Upscaling and Frame Generation are disasters meant to conceal unfulfilled promises from GPU makers for 4k gaming, and as a coverup for the otherwise horrible performance some modern games have, even at 1080/1440p resolutions.

Upscaling will never, no matter how much AI and overhead you throw at it, create an image that is as good as the same scene rendered at native res.

Frame Generation is a joke, and I am absolutely gobsmacked that people even take it seriously. It is nothing but extra AI frames shoved into your gameplay, worsening latency, response times, and image quality, all so you can artificially inflate a number. 30FPS gaming is, and will always be, infinitely better as an experience, than AI frame doubling a 30fps experience to 60FPS.

and because both these technologies exist, game devs are pushing out less optimized to completely unoptomized games that run like absolute dogshit, requiring you to use upscaling and shit even at 1080p just to get reasonable frame rates on GPUs that should run it just fine if it was optimized better (and we know its optimization, because some of these games do end up getting that optimization pass long after launch, and wouldnt you know… 9fps suddenly became 60fps)

  • Lucy :3@feddit.orgEnglish
    43·
    5 days ago

    To concretize:

    • Upscaling with ML may make the image acceptable if you don’t look at anything the devs don’t want you. You’re supposed to look at yourself, your objective/enemy and maybe a partner. Everything else, especially foliage, hair etc., looks like shit. Flimmery, changing with distance and perspective. Lighting is weird. Thing is, if we aren’t supposed to pay attention, we could just go back to HL-level graphics. Even HL 1. However, this would break the aspect of stuff looking good, of you being able to enjoy looking around and not only feeling immersed, but like you are seeing something that you will never actually see in real life - not because it looks unrealistically artificial, but too beautiful, too crazy and too dreamy to be real. However, when I get literally sick by actually looking around, because stuff changes abstractly, not like my brain expects it, that takes away the only actual visual advantage over GoldSrc.
    • Frame Gen does not make sense for literally any group of people:
    • You have 20FPS? Enjoy even worse input lag (because in order to generate frame B between A and C, the generation algorithm actually needs to know frame C, leading to another 1/20 second delay + time to actually generate it) and therefore a nice 80FPS gameplay for your eyes, while your brain throws up because the input feels like =< 10FPS.
      • You have 40FPS and want 80-160FPS? Well, that might be enjoyable to anyone watching, because they only see smoother gameplay, meanwhile you, again, have a worse experience than 40FPS. I can play story games at 40FPS, no problem, but halving the input lag literally more than doubled? Fuck no. I see so many YouTubers being like: “Next we’re gonna play the latest and greatest test, Monkey Cock Dong Wu II. And of course it has 50% upscaling and MFG! Look at that smooth gameplay!” - THE ONLY THING THAT’S SMOOTH IS YOUR BRAIN YOU MONKEY, I CAN LITERALLY SEE THE DESYNC BETWEEN YOUR MOUSE MOVEMENTS AND INGAME. WHICH WAS NOT THERE IN OTHER BENCHMARKS, GAMES OR THE DESKTOP. I’M NOT FUCKING BLIND. And, of course, worse foliage than RDR2. Not because of the foliage itself, but the flimmering between.
      • You have 60FPS? And you know that you can actually see a difference between 60 and 144, 240Hz etc.? Well that’s wrong, you only notice the difference in input lag. So it’s going to be worse than smooth now. Because, again, the input lag get’s even worse with FG, and much worse with MFG.
      • You have 80 FPS but are a high FPS gamer needing quick reaction times and stuff? Well yeah, it’s only getting worse with FG. Obviously.

    And about 4k gaming … play old games, with new GPUs. RDR2 works quite good on my 7800XT. More than 60FPS, which is very enough if you aren’t a speedrunner or similar. No FSR, of course.