong.
What feature is that? Tons of assumptions and assholes around here.
I’m also super interested in what “correct” is?
Believe it or not, not everyone sees the world like you do.
Heyyyyy look good advice!
Literally sees differently because he’s disabled scaling and set browser zoom to 80% both of which make everything smaller on 4K
I wasn’t belittling others over my own views. But anyway, I’m done engaging with you, peace ✌️
4k monitors look fine rendering 1080p
If you have a pixel
1
A 4K monitor can in the same physical space draw
1 0 0 1
Showing more real detail it can also display in 1080p mode
1 1 1 1
Yes, thank you for explaining that. No I will not buy a 4k smart TV, as I don’t care and like my 1080p (and even old tube 480p tvs) the way it looks.
This is just more “please buy our shit” sort of crap we have to deal with way way too much these days.
Given a reasonable amount of horsepower it makes sense to run your games in 4K. I was just pointing out that you CAN run a given game in 1080p if you don’t have enough juice and it won’t look worse than if it was running on a 1080p monitor. 4K is in fact great.
Pretending that it doesn’t actually look better is just pure copium. It’s no more real than the flat earth.
You don’t have to be wiling to spend on it but it makes little sense to pretend its not better.
When did I state any of that?
And no it is not “better” other then being more pricey, there are pros and cons.
You just said it wasn’t better other than being more expensive then said there are pros and cons. Did you glitch chatGPT?
4k is only ridiculous if you play games seated at a desk. Videogames are still ultimately a livingroom toy at their heart, and there are people who’ve graduated from game consoles to PCs and still want to play on the couch. That means distance from your TV, which means the TV has to be pretty large. Lower resolutions on a TV that size do not look good.
Ummmm 4k is way less important at couch distance compared to desk distance. Most of us don’t have TVs that occupy the same field of view from the couch as a monitor does at the desk. For example I have a 32 inch monitor at my desk 1.5 feet away and a 65 inch TV about 10 feet away. Sure the TV has 4x the viewing area but my viewing distance is more than 4x so the picture is not as crisp.
You are almost right. It depends on viewing distance as you correctly noted the given viewing distance and screen sizes its pretty easy to tell the difference between 1080p and 4K in most people’s living room especially since big ass screens are cheap and big ass houses expensive.
If you were watching a movie you might be right, but that won’t compensate enough for how low that pixel density is on that size of a TV on a video game. The subpixel aliasing will be notably worse on the TV.
The relationship between screen size and distance to viewer decides at what resolution you won’t be able to notice more detail at a higher resolution. 4K on a desktop monitor can make the same amount of sense (or not) as on a TV (or phone, or any other device with a display really).
That’s not true at all. 1080p on an appropriately large tv at a proper viewing distance will be far worse as those pixels are stretched out. The subpixel aliasing on that would be absolutely brutal.
Either I’m greatly misunderstanding you, or you have that completely backwards. The further you are from a screen the smaller the pixels are in your field of view, and the less jagged the image will look. If you are closer to your screen the easier it is to see individual pixels, thus they need to be smaller to get a smoother image.
You’re thinking of spatial aliasing, which can be improved by sitting further away from the screen. The problem here is temporal aliasing, which has more to do with the resolution and size of the display, and is not improved by sitting further away.
Temporal aliasing gets worse the larger individual pixels are and the lower the pixel density is, which is why it will more negatively affect the TV viewer even if they appropriately match TV size and distance.
And then you also have to consider the fact that they don’t make 1080p or 1440p for that matter TVs at the size you’d need to view from the average livingroom distance. So playing a game at 1080P means your TV has to scale that 1080p across its native resolution which will result in a blurry picture.
Here’s a video that discusses the issue
Which is bull, because we’ve been playing games from our couches for like 40 years and there were beautiful, amazing, wonderful graphics long before the 4k propaganda.
Here is what gaming looked like 40 years ago hint it looked like dogshit but we loved it
Modern gaming looks fantastic in 4K.
Using one of the most popular and beloved games of all time and calling it “dogshit”… that’s one way to win an argument I guess.
Ya it absolutely looks like dogshit. It was amazing at the time. I imagine that in 40 years our current games will be comparatively shit.
Sure buddy.
This is what I played as a kid and now I have 4K monitors can confirm
I mean… no?
I’m not sure what else to say to that.
No, I think you denying reality because of sunk cost fallacy has said enough.
Weapons grade copium on your part lol
Sure Pal.
You know it, buddy.
Your dismissiveness of reality doesn’t change the reality
Pretty sure lots of old games still look great. Why else would there be modern pixel art games still coming out? The graphics of yore may not have been advanced but they had an art style which is more important than graphics and more than most modern AAA games.
total polar opposite of its original purpose.
Generating stock value?
that too, but I w as referring to enabling shittily coded games to run on midrange hardware
But it’ll keep the hype cycle going for a little bit longer! Line must go up!
Wait, what is even the point of using an upscaling technology if it makes your game run slower than without it? Why wouldn’t I just run native res at that point? Is their only point that “it looks better” in their minds?
You can make black people look white in your games.
Wonder if it could also make female protagonists look like men, might be useful for the sort of people who complain that a game is woke when there is a women
Well, gonna be real gay when that transgender protagonist is now in a romantic scene with a dude.
No worries, we’ll just undude the dude in the romantic scene as well and oh shit now we have two transes
Don’t forget about making Cloud, a Japanese inspired character, look like Scarlett Johansson.
are you blind? Cloud is clearly already inspired by Scarlett Johansson
What’s the point of running 4k over 1080p?
Yes. It does make the game look better at the cost of framerate…
???
As someone who works with 3D software everything about this trend annoys me to no end. I don‘t benefit from any of this. Instead hardware becomes unaffordable. And before anyone mentions AMD, last time I checked Nvidia still had more bang for your buck in Blender despite everything.
I pray my current hardware survives for a long time because it‘s looking grim out there.
If only a certain country and their president didn’t cause the prices of GPU and RAM to skyrocket, maybe it’d be more affordable. That’s not AIs fault, that’s capitalisms fault. Inb4 China comes out with RTX GPUs for a fraction of the price and leads to a democratization of AI technology. But “it’s unaffordable” is how all new tech feats always start, that’s how the shiniest new tech has always been. Were people complaining about this when Half Life 2 was being released with all its DX9 bells and whistles? No, because a brand new “512mb GPU” at that time was cutting edge and less affordable, but at least people were being paid enough to make that expense. Now that capitalism has destroyed our economy, people are blaming the prices and not the capitalism. It’s silly.
Releases the first working Fusion Reactor “This is terrible because it’s too unaffordable. I don’t benefit from any of this because my country can’t afford it right now.”
So, while the little RTX 5060 can churn out a 258 fps result in NBA 2K27 at 1080p Ultra settings with ray tracing and DLSS 5 enabled, the game underneath will actually be running at around 43 fps.
Lol. Nvidia with the toilet paper math. “You’re only getting 6 frames but it’s actually 11 billion frames.”
Like, I’m playing Bully. Render the locked 30, barely consume any power and shut up. “Run your computer at full tilt all the time so your games can run like shit!” I cannot stand any frame gen. Makes games look like static.
Like, I’m playing Bully. Render the locked 30, barely consume any power and shut up
I am getting older and honestly only recently came to appreciate 60fps, it blows my mind to hear people say shit like “doesn’t do 120fps, unplayable.” …like wtf?
in some cases only 1% of pixels are actually rendered.
Upscaling was a mistake, I always turn it off and end up with higher or at least the same frame rates. It’s just another fucking thing like motion blur, chromatic aberration and lens flare. It makes the game look and feel worse at the expense of performance.
I always use DLSS Quality if available (and sometimes it is the only kind of render scaling available) and always have a ~20% performance boost with almost no image quality loss.
I’ve started downscaling
When will they realize that good graphics does not equal a good game?
Not anytime soon since gamers are still overwhelmingly indicating they will pay out the nose for the latest graphics.
Ehhhhh have you seen the numbers lately? People seem to be moving away from AAA titles more and more.
Yeah, life has infinite graphics and it’s a 3/10 at best.
That’s if you even consider AI generated frames to be “good graphics”.
I love beautiful graphics. I’m not picky about them and don’t insist on photorealism only (Valhala is a beautiful game and uses this strange mix of high and low fidelity graphics), but I do love me some good photorealistic rendering.
I’m not interested in this “AI tries to predict the pixels between actual rendered ones”. It’s just a push towards average, like everything else big data, when it works well. And maybe this one does work well but I still dgaf because I don’t want slop frames.
And I suspect that’s a reason you don’t see true frame to frame comparisons between AI upscaling and that same frame fully rendered at the higher resolution. It’s difficult for random reviewers to get the exact same frame rendered like that so I mostly see frames taken from the same viewpoint, but you can’t do apples to apples comparisons because the scene is dynamic and things other than the camera have changed. But nvidia could generate the same frame both ways for a direct comparison but only seem to want to show comparisons like DLSS off (at low res) vs DLSS on (at high res) or different DLSS versions against each other, which I think is telling.
I don’t care about or want this technology
You know what AI reminds me of? That Xavier the renegade angel episode where the monks built that machine to do the monk chants for them and all but two monks remained afterwards and the two that were left in the monastery were playing video games and had put on weight. And the monks said something like: surely engaging in western luxuries will not make us lazy.
Edit : ayyyyy full episode https://www.wco.tv/xavier-renegade-angel-episode-11-vibracaust
I gotta re-watch this show now. Such a banger
If I had a video card that could run this I’d be so disappointed.
Well its a good thing no one plays games anymore, its just benchmarking and dick measuring right? Right?
I’m actually kinda interested in how this will change what emulated games look like. Can it improve the visuals in Aria of Sorrows? Or like old racing games?
