frames win games we proved it NVIDIA
advertises it and now we get to double how many we get for free NVIDIA says yes
thanks to a brand new feature exclusive to 40 series gpus called dlss 3.0 like
previous generations of dlss it improves your frame rate by trading off some
image quality unlike old school dlss however dlss 3.0 works not by lowering
the resolution but instead by pretending it's running faster than it really is
sounds like BS but I promise you it's
not what does it actually do should you turn it on and can we even tell the
difference I'll tell you right after I tell you about our sponsor Boost Mobile
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dlss 3.0 or more accurately deep
learning frame generation which I'll call it from now on is NVIDIA's answer
to low frame rates only officially available for NVIDIA's RTX 40 series
gpus for now it mandates the use of NVIDIA's reflex low latency Tech and
using an optical flow model on the GPU's tensor cores inserts fake frames in
between the real ones that your GPU is actually rendering literally doubling
your frame rate even without upscaling that's right it can be enabled without
dlss which is why I won't be calling it that this obviously makes gameplay look
a lot smoother but you might be thinking back to the battle days of the 2010s
when TVs would advertise 120 hertz and
240 hertz when all they really did was
hold back multiple frames to blend them
more or less by brute force that resulted in an often broken looking
effects that added substantial input lag and was only really good for keeping
track of where the puck is so you don't miss a sports ball hole in one what
makes dlfg different is that it's making an educated guess at what the next frame
should look like in near real time based on the previous frame and some motion
vectors provided by the game engine which should look a lot better and be
more responsive unfortunately dlfg isn't
available in very many games right now so I'm going to pick two to closely
examine starting with Marvel's Spider-Man remastered this game looks
shockingly good with dlfg and able to give us double the frame rate though
there are some things to take note of first off there's a sort of forward
ghosting that happens from time to time as dlfg does its thing sort of the same
way dlss 2.0 is ghosting happened you don't see it often but you can see it
clearly here when Spider-Man jumps out of his apartment Window as a kind of
Halo thanks to the game engine's insistence that he's moving but the way
the camera moves counteracts the motion Vector data from the game engine in
gameplay this manifests is a kind of Shimmer on the walk and wall crawling
animations looking almost like a lighting error and when scenes change
dramatically from shot to shot you'll find yourself staring at a frame made
entirely of visual artifacts something common to all games compatible with
frame generation right now and NVIDIA says it's a bug somewhere in the chain
and the flag should be getting set that disables frame generation during such
transitions it'll be fixed soon the more severe but paradoxically even less
noticeable artifact is the breakup of sharp shapes when in front of or behind
character models as digital Foundry pointed out the rooftop running part of
the intro shows this off pretty well and same deal with the Running Animation
when running up certain buildings my feelings are more or less the same as
theirs unless you really know what you're looking for you might not even
notice these artifacts especially since they look a bit like the kind of
artifacts you'd get from motion blur or streaming video that you've
subconsciously learned to ignore by now but anyway we'll see if our own Gamers
can notice them later on in the video and honestly I would be surprised if they could this
game has far more distracting visual anomalies that are unrelated to dlfg
like the way its ambient occlusion crawls along certain scenes and how it
renders even nearby background objects at a lower blurred resolution regardless
of your depth of field settings all of which is to say that despite the pixel
peeping we're doing here dlfg doesn't seriously harm image quality and those
artifacts are gone in the next frame anyway they're only on screen for
anywhere from 16.7 milliseconds to 8.3
and even smaller as the frame rate climbs of course in order for frame
generation to do its thing it really needs a certain frame rate to be usable
NVIDIA recommended 40 to 60 is the
Baseline when I ask them about it in terms of graphical artifacts while
they're still minor they definitely got a lot more pronounced when I locked the
frame rate to 60 instead of 120 and when I dropped it down even further to 30 you
can start to see how much guesswork dlfg has to do as there's more changes
between the frames like check out Spider-Man's mask in the this scene I
had to see how deep that rabbit hole goes so I dropped it down once again to
15 frames per second and that exposed even more weirdness check out how it
handles the intro video here it looks like the GPU is failing like it's really
weird the game clearly was never meant to run at this frame rate though there
are some fascinating things that happen to the laptop display here and to Peter
himself when he's flailing around and when he finally jumps out of the window
it looks almost like 2 000 Sarah YouTube but higher resolution he even mostly
disappears behind the railing and the railing doesn't fare much better the
other game I tested for image quality is f122 and when it looks good it looks
really good but when it looks bad it looks really bad right off the bat the
thing you'll notice most is the thing that's front and center the driver name
tags it's not such a huge deal at 120
hertz but they Shimmer and shake at 60 FPS and things get worse from there I'm
not sure why such small motions relatively speaking are causing eui to
corrupt like this when it wasn't nearly as noticeable in Spider-Man even with
fast motion but there it is another curious thing you'll notice is at the
bottom of the screen even at 120 hertz you'll see Phantom pieces of the minimap
flash on screen from time to time and if you look really closely you can make out
what looks like an F1 car's tires with Optical camouflage applied to them when
we crank the frame rate down you can see this way more readily it looks like
NVIDIA trained the data set exclusively using the hood camera and possibly even
on a single track while we're down in low FPS territory you can also see some
more examples of ghosting and overshoot on the car's tires and sometimes even
the front Wings start to overshoot ahead of the car it's really too bad because
at high frame rates most of these issues are easily ignored and f122 itself would
be an ideal candidate for gamers looking to crank the visuals on weaker Hardware
because it relies more on anticipation than twitch aiming and it is often
played with a controller after all it's far more tolerant of input lag than say
a competitive shooter the same could be said of most simulators even PC Building
simulator check out our Floatplane Exclusive by the way for the uncut Jake
Vs Linus Shenanigans and what about input lag
we were never going to get 120 hertz level input latency with 60 real frames
and 60 fake frames at least in theory we should see roughly the same input
latency as the original frame rate right due to the shortage of games available
to test with and with Labs tied up with pre-testing for the upcoming rdna 3
release we've only got input latency results for cyberpunk but we can already
see an interesting pattern here the complete dlss 3.0 package provided input
latency somewhere between dlss 2.0 and Native 4k on both our high-end and low
end CPU benches which is expected due to the extra processing frame generation
requires NVIDIA cited about an extra three milliseconds though in our case we
measured more like four and a half or even as high as 13 on the core I3 that's
almost a frame at 60 FPS for that one perhaps this is a driver optimization
thing but it seems like even though it can boost frame rates and CPU bound
scenarios it can only help responsiveness so much still it is lower
than running at 4K native and if you're not quite a CPU bound you aren't likely
to perceive the difference at all that brings up a good question we've looked
at all of this under a microscope so far but how does it actually feel to play
with does it make things significantly worse do people even notice when it's on
and which do they prefer to find out we
set up three identical test benches connected to three identical monitors
each displaying a different configuration one rendering natively one
using dlss set to Quality and one using dlss 3.0 with frame Generation all other
settings were identical for guinea pigs we selected five subjects of varying
familiarity with Graphics technology and asked them to play the games and rank
each setup in order of visual Fidelity and responsiveness first up Marvel
Spider-Man Captain 120 frames per second note that this means that dlss 3.0 was
running at 60fps and doubling the frames using AI let's see what the normies
think see I notice in this one here in the reflections there's like a bit more
flickering okay this this one seems a little slower
I think I do like this one this is like
fast it's like someone hit the turbo button on the computer I'm gonna say
that this middle one looks the best so the normies seemed to not be able to
tell the difference but what about cultured and Discerning gamers
I don't know they seem so similar now I'm not sure what I think
it's funny how they have the same guy like in every single scene it's like the
same face I'm looking at yeah I feel like that's the smoothest you can kind
of see a little bit of Shimmer but I think that's just a setting things not necessarily
um it's fun I would choose to play on this one and I don't know why and
naturally we have to bring in someone who is relatively knowledgeable about displays and Graphics yeah I'm kind of
the display guy I guess I do all the reviews for displays I own a display I
got it crazy right
no they're all really similar the UI
elements they get garbled with DLS S3 I
don't know man it kind of the same thing one two three and here are our results
for visual Fidelity native rendering appears nearly indistinguishable from
dlss's Ai upscaling and only when frame
generation gets involved does quality seem to suffer though most subjects
found it difficult to detect any difference as for responsiveness while
we know that frame generation measurably hurts latency many of our subjects
actually felt it was more responsive than dlss 2.0 which it literally is not
so what you might be asking I'm playing a game at 120 FPS natively why would I
bother using dlss that's a fair question how does the technology fare at 60 FPS
we took our same subjects and ran the test again swapping the configurations
for each monitor to try to account for any unknown bias preferring a specific
monitor I don't know
I don't know dude I feel like the middle one is the worst
whatever I said yesterday I don't know if I was just kind of making it up in my
head okay at this point I cannot tell the difference I noticed a weird
artifact and like it kind of like it's hesitating it looks like it's hesitating
right now um when I move the graphic scope potato
the text isn't so bad but the marker itself gets garbled when I flick it
around a little bit I'm I'm still liking this left one a lot at 60 hertz we see
dlss 3.0 really start to suffer in both visual quality and latency most subjects
quickly selected the frame generated rig is the worst at everything we did the
same 60 FPS test in a plugtail Requiem and found similar results with nobody
preferring the generated frames but what if we just uncap the frame rate and
really let those systems fly into the triple digits well we did just that and
interestingly we see frame generation take the lead in latency our guess is
that many subjects interpreted the added smoothness of the generated frames as
feeling more responsive at high frame rates dlss 3.0 does a great job of
adding frames without introducing unplayable latency or immersion breaking
artifacts at the lower frame rates well things are more of a compromise but
here's something to note the only card available with dlss 3.0 is a 4090 and if
there's any card that really doesn't need frame gen is that thing the real
benefit of frame generation will be providing budget Gamers the ability to
crank the settings and get frame rates that they typically would not be able to
achieve so it was one last test we played a game of would you rather would
you rather play your game without frame generation at 30 frames per second or at
60 frames per second with frame generation probably want whatever you
dlss thing you just put on okay this one automatically oh definitely the first
option easily previous setting I think this is better yeah I really can't tell
a huge difference I think I prefer this
one I want smoother I prefer the first
one oh this one hands down I'll take smoothness and artifacts every day if
you went into this thinking dlfg was a dud or if you still do think that I
wouldn't write it off so quickly think about what dlfg is doing say you're
limited to 38 PS for whatever reason you can either have an experience that's
full of what looks like stuttering or you can reduce visual Fidelity in a far
more noticeable Way by reducing settings of resolution or you can turn on dlfg
and look at a smooth 60fps with some very minor visual artifacts that might
be masked by motion blur anyway your input latency is going to be similar to
30fps but because you have smoother looking gameplay you'll be able to
adjust your aim and track objects far more easily it won't save you in a
competitive shooter of course but it'll turn single player games into a more
enjoyable experience as two clicks Philip put it in a recent video we
didn't really Embrace resolution scaling with dlss early on either but it's now
ubiquitous and well accepted among Gamers I mean it's either that or you
run at a lower resolution and let your monitor scale it the stupid way right
dlfg is still in its infancy with bugs that are actively being hunted down and
squashed and before you conclude that you'd never use it because you don't
want any input lag at all two clicks Phillips video had another interesting
angle that has me very excited for the future use
Ella for VR to Dean put from the real frame rate making
games playable even sub-60 it's a separate concept from dlfg but the demo
built by comrade Stinger showcases the intended effect very well here we have
30fps rendering but by enabling reprojection or async Time Warp power
movements especially Mouse movements are smooth and responsive you can see in
this mode that it works by basically projecting the scene in a kind of a
virtual display that moves back to the center of the screen as each frame is
updated we'll have this link below so you can try it for yourself since the
video really won't do it justice on its own two clicks Phillips idea of
combining this with full gated rendering to render a low resolution extension of
the screen means that you'd practically never notice it and combined with frame
generation to smooth everything out you've got a recipe for comparatively
very low Hardware requirements along with very high responsiveness and frame
rates this would be a holy grail of
sorts there are many games that could benefit from this setup but none that I
can think of would be a better fit than digital combat simulator DCS requires a
beefy system to run and while you can get away with a not so beefy control
setup one thing that you really need while flying is to keep an eye on your
target whatever that may be so you've got to be able to whip your view around
a lot and low frame rates make that job
so much more difficult to do while just tracking small fast moving objects and
if you lose track of your Target in DCS you can go from Hunter to hunted in an
instant no matter what you're flying in a hypothetical future where Eagle Dynamics and developers like them
Embrace Technologies like dlfg and async Time Warp the price of admission becomes
substantially lower and they'll require less power to run too it may be a
situational feature for today but if it means that more Gamers can have better
experiences and even experiences that they wouldn't be able to have at all
otherwise I'm keeping my hopes up for a tomorrow where our AI overlords
regularly serve us those delicious imitation frames and we're I talk about
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thanks for watching guys maybe go check out the video where we tested to see if
we could tell when dlss 2.0 is on or not these kinds of analysis videos they tend
to miss out on the experience of actually using the feature and a lot of
new ones can be lost just looking at the flaws instead of looking at the hole you
know