this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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Which was what this tech was supposed to be for when it was first pitched to gamers, a tool to help extend the usable life of a GPU.
Not we know now that's not how the tech is being used and especially for Nvidia, that not how this is used and marketed at this point and it would seem that developers are just expecting upscaling to fill in the gap for not doing a proper job to being with.
ETA, also don't forget that it's not just upscaling, Nvidia are pushing fake frames as the standard too in their marketing and optimization push.
Frame generation is a requirement if we’re going to see very high refresh rate (480hz+) displays become the norm. No card is rasterizing an entire scene 500 times per second.
Calling it fake frames is letting Internet memes stand in place of actual knowledge. There’s a lot of optimizations done in the rendering pipeline which use data from previous frames to generate future frames, generating an intermediate frame while waiting for the GPU to finish rendering the previous frame is just one trick.
The generated frame increases the visual clarity of motion, you can see at https://testufo.com/photo.
We’re not going to have cards that can pathtrace at 4k@1000hz anytime soon, frame generation is one of the techniques that will make it possible.
It’s one thing to be upset at companies marketing teams who try to confuse people with FPS numbers by tweaking up scaling and frame generation. Directing that frustration at the technology itself is silly.
e: a downvote, great argument
Yeah, downvoted because I woke up and saw this absolutely ridiculous strawman that bordered on marketing drivel worth of Nvidia and monitor manufacturing advertising wing.
Yeah, marketing lies. I mentioned this in the last paragraph.
You're skeptical of the benefits, that is obvious.
You're wrong about it being subjective though. There are peer reviewed methods of creating photographs that display motion blur as a human eye would experience it. People have been using these techniques to evaluate monitors for years now. Here's a very high level overview of the state of objective testing: https://blurbusters.com/massive-upgrade-with-120-vs-480-hz-oled-much-more-visible-than-60-vs-120-hz-even-for-office/ . We are seeing diminishing returns because it, roughly, takes a doubling in the refresh rate to cut the motion blur in half. 60-120 is half as blurry, 144 to 240 is only 25% less blurry.
If you want to keep seeing noticeable gains, up to being imperceptible, then display refresh rates need to continue to double and there have to be new frames generated for each of those refresh rates. Even if a card can do 480fps on some limited games, it can't do 1000fps, or 2000fps.
We need exponential increases in monitor refresh rates in order to achieve improvements in motion blur, but graphics cards have not been making exponential increases in power in quite some time.
Rasterization and Raytracing performance growth is sub-exponential while the requirements for reducing motion blur are exponential. So either monitor companies can decide to stop improving (not likely since TCL just demoed a 4k 1000hz monitor) or there has to be some technological solution for filling the gap.
That technological solution is frame generation.
Unless you know of some other way to introduce exponential growth in processing power (if you did you would win multiple Nobel prizes), then we have to use something that isn't raw rendering. There is no way for a game to 'optimize' its way into having 10x framerate, or 100x framerate.
Yes, game companies are lazy and they cover the laziness by marketing their game with a lot of upscaling so that they can keep producing crazier and crazier graphics despite graphics cards performance growth not keeping up. This is the fault of gaming companies and their marketing and not of upscaling and frame generation technology
Frame generation gives all cards better FPS, which objectively smooths out motion. Going from 30 to 60 fps cuts motion blur in half. Nothing supposed about it.
A developer's choice to optimize their game and their choice to support upscaling and frame generation are not mutually exclusive choices. There are plenty of examples of games which run well natively and also support frame generation and upscaling.
Also, frame generation only adds latency when the frame time is long (low FPS). As the source framerate increases the input latency and the frame time converge. In addition, it's possible to use frame generation to reduce input delay (blur busters: https://blurbusters.com/frame-generation-essentials-interpolation-extrapolation-and-reprojection/). Input latency is a very solvable problem.
My point is that you're not understanding the trajectory of display hardware development vs the graphics card performance growth and presenting frame generation and upscaling as some plot by game developers and graphics card designers so that they can produce worse products.
It's conspiracy nonsense.
It's very unfortunate that all of this shiny new tech is often only present on the latest GPUs, this is a good exception to something that looks like a forever rule.
I understand there were big changes between RDNA 3 and 4, but if you look at GCN and it's support thru the generations this trend still seems greedy as hell.