with just a few clicks comrade Stingers
asynchronous reprojection demo can make 30 frames per second gameplay look and
feel like 240 frames per second it's
completely free takes almost no additional system resources and the
effect is so convincing that we fooled even the most seasoned gamers in our
office we're still above 240. I'm gonna say 120. yeah I'm gonna say like 140
maybe even maybe higher I have no idea
this is cool I don't know what you've done holy
hahaha just your initial impression is
obviously fake right haha April fools no
it's December and asynchronous reprojection is not only real but it's
actually a mature technology there are literally hundreds of games going back
half a decade that are using this Tech to boost perceived performance
they're just not the kind of games that you typically play on a monitor
but why not right the idea to use it on desktop came from
two clicks Philip and it's one of those ideas that is so brilliant in hindsight
that it seems totally obvious like this segue to our sponsor ridge
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shipping
you can download comrade Stinger's Unity project to play around with for yourself
and I would recommend that you do so but first let me explain what's going on
here this slider in the corner allows us to control the frame rate of our game
while the rest of these parameters are to apply and compare the performance and
rendering tricks that make up asynchronous reprojection let's go a
little slower this time we'll start with Native 240 FPS rendering
I know this isn't going to fully come through in a YouTube video but it looks
smooth right it is but let's say we can't afford an
RTX 4090 and our GPU can only reliably
generate 30 real frames per second
drag this down over here set to render at 30 FPS and
obviously this is a degraded experience with visible
choppiness tearing and input leg
then with the push of a button it
instantly feels like 240 FPS again even
though we're still running at 30 frames per second the first step to show you
guys what's happening is to go even further and stop rendering new frames
altogether then enable asynchronous
reprojection interesting
this is a great demonstration of how the
display and user input can be refreshed
without receiving a new rendered frame from the GPU
this obviously isn't a great gaming experience given that we're looking at a
static picture in a black void and
we can't even move our character but it's very smooth
let's take things a step further pun intended by breaking the on-screen
objects into strips and sorting them by their distance from the player we can
actually guess where they're going to end up relative to the player's input
again without rendering a new frame at
zero FPS things get pretty messy pretty fast but watch what happens if we have
even a little bit more than that not bad
for 10 frames per second but the black
void is still there especially if we
whip the camera around and in some ways it's even more distracting that's where
the next little bit of black magic comes in the area of your vision that is sharp
enough to read text or recognize a human face is only about six to seven degrees
everything else is peripheral vision which is relatively blurry but highly
sensitive to motion that's why this is
so annoying even if I'm still in The Sweet Spot of your field of view but
there's an easy fix you can simply stretch out any object that's at the
edge of the last rendered frame until a new update is received and you can see
that by filling that void with something even just a loose approximation of
what's supposed to be there the perceived image quality jumps
dramatically
no Wild no of course at only 10 frames
per second we're going to be able to break the illusion pretty easily even by
moving the mouse moderately quickly but
going back to the demo we did before if
we boost our frame rate back up to 30
all of a sudden it's far less noticeable unless we look and
move at the same time then we can kind
of notice that judder but let's say we ratcheted it up to 60 FPS
oh now
things are getting pretty convincing here then the question is if this has
been around for years and can turn the 60 FPS that your mid-range GPU turns out
into a 240 FPS experience why on Earth
haven't we been using it if I had to guess I'd say because it just didn't
occur to anyone that we wanted it myself included I mean when was the last time
Gamers asked for a compromised form of rendering the outrage over driver cheats
would have been immediate so async re-projection well it wasn't developed
to help Gamers save money or to help GPU manufacturers get more FPS on low end
carts it was developed out of necessity in the early days of VR it was already
clear that being Tethered to a stationary expensive PC was always going
to be a friction point for Mass adoption why does it look like the inside of a
vagina but mobile chipsets had nowhere near the performance they needed to
render 90 plus frames per second at greater than full HD resolutions
performance hasn't been perfect especially when there's a lot of like
particle effects on screen so they had to do something to bring out lightweight
battery-powered headsets that also didn't cause users to projectile vomit
within minutes of putting them on and
asynchronous reprojection and over the years it's gotten really good
don't take my word for it though let's take a more detailed look at the
reactions of some of the gamers in our office I have over 900 hours in Apex
Legends and over 300 hours in vermintide too I am a competitive FPS player I rank
in top five to ten percent on apex Legends globally and I've been a gamer
for basically as long as I can remember I
play a lot of video games from FPS to
puzzle to anything I play games on my
computer I game a lot and I'm terrible at it I
play a lot of games I've helped develop some games hi I'm Mark
um I'm gonna say 120. no 90. I would say
one 140. yeah I'm just saying like the trails like I'm seeing things rent take
a while to refresh on the screen in terms of like frame rate it doesn't feel
that much different I want to say it's worse Anthony what are you using
foveated rendering my God wants to say that this is the
least responsive so far to me this feels like 60. has anything changed
no no I can't I can't tell it feels
feels the same uh yeah like I can very clearly tell with the with the shadow
here just kind of how blurry those edges are for a split second from a technical
perspective I'm intrigued I'm incredibly intrigued this is this is super neat
it's so hard to know if if I'm thinking I'm seeing something
because I'm looking for it or if there actually is something different like if
you really quickly snap between like the player model and that kind of cyan uh
Cube there's definitely a lot of blur going on at like really high speed yeah
it's basically the same as last I can't really tell I want to say it feels
better this seems a bit better again if I had to guess about frame rate
I have a suspicion that all the frame rates are the same
um when you go really fast it's bad that
is incredibly annoying I would not want
to play like that whoa okay clearly
things are things are things are popping in and out of existence I don't know is
real anymore uh I don't know if it's just like you know you know how there's
um systems where basically whenever something's being looked at is being
rendered but as soon as you're looking away it gets called or it's not it's
just not rendered anymore um that's what this feels like but like
on a slow mode laughs
oh oh no no
oh
what do you mean Better or Worse we'll have the mostly uncut version of those
sessions up on Floatplane.com if you want to see more it's pretty funny but
the gist is that not a single one of our test subjects correctly identified the
frame rate no matter what we set it to in fact a surprising number of our
respondents thought that 60fps felt and
looked worse than 30 because they started actively looking for the
artifacts now to be fair to our test subjects they're not idiots it's really
hard to tell in person and that's part of what makes this test so interesting
but why is it so hard to tell the reason
lies in the relationship between frame rate and refresh rate
frame rate is a measure of how many complete images per second are generated
by your GPU the higher your frames per second the sooner you're going to get
the most up-to-date information say for example on the position of your
opponents that also includes though the
results of your inputs that improves the
perceived responsiveness of the gaming experience and is one of the reasons why
a high frame rate is so desirable but the frame rate almost never
corresponds to the refresh rate of your monitor that is how many times per
second it can actually show you a new image
I understand why people confuse the two sometimes they are similar in the sense
that the higher the refresh rate the sooner you see the results of your mouse
movements and your key presses so they have a similar impact on your gaming
experience but the refresh rate doesn't
work to give you new information unless you've got an updated frame so that they
aren't quite the same the conventional wisdom for competitive PC Gamers before
the days of high refresh rate displays was that you wanted to push the frame
rate to at least double of what your display was capable of that should give
you an edge over your opponents by having slightly more up-to-date
information on the screen that usually meant targeting about 120 FPS the idea
was that by the time your monitor is finished displaying the current frame
your GPU will have created a more up-to-date frame for the next one than
it might have if both of them were locked to 60. this is what we're seeing
with async reprojection but in the other direction the GPU is running slower but
the user inputs are displayed as soon as the display can show them even if the
GPU hasn't caught up yet that means that regardless of the real frame rate input
from the mouse remains responsive and the most common complaint from our test
subjects while moving their view at these ridiculously low frame rates
wasn't even that the game was laggy or unresponsive but instead it was the
stretching along the edges of our screen our test subject's reactions by the way
were great when we showed them how the sausage was made
what is this what the hell is happening
oh my God what
oh my God whoa oh okay oh my God this is
next level it goes to show how frame rate and
perception are so heavily tied together like looking at that I you you would
never have guessed that it was it was a 30 before obviously it's not perfect I
could get a much better experience with like fancy Hardware but I mean if you
can enable this on a lower tier GPU or something that's like pretty crazy and
what's really cool about this is that it's not just a placebo having more
responsive inputs even if your frame rate isn't that high can make a big
difference when you're tracking a moving Target say in an FPS game and this is
just the beginning comrade Stinger put this demo together in literally an
evening which means that edge cases like kiting a character model are still
pretty ugly thanks to all the visual anomalies but imagine if the major GPU
and game engine designers were to build support for this into their products
NVIDIA is using machine learning to generate whole artificial frames in dlss
3.0 and that could end up seeming downright silly if all they had to do
was use their machine learning to guess at what should be just outside that
frame that hasn't been generated yet or what might be on the side of that sliced
up model that you're kiting around however it's not a Magic Bullet either
even if asynchron projections artifacts could be nearly eliminated racing games
mobas and other games with mostly fixed
viewpoints might actually benefit more from traditional rendering at variable
refresh rates like with g-sync or freesync so like variable refresh rates
or frame generation for that matter this technique is just one tool in the
developer's toolbox that if it catches on and matures could be used to improve
responsiveness and here's another cool one also minimize power draw imagine
this on a future console like a Nintendo switch 2 or a steam deck too you know a
device where maybe you could run at 60fps but you're routinely capped to 30
in order to save battery thumbsticks and especially gyro controls could be made
far more responsive with almost no increase in power drop suffice it to say
I'm extremely excited to see where this and Technologies like it will take us in
the future especially in a world where GPU prices have risen to the point where
they're just unreasonable and gaming on top tier Hardware has become less and
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below if you guys enjoyed this go check out our recent video on dlss 3.0 for
more on this kind of frame rate might not really matter in the future
technology it's a little rough around the edges but hey Solo's dlss and FSR
1.0 and look how far they've come