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.
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.
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.
I would actually argue it does not. Frame generation requires a minimum of 45-60 FPS so with such a requirement it does not take a game from unplayable to playable. Additionally, those frames don’t lead to the same experience as if the GPU had natively rendered the game because it does not account for the user input for those frames. It literally delays the next frame to insert a fake frame in between, leading to an increase in latency, so the only experience improvement is a smoothing of the rendering but it makes the visual quality worse and the latency worse. To me, this does not make sense and has been very wrongly advertised by nvidia with claims such as an 5070 = 4090, so so wrong.
Edit: frame generation is only appeasing the people for whom higher FPS = better, without looking at the real user experience such as frame pacing, latency, visual quality etc.