DLSSG To FSR3: Frame Gen Modded For RTX 20/30 Series GPUs... But How Good Is It?

cyberpunk 2077 R tracing overdrive mode running at 100 FPS and more on an RTX 3080 yeah your eyes are not fooling you there thanks to a recent mod by online Persona Nukem nearly any and every game which supports dss3 frame generation now supports amd's FSR 3 frame generation instead so that means you can enjoy the benefits of amd's frame generation in Ultra demanding titles like Allen wake 2 with its path tracing enabled even though titles like this one and cyberpunk currently do not natively support FSR 3 frame generation technology in this video I'm going to talk to you about how you can upgrade a game's fluidity with this FSR 3 mod and I will answer the question of how it performs and looks and I will compare it briefly to dlss 3 frame generation but before I get into the nitty-gritty let me briefly State one little caveat about this awesome FSR 3 mod here and that is unfortunately it is currently limited to RTX gpus so even though team red came up with FSR 3 technology this mod at the moment that I'm using to Showcase in this video does not support AMD gpus or older pre-tx gpus it says so in the mod description and that also pans out in practice I tried loading up the mod on a Radeon 7900 XTX to no avail I think the reason is because the way the mod is set up and as a result it requires an RTX GPU it's a shame but in the bright news in the future there are other mods that are going to be coming out that will make Universal FSR 3 tools to inject into many titles remember Luke FZ mods for Starfield well they're working on something similar for FSR 3 frame dren and we're going to see it in many more titles in the near future but in the meantime thanks to Nukem at least we have FSR 3 running on RTX 2000 RTX 3000 Series gpus whose owners may have been getting a little bit envious about all that Fame Generation stuff on RTX 4000 gpus and this mod here can help fulfill a very similar role for aging gpus and help unlock some extra lifespan out of them really so how does it work I think it's really simple as per the instructions on The Mod page you download the file and drag and drop the two DLS from the extracted folder into the directory that contains the game's executable file for example in a plague tail here just the main folder where you can see the games exe there then doubleclick the registry change enabling file to make the game and windows think your GPU supports dss3 frame gen and voila when you go in game you can see the ability to enable dss3 frame generation even though this older RTX GPU definitely does not support it like the RTX 3080 here that I'm demoing when you enable frame generation in the game menu instead of enabling dlss 3 frame gen you are in fact enabling an injected version of FSR 3 frame generation and as far as I can tell in my testing this FSR 3 frame generation is also special in that it allows for different image quality treatment for example here in Miles Morales I've enabled Fame generation on the Artic 380 and have four different image reconstruction techniques working with it igti dlss xss and of course FSR 2 so unlike the official FSR 3D titles released so far such as Avatar frontiers of Pandora you're not just locked into FSR image reconstruction to you FSR 3 frame gen this is nice and very appropriate for older RTX gpus where I would definitely recommend dlss over FSR 2 for example so how does the frame generation Fair the immediate impression is really well like with DL ss3 frame generation I think most people will be astonished at the immediate increase in output frame rate when turning on this injected version of FSR 3 and as long as the frame rate is high enough I think any increases to input latency will be seen as negligible as a price to pay for the added fluidity just as Rich discussed in his FSR 3 review a number of months back beyond the installation from a user perspective I would say it is about 90% the way there to a native FSR 3 Fame generation implementation you click on it and you're good to go in game the reason why I say it's 90% of the way there to a native frame generation implementation is because there are idiosyncrasies of FSR 3 native implementations that cannot realistically be accounted for here in the mod native FSR 3 frame generation implementations have multiple ways how to handle the UI in a game for example and usually developers elect to keep the UI from being interpolated so in a game that's 120 FPS with FSR 3 usually the UI is still at 60 this is different than dss3 as a result of being added on top of what dss3 was doing you see issues with UI in games with this mod like here as we can see in a plague tail and although I think the UI is the biggest issue here we still have to give FSR 3 the benefit of the doubt here in terms of quality as we are looking at a mod here and perhaps even the frame generation quality itself could be better in a native implementation than what we're seeing with the mod still I would say you're getting close to FSR 3 native quality here for most users perception and it even goes beyond native implementations by allowing you to use dlss TAA or any other image quality treatment while FSR 3 frame gen is active interestingly because we are using a mod Ed version of FSR 3 here that hijacks dlss and only works with RTX cards we get another secret Advantage with this mod and that is that Nvidia reflex applies to FSR 3 as we can see here in Spider-Man Miles Morales running with gsync on 120 HZ screen that I recorded off screen here as you can see reflex is actually artificially limiting the frame rate here below 120 FPS to prevent frame queuing from vsync occurring at the monitor's refresh refh rate and as you can see on the bottom there with the display from the monitor the monitor's refresh rate is adjusting in kind with that reflex frame cap so you will actually get the benefits of reflex latency mitigation with this FSR 3 mod something you wouldn't necessarily get in a standard FSR 3 native implementation okay so what is the frame rate uplift like let's start with the classic in-game Benchmark in cyberpunk 2077 here I'm running it with rt overdrive Max setting RTX 380 1440p dlss performance mode Ray reconstruction FSR 3 frame gen is on here on the right and we're really seeing fantastic uplifts here in the overall frame rate and the general apparent motion fluidity of the camera movements on screen on the right hand side of that screen here here in The Benchmark we're seeing around a 67% uplift and overall average frame rate on the RTX 380 bringing the game from the upper 50s and low 60s to around 100 FPS usually and a bit more that's taking a rather standard experience and propelling it into HFR territory all while RT overdrive or path tracing is enabled this is an excellent upgrade for the RTX 3080 a very similar upgrade can be seen when using our open World Car traversal Benchmark that rich and will tend to use in their GPU reviews here we're seeing a similar 65% average uplift in frame rate with FSR 3 frame gen enabled you can definitely see a palpable increase in the fluidity of camera movement here I'm showing the game with a high level of dlss scaling in performance mode but you will see similar or even better scaling with everstar 3 on when you go up to something like quality mode as we're seeing here where I can see FSR 3 increasing average frame rates by around 73% on that RTX 380 the issue here with using higher dlss modes on a GPU like this is that you have a lower input frame rate thus you're decreasing FSR 3's fluidity and you're rapidly increasing the visibility of present artifacts which I'll talk a bit about later as per amd's suggestion I also recommend applying FSR 3 frame gen to games and settings which are already at around 50 to 60 FPS at a minimum with 50 or 60 FPS input frame rates you'll get a minimum viable experience with the technology where the output frame rates tend to be in excess of 100 or so this is important so as to make artifacting less visible but it's also important if you're on a mouse and keyboard setup where input latency is much more easily felt than on a controller okay some good results in cyberpunk here but do we see similar uplifts in non-path Trace titles I would say based on the experience that I measured in Spider-Man Miles Morales the answer is yes here we running the game with daa at 1440p with rate tracing settings maxed out we can see that FSR 3 frame generation when enabled on the right here is increasing the average frame rate by about 65% so very similar numbers to what we saw on overdrive cyberpunk in GPU limited scenarios like the ones I'm showing here this is where you'll tend to see around a 60 to 75% average increase in frame rates on your GPU it's only in CPU limited scenarios that one starts to see near 100% increases in frame rate and that's something Rich talked about in his original FSR 3 review so the increase in frame rate is readily apparent and so is the increase in camera motion fluidity but how fluid is FSR 3 in these games now what I'm going to talk about here is actually very subjective for most people but I think that there are some objective data to talk about here if you can recall back when I covered Avatar frontiers of Pandora I had a mini section of that long review talking about how FSR 3 was in that game and how it could sometimes have issues presenting smooth frame times with vrr enabled basically you could start traversing the world in its more denser areas or engaging combat and the frame time started to get more erratic so even though FSR 3 was supporting variable refresh rate monitors correctly it still did not always look super smooth smooth in such moments due to the variability of the frame times that is a completely subjective appraisal of course and in the aftermath of the video I saw a lot of comments under the video or elsewhere on the web that presented different subjective or objective measurements here it is important to note a couple of things one is that not everyone can always perceive frame time discrepancies in games and that's completely valid another thing to note is that not every PC or test sequence will show the issue that I highlighted even in that video review I talked about how the issue was sometimes happening but not always so I really did actually want to try and get at the bottom of the issue here for this mod video but unfortunately I have come out only more confused after my testing as I cannot get consistent Behavior one of the theories in the wake of the last video was that the injected overlays like FCAT that we at digital Foundry use for PC well that they could be triggering the issue so in the wake of that I tested the game with and without an overlay and as we can see here here's the game running with an overlay being used and frame time analysis is being done by fcap we can see the frame time issue occurring in the bottom right of the frame time graph here basically larger frame time discrepancies between frames can occur that present similar to vsync jutter on a vrr panel now here's a similar scene again without the overlay being injected at all but instead I'm measuring the game's frame times using our console measuring tools which just analyzes video feeds and guess what the same issue can occur on the bottom right there when you see spurts of Saw too frame times so in the testing the overlay did not seem to change the ability for the issue to pop up another question was whether the saw to frame time issue could happen on AMD so I dropped in an RX 7900 XTX and tested the game out there and I was also reproducing the saw to frame time issue just like I was on an RTX 490 so I don't think at least in the testing I did there that the issue was occurring whether or not an overlay was on or whether or not the GPU was AMD or Nvidia it was just happening so I Enlisted the help of Richard lead better here to test on a different setup entirely with a core I9 13900 K with the 7900 XTX there to see if he could replicate the issue when he tested no Sawtooth frame times were occurring in that same problematic area where I measured the issue occurring on different GPU Hardware with or without an overlay I go back to test the area again after that because I'm so confused and guess what I load up the area again and suddenly I'm not seeing the issue at all just like rich is not seeing it the game hasn't been updated my PC has not changed at all and really nothing is different so whatever is causing frame time saw toothing and UNS smooth vrr Behavior well that's currently a mystery to me the final answer is that I really need more time and research to figure out what can cause the issue that I've measured in my play when trying out the FSR 3 mod on the RTX 380 I found that the frame time issue was not showing up consistently there either on that RTX 380 it was under control at times in many of the titles I tested with little to no issue when you just be cruising along but then sometimes it would flare up all of a sudden and impact the consistency of the frame generation experience making it less smooth Rich did his own testing of cyberpunk on the 380 using the mod and his testing did not show the issue being present to the same degree other than our CPUs being different but both being ridiculously highend I don't think there's any defining Factor as to when and how frame time issues might occur when using FSR 3 if they're going to happen at all reading up on user reports I have seen that some people say that they have impacted smoothness when using FSR 3 well others don't see any issue at all in light of that and my inability to consistently reproduce the issue based on on some Factor my general tip is to just give the game a restart if you start seeing issues as my avatar experience shows with that in mind I would say FSR 3 can be very smooth with vrr and the reasons why it cannot well they're currently unknown and they require quite a bit more [Music] [Applause] research getting over to the comparison to dss3 and general quality I would say the quality is good enough for most normal camera movement but there are definitely some obvious problem areas in the modded frame generation here one particular problem is Shadows check out this footage of me moving side by side in a plague tail recum notice how you see a kind of flashing double image of the shadow that looks like it is stuttering as I move from side to side this is due to shadows in FSR 3 not being properly reprojected this does not happen with Native dss3 in the game games you can inject to like we see here but it does happen with FSR 3 in all of the games I tested like we can see for example here in cyberpunk when focusing on the car's Shadow at the bottom of the screen this tends to be one of the more obvious artifacts when using this mod another issue is silhouette and hair artifacting like we see here in Allen W 2 when I move the camera from left to right you should be able to see what I mean on the character silhouette of their hair a kind of fizzling and haloing around the head that occurs and this is an issue that you'll see in other third person games with this FSR 3 mod that just doesn't really happen with the lss3 the last larger issue you may notice is a kind of stipple noise look showing up at times and areas of Greater contrast moving quickly the reason for this is due to FSR 3 resolve which seems dithered so sometimes things look a bit noisier depending upon how much fullcreen change is occurring rapidly now there are technically more quality differences with dlss 3 but this is just a mod and completely unofficial so focusing on the quality I think is missing the point as it's not really representative of an official FSR 3 frame gen implementation the bigger point is the one I talked about earlier camera motion and translation generally looks better and the game is going to be increasing frame rates in a way that will definitely extend a gpu's utility over time than it would not have had before and that is really all I have to say about this mod I think it's pretty cool if you did find this video cool please hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital Foundry posts a video support DF on patreon to get years of our work in high quality for download follow on Twitter comment below and as always this is Alex sping you farewell

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 188,665

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Id: wxlHq_EuxFU

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024