Resolution modifiers, frame gen, etc.

[punkncat]

I have been admittedly outspoken concerning these various modifiers especially how it pertains to a cards power/ability and the need for such against sheer rasterization. (I probably spelled that wrong) My initial consideration of it actually being a sort of cheat rather than counting on pure grunt to accomplish desired resolutions and framerate. In fairness to my position at the time, I really don't care much for Ray Tracing, and the last couple of GPU I have used had enough power to turn out acceptable frame rates to resolution at highest settings for most things.

I just put together a spare parts PC of some stuff that has been sitting on the shelf, alongside a new case and motherboard to round out the build. The graphics card in this unit is a GTX 970 blower type. On its own it does a pretty fair job of keeping 'mostly' 60 FPS at mid-low settings at 720 resolution. In particular, there were a couple of games I wanted to see better results from. For said experiment I opted to check out AMD's FSR 1 and 2.x

I have to say that after experiencing what this tech CAN do for older cards, even Nvidia, it is quite the boon for folks playing on older hardware. My prior opinion of the tech wasn't high, but after actually seeing it make a significant difference with hardware of this age, it really is a game changer.

 

[NorbertPlays]

I don't consider it cheating at all. There's going to come a point where improving performance by throwing more hardware at it becomes unsustainable both from an economic and technical point of view, and while Moore's Law may not be quite dead yet it's definitely feeling pretty unwell so as we approach a "this is as many transistors as we can reasonably use" point it makes sense to rethink how we use them - I predict that the next few generations of GPUs will focus less on increasing the number of traditional cores and more on increasing support for "AI" functionality, and we may be heading more towards things like this that don't use any traditional rendering techniques.

Also, even if you currently have hardware that has the power to brute force the latest games at high resolution and high frame rates, reducing the resolution and using DLSS can sometimes produce more pleasing results.