It just kinda makes no sense to me. How can you improve the framerate by predicting how the next frame should be rendered while reducing the overhead and not increasing it more than what it already takes to render the scene normally? Like even the simplistic concept of it sounds like pure magic. And yet… It’s real.
Adding to what others are saying: having a relatively high fps to start with helps frame gen work better:
For these reasons, frame gen works best for those who already have a high base fps. I use it take advantage of 4k 240hz monitor in visually rich single player experiences. I aim for 70-90 base fps and then double it with frame gen. For competitive multiplayer I disable it.
This kinda also explains to me why my experience with games that offer FG have been mostly bad. The only game where FG actually made the game smoother, visually, was STALKER 2. Without FG, I get like 40fps even with FSR. With FG, it looks and almost feels like natural 60fps in other games but the input lag kinda ruins all the visual gains by making it very icky to control. Every other game, tho, where I get close to but not exactly 60fps, if I turn FG on the FPS counter says 60fps but the game is visually not fluid (even if the input lag isn’t at all noticeable; like standing still and watching trees blow in the wind or NPCs walking around looks even lower than the 40-50fps I was getting without FG on) and it often starts to stutter every few seconds/minutes which varies on the game.
I figured it might just be my older GPU (GTX 1660 Super) simply not having some chip necessary for it work properly. Like DLSS or RTX ray tracing. Which is also a little ironic given one would thinl FG is for when you can’t get a stable FPS on older or lower powered hardware. 🤷♂️
Yeah, there’s a fair bit of criticism about the tech being better for the higher-end cards that shouldn’t need it in the first place. Another way this shows up is in VRAM amounts.
To ELI5, how effective FG is at improving the base frame rate scales with available VRAM. (Think 60 improved to 80 versus 60 improved to 120.) Some modern games hit 12GB regularly now even in 1080p and before any fancy tech. (There’s a separate discussion on game optimization in there.) Since lower-end cards really skimp on provided VRAM (every tier should really be at least 4GB higher), there’s not much space there for FG to work with in the first place.
Ohhh. That might actually look nice. I haven’t thought about using it in that direction