DLSS 3 Frame Generation- major selling point, or worthless marketing gimmick?

whenever I mention dlss3 frame generation in any of my videos I always get a bunch of comments and they're they're split a lot of people are saying this is an absolute marketing gimmick that Nvidia invented just to double bar graphs in their marketing slides and try to sell you their 4 000 gpus and justify their inflated price tags whereas I get a bunch of other people in the comment section saying this is an absolutely killer feature it is revolutionary it can double frame rates it is fantastic now where is the actual truth on this and where are these opinions coming from well first of all one of the issues with dlss frame generation is that you can't actually experience it through a YouTube video most people don't have a 4000 series of GPU which means they've never actually experienced dlss3 frame generation now let's talk about this so what actually is frame generation does it really double frame rates what are the downsides is it a gimmick or is it a game changer well let's quickly sum up what it is and I know some of you guys already know but just short version basically what it does is it delays showing you a real frame that the game engine has generated in order to insert an AI generated fake frame right before that and it does this every other frame which is how it can almost double frame rates although in reality it's usually a little less than doubling and in some cases a lot less than doubling and I'm not quite sure why it doesn't always just double it but there must be some kind of overhead going on in there now this brings up some obvious issues and this is where the people saying this is an absolute gimmick are coming from notice I said it has to delay showing you a real frame in order to insert a fake frame before it that means it does increase the latency of the game it decreases the game's responsiveness when you're playing it now the other thing is these are fake frames in other words this game this Frame is not generated by the game engine so it is not response to your inputs and you're not actually seeing any um like if you're playing a competitive game if an enemy peeks out from behind a corner even though you have more frames you will actually see that later than when it actually would have happened if you were not using dlss frame generation at least if you have reflex enabled on both of those then that's a whole other thing but anyway the point is it slows down the responsiveness of the game and these are age AI generated frames which means they don't look as good as real frames some of them look almost as good or almost indistinguishable but there can be weird things that happen to the image quality because it's taking the the next frame it's taking the previous frame and it's taking some information from the game engine motion vectors things like that to get an idea of where things on the screen are going but sometimes it just does not have information about certain parts of the image or it guesses wrong about what those would look like and then that gets you frames that don't quite look right now here's the problem though when you judge it based on all of those problems this absolutely sounds like a marketing gimmick that nobody would ever use it slows down your game and it looks bad however that's not the experience I've had actually using it in certain games although I think this is a very game to game subjective idea so let's talk about that so first of all um like I said there's the two issues there's the latency issue and there's the image quality issue so what about the latency issue unless you're playing a competitive multiplayer game that you take extremely seriously I do not think the latency issue actually matters as long as your base frame rate the frame rate you're getting without frame generation is high enough because uh for example I got the screenshot right here we've got the Witcher 3 here and I'm doing frame generation off versus frame generation on the average PC latency is reported at 64.2 milliseconds um with frame generation off and 76.4 milliseconds with frame generation on so we gained about 12.2 milliseconds of latency by enabling frame generation that isn't especially noticeable especially like I think maybe some of you guys will hate me for this but I think the Witcher 3 is best played on a control troller when I enabled frame generation playing this game on a controller I absolutely could not tell a difference in the PC's responsiveness it felt good either way it felt like about 60 frames per second should feel also a lot of times the game is getting Nvidia reflex added to it to support frame generation and would not otherwise have had that available so your latency actually would have been a bit worse anyway if they hadn't implemented frame generation but you do have the choice of whether to implement that um or not once once it's in the game so I mean I think it is fair to compare on and off frame generation with reflex enabled on both because you will have the option to enable reflex without frame generation in any game that has frame generation anyway so in other words I think if you're not if you're just playing a single player game and you have a decent Baseline frame rate especially if it's a single player game that you'd be playing on a controller I think the the latency issue is a non-issue if you're playing a competitive game and you want to see the enemy peek around the corner like as soon as you possibly can because one millisecond who fires first in CS go not that CS go supports frame generation but you get the idea who fires first by one single millisecond could determine who wins that game that matters right so even if it's only 12 milliseconds and 12 milliseconds doesn't feel like that big of a deal you know then um in a single player game in a competitive game you wouldn't want to use it you want to decrease your uh your graphic settings as much as possible just to get your Competitive Edge and that's not going to change so in other words I don't think this fits well into competitive games also I'm saying this 12 milliseconds as just a random example I have noticed the latency difference can be it can be much smaller than it can also be much more than that and it just really depends on the game and the exact situation in the game and I don't have enough data to give you some kind of average and I think averages hide results anyway all I can tell you is again I think this is a technology that is best experienced in person and in the single player games I've used it in latency just has not been a problem now if the base frame rate was low enough that might be more of a problem so I think as this as frame generation gets implemented on Lower End Hardware because currently we only have it on the 4080 and the 4090 that's where I wonder if frame generation latency issues could end up being more of a problem so frame generation latency not a big deal in single player games I don't really notice it if you're using a mouse in a first person shooter that's where it's most noticeable um in Portal RTX which is the first person Mouse aim not really a shooter but and then in what's it called Warhammer 40K dark tide I can if I'm really like trying to notice it I I can maybe feel a slight increase in the floatiness of my mouse guys but it's incredibly minor and again those are really I mean Warhammer 40K dark tight it's not really a single player game but it's like PVE right I seem to be just shooting you know AI monsters it didn't really affect my aim it was fine okay so in my opinion the bigger problem to dlss3 frame generation is the image quality that's where it has bigger issues and this completely depends on the game so I've played this in a lot of games some for more extended periods of time some for less and in some games the image quality is fine I actually played uh plaguetail Requiem which has a frame Generation Um the last several hours of the game I played with uh with frame generation on and I'd frequently turn it off just to compare and I absolutely loved it frame generation solved a big problem in that game which is CPU limitations that game can become CPU limited and this is actually the biggest uh the biggest deal in my opinion for dlss frame generation when you are CPU limited it can help you where other things can't and I'll come right back to that I wanted to talk a little bit more about image quality first so hang on to that CPU limited idea because in my opinion that's the biggest selling point for dlss3 anyway image quality like I said plagetail Requiem thought it looked great Witcher 3 I haven't played for as many hours as I did plagetail Requiem but in the time I have played with it I actually think frame generation is looking good and once again it's solving a CPU limit issue that I couldn't solve in any other way other than turning Ray tracing off but then I'm still CP a little bit anyway but we'll get back to the CPU limited issue just hang on to that idea um but then in games like Spider-Man remastered I actually hated the image quality of frame generation and I turned it off and that was actually my initial impression that was the first game that I tested so my initial impression of frame generation was a lot more negative than it is now that I've tried it in a lot a wider variety of games Spider-Man moves so quickly over a variety of background objects buildings we have webs shooting out all over the place there's a lot of Hud elements up on the screen interacting and passing over other objects and those are all places where frame generation has issues with the image quality and I actually found it noticeable and I would not use it even though it did again help me with the CPU limited issue although in that game while I was CPU limited it was at a high enough frame rate that I wasn't as compelled to want to solve the problem using dlss3 so really Spider-Man remastered is the game that I've played the most where I had the biggest problem with the image quality now in other games that I've only briefly tested out um or that I've seen you know other reviews on things like that a lot of times it's like HUD elements like an f122 we've seen a lot of footage where like the name the names of drivers floating over their cars that kind of a thing the text interacts weird because it doesn't realize it's text and so that looks bad certain HUD elements things like that so they're absolutely games where I think it's just an image quality issue and that's something that I hope can improve over time although I'm sure there are limits to this technology and it will probably never be perfect as far as the kind of image quality that you could get I wonder if somehow they could get the HUD elements to render at a real a real frame and then everything else maybe do frame generation I don't know if that's possible something like that might be really useful but in general um I think in my opinion image quality is the biggest issue in for single player games multiplayer games latency might matter I don't think I don't think uh for single player games latency is a real issue now can I weigh in on is this a gimmick or is it a game changer I think I've answered that question for myself because the game I'm actually playing right now is the Callisto protocol on PC now you might note the Callisto protocol doesn't have frame generation I know and I wish it did I found myself really wanting to press the frame generation button while I was playing the Callisto protocol and that's my answer to Is it a gimmick no because I actually want it in a game that doesn't have it I wasn't even thinking about it other than it just popped in my head man this would solve my problem right now now what problem is it's solving this is where I'm coming back to the CPU limitation remember that one of the problems with dlss3 frame generation is that they're not real game engine frames they're not frames generated by the game engine but while that's you know in in the sense it's a bug but it's actually a feature because these are not generated by the game engine they are not dependent at all on your CPU so so when you are CPU limited which is happening in an annoyingly High number of games now and I think this could be solved through better programming for one thing but if the games are programmed badly this could help you out if it was implemented into the game for example The Witcher 3 when you enable Ray tracing the 4090 can't be fully utilized in a lot of scenes because in cities you become CPU limited the game is too single thread uh performant based so it can't take advantage of all the threads on a powerful CPU and a lot of times it's delivering well less than 60 frames per second on the CPU so no matter how much you turn down any setting except for Ray tracing really you're still uh you're still CPU limited it doesn't matter how powerful the GPU gets the 4090s bottleneck by the CPU due to bad coding but there it is um flipping on the frame generation button doubles the frame rate or at least almost and as long as it looks good and you're playing a single player game so latency isn't a big deal if fantastic it solves that problem now Callisto protocol has that same issue when you enable Ray tracing you can become severely CPU limited even when your GPU is capable of a lot more you can see the GPU utilization will drop way below 100 because it's waiting on the CPU to feed it more information but the CPU just can't um and so you're stuck if I could flip the frame generation button I could basically double my frame rate in that situation which would really help with the motion fluidity so in essence here's the thing about dlss3 I think its biggest bonus point is that it's it can help you in a CPU limited situation where normal upscalers can't because Normal dlss2 and fsr2 things like that reduce the GPU load not the CPU load so they can't help you increase your frame rate in a CPU limited situation I would love for game developers to just program their games better but if they don't this can help you when other things can't so I do actually want it in more games um like I said the image quality is a bit of a mixed bag I think if it's available in a game you should try it out and see what you think of the image quality I think in some games you won't like it in some games you will I think especially games that are slower paced uh and games that have fewer HUD elements like the Callisto protocol like I said I really want it in that game I think this would be a great fit for those situations so so is this some revolutionary technology well here's what I hate I I don't like how Nvidia is marketing it because first of all they say that it increases performance it doesn't it decreases performance performance in my opinion is how well the game engine is interacting with your inputs right so it decreases performance but it increases motion fluidity that you're seeing on your screen objects can look better in motion um if they're uh you know render if you get more frames per second so as long as the image quality of those frames is good enough and like I said that's game dependent um then it absolutely is increasing your frame rate what I can't stand is the marketing slides trying to show dlss three frame uh frame rates up against non-dlss3 frame rates because those things are not created equal the dlss three frames don't look as good and are not as responsive as a normal frame so this is misleading as a math teacher this reminds me of of trying to combine like terms if things are not measuring the same thing or do not create the same impact to the situation you're dealing with you should not compare them directly so that's the last thing I'll leave you guys on is don't get fooled by marketing claims or frame rate counters because in the past frames per second has been a measure of two things it has been a measure of the motion fluidity of what you're seeing on your screen and it has been a measure of the game's responsiveness dlss3 increases the frame rate but decreases the game's responsiveness so this is not an Apples to Apples comparison and the frames don't look quite as good so whether you notice it or not I think depends on the game but they should not just be stacked up in an Apples to Apples comparison so dlss3 in summary I think is a fantastic technology that especially shines in CPU limited situations in single player games the where the um quick input response times aren't that big of a deal especially if you're playing on a controller and I think the image quality is best I think well sorry I think the latency is least noticeable especially if you're playing on a controller I don't think you'd ever notice it and if you're playing on a mouse it's it can be more noticeable if you're at a lower Baseline frame rate but in the end I think if it's a single player game the the latency really isn't that big of a deal um I think that the image quality is going to vary wildly game by game and I think in some games especially with if it's a slower paced game with um with few HUD elements on the screen I think it's going to really shine so overall I think frame generation is cool it is not a gimmick and I think it's just not quite as big of a game changer at least yet as Nvidia wants to sell you in their marketing slides but it is not a technology that you should completely write off also I think it's only fair to mention that AMD has announced a competing technology with fsr3 which will hopefully be a a solid competitor to what Nvidia is doing here the only downside is we don't have it yet so I can't test it out and give you some Hands-On stuff although the advantage there would be that AMD likes to go more open source route support a wider variety of Hardware whereas Nvidia wants to lock things down currently just to their 4000 series so it'll be really interesting to see where these Technologies go and especially hopefully both both companies kind of push each other to further develop things let me know what you guys think about it in the comment section especially if you've experienced it in person because in YouTube videos it cannot accurately represent the experience of actually using it because the YouTube video you cannot feel the response offensiveness you can look at latency counters but you can't feel the responsiveness for yourself until if you actually notice it and also YouTube videos are only at 60 frames per second whereas the games aren't running at 60 frames per second and the image quality issues are less noticeable at high frame rates and so if you slow down the footage to emphasize the problem you are no longer showing what it's actually like to experience the technology so that's all I've got to say here is if you're trying to judge off of YouTube videos that are slowing down the footage and giving you latency measurements that's all well and good I think that's great but it's not the same thing as actually using it and I like using it in certain games and not others I hope all of you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 169,113

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Id: rkYkJgyyMYo

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022