Up to 90-120hz is pretty nice. That’s the sweet spot for me. I’m not into esports and also I’m an environmentalist so 240hz and 360 hz monitors just seem really excessive to me since you need hundreds of watts of power to push those frame rates. I usually run like 75 hz on my steamdeck or other lower power devices.

It’s more so that the actual FPS is lower when using FSR in many cases. The GPU frame rate doesn’t matter in terms of input lag and stuff, it’s all about how many time the CPU can loop through the game logic per second.

So basically when you move 10 steps forward in a game, the CPU is running tons of code that take the time elapsed since the previous frame and interpolates where the player should be this frame. This is Delta time, (change in time between this frame and last) it’s multiplied by stuff moving to give fluid movement with a variable frame rate. This is why older games would slow down if the frame rate dropped and new games will still calculate the passage of time correctly, even if you only have 15 FPS.

The fake frames have nothing to do with the game engine or logic, they are deep faked frames that are created with a neural network to fill in between real frames. This does give you something very close to extra frames on the GPU, but there is often a performance hit on the real frames since it’s a heavy process. The CPU has to stay synced to the GPUs real frames since some logic is CPU bound, like physics, creating certain buffers, all kinds of stuff. If the real frame rate of the GPU is lower, it bottlenecks the CPU since it’s also involved to a smaller degree, in rendering real frames. (Preparing data, sending it to the GPU, certain operations which are faster on the CPU that involve rendering like maybe using MMX or other CPU extensions.

So basically the less real frames you have, the longer the wait between when you game engine can detect mouse and keyboard events and update the game world, even if you are getting 2-3 times the frame rate with generated frames.

If you get higher real FPS via upscaling, and a lower resolution. It can improve input latency and sim speed.

True, Ig I was trying to teach people about why FSR often causes input lag. If you are getting 120 real frames then yeah, it probably won’t matter much, but if you are getting less then 60 real frames it’s going to be a worse experience unless you are playing menu games or something.

Generated frames are created using a neural network, they have nothing to do with the actual game scripts and game loop and input polling and stuff. FSR does generate frames to interpolate between real frames but things like physics and input are not being generated as well. It’s only visual. I guess maybe you have to have some basic knowledge about how a computer program and game engine works to understand this.

Basically the CPU steps through the simulation in steps. When you use frame gen, if it lowers the actual frame rate, then the CPU is making less loops per second over everything, like the physics updates, input polling(capturing key presses and mouse events), and other stuff like this.

Maybe it’s not the CPU but with FSR either way the real frame rate drops which is why you get input lag. The game logic/game loop is only calculated per real frame. Which means if you take a 20% drop in real frame rate you are going to get 20% more input lag.

If it drops the real frame rate more than FSR2, which it does, then yes, you will have more input lag.

The frame rate isnt going from 30 to 120 FPS. It’s actually going from 30 to like 20. The rendered frames are different then the CPU frames which handles the game loops, (physics, input, simulation, etc)

It’s because game logic is calculated on real frames and these things lower the real frame rate even though they give you more rendered frames. If you were getting 40 real FPS, and then you go to 30 real fps, you will feel a significant amount of lag even if you are getting 60 fps in fake frames. Basically the game loop is running slower and stuff like input polling is happening slower even if you have a higher frame rate.