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Comment by jekwoooooe | Hacker News Reader

Why is there so much hate against fake frames? I know you can’t tell the difference

NVidia themselves have said that framegen shouldn't be used if the card isn't hitting 60 FPS to start with because of the latency it introduces. If the card is cut down enough that it's struggling to hit 60 FPS in games, enabling framegen will do more harm then good.

You can feel additional latency easily in competitive FPS or high speed arcade racing games.

You can feel less than 50-60 fps on a management game where you only interact with the UI and move the camera around, not game breaking but doesn't feel great. And I used to play far cry 3 and CSGO at ~25 fps, I'm used to lack of performance.

"I am accustomed to using crap so it is okay if this brand new graphics card is crap"

I think they're saying "I'm used to crap and even I can feel this is crap in cases where people will claim no-one can tell"

Well maybe I’m just spoiled by my 4090 then I never go under 100 anywhere let alone 60

Fake frames have a big latency penalty, because you can't generate a frame between X and Y until you have Y. At the point that you have generated frame Y, however many frames you insert give you that much additional latency, beyond whatever your display adds.

I guess I can see some utility in situations where latency is not a major factor, but IMHO, that pushes out most gaming.

I believe DLSS frame gen predicts future frames (X_1, X_2, X_3) given (X_0, X_-1, X_-2, ...), without waiting for X_4. At least that's the impression I get from their marketing.

Nvidia Reflex 2 does that with async frame warp (that has been used in VR for a while now), but it's separate from DLSS, and is not supported in many games.

Yeah, but there's still a latency penalty, because X_1, X_2, X_3 won't respond to player input, so your effective latency is still that of your 'real' FPS, and that's lower than without because the frame gen takes a good fraction of GPU resources.

This is where you get to pretend your losses are nvidia's fault.

You absolutely can tell the difference. DLSS (upscale) visually is massively different in some games. Sometimes it works great, sometimes the result is very ugly. I've tested with several of my favorites.

And generated frames are far worse than that. If you're running at a very high base framerate (100+) then they can look OK but the moment the frames get any further apart the visual quality starts to tank.

because you can tell the difference, they have quite a few artifacts, and they make latency worse which is especially problematic in the scenarios where you need the "performance" offered by fake frames. At this price point it's that last thing that's especially problematic. You may get 60fps in an fps counter with dlss 4, but it'll feel like 15-20fps and not be very playable

You can feel them and the feeling has a multiplicative effect with Unreal's shortcuts (their tweening, lighting/shadow estimations).

Publishers are also forcing the settings to be on, to save time on optimization and for false advertising.

This is why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44368785

Fake frames are cool tech but they are horribly mismarketed, indistinguishable from scam.

It’s an escape hatch for developers to ship shitty unoptimised games.

Because there are other cards available at this price point with significantly better raster performance. So just go with that instead.

Try playing on a 43" TV. You can tell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com