I "Fixed" 10 FPS Gaming: The Future of Optimization

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Welcome back to Hardware Unboxed. So, the other day you might have seen our video talking about how frame generation is not a fix for poor performance. This was all based around an upcoming game called Lego Batman: The Legacy of the Dark Knight, where the developers posted some system requirements with some pretty dodgy frame generation configurations in there. At least for the recommended and 4K specs, they were targeting 30 to 60 fps frame generation, which we know isn't the most amazing thing. But then for the minimum configuration, they were using 15 to 30 FPS frame generation, which is absolutely disgusting, and we talked about that at length in the video. But this got me thinking, right? So, we've got this developer here that's talking about using frame generation in this way. Is this really the future of gaming? And if so, what is that future going to be like? Because if we've got developers today that are creating games where they're targeting, I guess, these frame gen configurations, if they're going, "Hey, we want you and we think that you should be playing with 15 to 30 FPS or 30 to 60 FPS frame gen." What does that actually mean for the gameplay experience? So, in today's video, I'm going to go through some interesting, let's say, frame generation configurations to show you really what it will look like if developers start relying more and more on frame generation. And this isn't a super serious video or anything like that.

[00:01:21]We're going to have some fun here with some configurations because yeah, when I saw 15 to 30 FPS, I just thought, what on earth are we doing here? Is this really what where gaming is going? So today's video is a look into the future of gaming with extreme levels of frame generation.

[00:01:41]So to start off here, we just have Cyberpunk 2077 running. And this is running in a configuration that I would say is a good use of frame generation technology or at least sort of a minimum spec thing that I think is suitable for frame gen. So set the maximum FPS value in Cyberpunk to 60 fps. This sets the render rate to 60 in this particular game. And we're using 2x frame generation with DLSS frame gen while also using path tracing. So of course if you're using frame gen, you're probably targeting the highest levels of visual quality. So, of course, we have to be using path tracing in Cyberpunk. And when you're playing the game with this configuration with a base frame rate of 60 fps being doubled up to 120 fps, it's not bad. I mean, you're not getting a super low latency and super responsive experience because the base frame rate is still only 60 fps. But on this 1440p 540 Hz monitor that we've got here, it certainly looks smoother than you would see from normal 60 fps. So, if we're sort of moving the camera around, it is smooth. It is fluid. You're getting better clarity because we're using an OLED monitor. There are some visual artifacts that you might be seeing in some of the screen captures that we're looking at here. But in general, this is an okay way to play now. And we would even recommend, you know, higher base frame rates. For example, you know, for a really good experience in Cyberpunk, you probably want to set the, you know, the minimum FPS or the render rate of the game to around 100 FPS. Now, we're doing 100 to 200 FPS frame generation. I think maybe the game isn't quite powerful enough to run at those specs.

[00:03:09]So, we might be doing something like 70 to 150 FPS frame gen at the moment. But still, this is, you know, it's a more responsive experience. It feels nice.

[00:03:17]It's not too bad. So, that is all well and good, right? If you've got the performance to do it, you're running the game. It's well optimized and it can run at these sorts of configurations. But what is it like in this 15 to 30 FPS mode? So, let's dive back into the settings here. We'll set our minimum FPS way down to what I think is probably well below what is acceptable to 15 fps.

[00:03:41]Now the game is going to be rendering at a base frame rate of 15 fps with 2x frame gen. We are now getting the wonderful configuration of 15 to 30fps frame generation. How how wonderful is the future of gaming with this particular mode? So, the first thing this brings to my mind here while playing this is that 30fps output, no matter what kind it is, whether we're rendering it natively or whether we're using frame generation, it is a slideshow. It is not a very good experience in terms of the graphical output. It just it doesn't look smooth.

[00:04:17]It doesn't look fluid. We're using this with motion blur off, so I guess that is part of it. Motion blur can help to smoothen out, I guess, a 30 fps game, but this is not a good way to play games by any modern standards. This is not how we would recommend people play PC games today. Obviously, the other issue, and you can probably see in my gameplay that I'm sort of doing right here, is that it's really difficult to play a game with a base render rate of just 15 fps.

[00:04:42]Everything is super delayed, if I'm sort of moving the mouse around, it has this, I guess, rubber band laggy sort of feel.

[00:04:49]So, not only is it super laggy in its movements, you know, I'm moving the mouse and, you know, 50 to 100 milliseconds later it's actually responding, you know, it doesn't feel good to play, it doesn't look good in that sense. So, this is just not a way that I would recommend. I mean, 15 to 30 FPS is just not good. The developers of Lego Batman should not be recommending gamers play this way. And then on top of that, there's just tons of visual artifacts in this output, even with what I think is probably the best mode in terms of visual output for frame generation, which is DLSS frame generation. You can see as we're sort of moving across with some of the bridge elements here, the cars, you know, we can get them into these positions where you can sort of see this really obvious flickering around the wheel of this particular car in motion. And that's of course because only 15 times a second are we actually getting a real frame that's being rendered by the game. The other frames that you're seeing which have extremely long frame times are all the generated frames. So these artifacts we're seeing around the wheels and things like that are just not things that is I guess solvable with this type of frame generation. There's just not enough data that's being fed into the algorithm to give us this this nice experience. But we can of course go to more extreme levels of frame generation with the technologies that we have access to in 2026. Nvidia earlier this year announced a new 6x mode with dynamic frame generation. So let's get into that configuration and see what we can really do with a base render rate of just 15 fps. So to do this first we have to quit out of the game. Let's just dive in here into the Nvidia app. We'll go over to graphics and choose Cyberpunk 2077. And we're going to be using Nvidia's override here. So, if you're not aware of the override features, I guess a pretty good tutorial, but we've got DLSS overrides and then the frame generation override, which is what we really want to be using here. So, I'm going to use a fixed multiplier of 6x in this mode, which means that whenever we enable 2x or 4x frame gen in the game, it's going to convert that to 6x frame generation instead. So, let's fire Cyberpunk 2077 back up and we'll get into a 50 to 90fps frame generation configuration. So, we've now loaded back into Cyberpunk 2077 and as you can see here, we are still listed in the game at least as using 2x frame generation. We can dump this up to 4x. doesn't actually make any difference. But you can see if we look at the frame rate counter that we're getting out of this game, we still have got a base frame rate of 15 fps as you would have seen, but now our FPS counter is showing an output of 90 fps.

[00:07:24]This is 6x frame generation from a base frame rate of just 15 fps. And while of course the visual output that we're seeing here is now much smoother, this is much more in line with what you would expect from a smoothness standpoint with 90 fps gaming on a monitor that can give you a 90 Hz output like this monitor can. So yeah, the smoothness massively improved, but there's a couple of things that are still highly problematic about this output and why I just don't think this is a great way to play the game.

[00:07:55]First of all, the input lag is still massive. So, while we're getting this sort of nice and smooth experience, and you can sort of feel the smoothness on the screen, the input is so slow. Like, you're sort of panning around here, it's taking what feels like an eternity to move the camera. As I'm sort of updating it left and right here, just doesn't feel nice to play this way when you've got this level of input lag, and it does make the game quite hard to at least drive. Again, as you can sort of see here, I think Nvidia, the Nvidia app overlay is telling us that our in-game latency in the top right corner is about 140 milliseconds. So, that's yeah, not amazing. Not people don't want to play games at 140 fps. And you know, if we get our gun up here and we start sort of trying to target people, it becomes it becomes really difficult to target because and I mean, we're looking at civilians here, so you know, probably not the best way to play Cyber Punk, but you know, doing these targeting moves is just it's really hard to sort of get a lock on enemies and that sort of thing just because of how much overshoot and rubber banding there is with the latency that you're feeling in the game. And then of course, as you would have seen throughout a lot of this demonstration of 15 to 90 fps, is that there are so many visual artifacts. I mean, look at what we're seeing on top of this um I don't know what you would call this building here. There's just so many artifacts and flickers in there. You know, you can see this element here, the fast travel station in the game. It just doesn't look good visually. As cars move past, there's just so many artifacts.

[00:09:21]And that's because with the previous frame generation configuration, it was just 15 to 30 fps. Half the time you're getting real frames, half the time you were getting generated frames. With 15 to 90 fps, now 16th of the time you're seeing the real frame. And then for the remaining 56th of the time, it's all of the generated frames. So the artifacts you're seeing persist on screen for a lot longer. And anytime we're not seeing these sort of easy lateral translations, like if we move left to right for example, these textures are all appearing fairly normally on the screen.

[00:09:53]There are some artifacts in the lighting and things like that, but when you get these simple moves, frame generation can handle it really nicely. You just see the lateral translation and the frame generation algorithm can deal with that.

[00:10:04]But anytime you've got sort of things coming in and out of the screen, discclusion, fast motion, it really cannot interpolate the frames particularly well. And that's when you get these extreme issues in terms of artifacts. And this is why 15 to 90 fps frame generation is just really never going to work. I mean, I guess potentially you would see a really incredibly amazing algorithm that could do all of this interpolation at some point in the future, but we're just so far away from that with the current technologies that I just don't see a path for this becoming something that's viable anytime soon. I mean, just yeah, just look at these pieces of grass in motion. And look at all these artifacts around here. It's just crazy the visual quality that you don't get compared to running the game at a native 90fps. And so yeah, this is just it's never going to be a recommended configuration. I never want to see developers talking about 15 to 90 fps frame gen. You know, hey, let's get 90 fps. Let's get 60 fps by just increasing the amount of frame gen that's being run. It's just not a good way to play at all. But I believe I have a solution to go even further than this with the frame generation that we're using in games today to really give us a look at the true ideal future that we're facing in PC gaming at the moment. And we're going to be using for this a utility called lossless scaling which I'm sure a lot of you will be familiar with. So if we fire up lossless scaling you will see that they offer a frame generation mode. So in frame generation we can choose lossless scaling FG3.1 with a fixed multiplier mode. So this is going to provide some additional frame generation on top of the frame generation that we're already getting through Nvidia. So we're just going to make sure that loss of scaling works here on our RTX 5090 through LSFG3.1 fixed multiplier of two. So hopefully if this works we will be getting 15 to 180 FPS frame generation. So, if I click scale and then head back into the game, we should be seeing it work in just a moment.

[00:12:09]And yeah, here we go. The monitor is telling us that we're getting about 180 hertz or 180 fps output. And I think if we look in that top left corner, yes, 90 to 180 FPS frame generation. Here we go.

[00:12:23]With such amazing smoothness like this, shouldn't we be over the moon with the output that we are getting? I mean, this is 180fps while rendering at just 15 fps. There's no need to buy RTX5090s anymore because you can just render games at 15 fps and chuck it up to whatever frame rate that you want to play. But obviously, there are a few problems here and why that doesn't really make a lot of sense.

[00:12:49]Firstly, the latency in this game is still absolutely horrendous when you use 50 15 sorry to 80 180 fps frame generation. But also, as I'm sure you have seen in some of the footage that we're showing you right now, the amount of artifacts on screen is absolutely crazy. Like absolutely insane. There are huge blocks coming across the screen where, you know, you're just not seeing anything properly. I mean, you can see here that in this area just below the car here that this just is not being rendered correctly whatsoever when we use this level of frame generation. It's just flickering. It's doing all sorts of things as we sort of move around.

[00:13:28]Anything around this um marker of where we're going into the future. I mean, that just isn't rendering properly. You can see as we move here that it just looks absolutely terrible. But again, apparently, according to developers these days, the actual visual quality and experience that you're getting doesn't matter too much so long as the output FPS is the output FPS that you're wanting. So again, 180 fps with tons of visual issues, it's not a problem or at least shouldn't be a problem for people gaming. So again, we're sort of using 12x frame gen at the moment, I would say, by using this combination. But one of the interesting things about lossless scaling is that it offers modes that aren't just 2x frame generation. You can actually go all the way up to as high of an FPS as you want, which is absolutely crazy. I think the multiplier caps out at 20x. So, we're going to try using that mode in just a moment. But firstly, what I thought was I've got a 540 Hz monitor here, right? So, if I'm only rendering at 15 fps, I might need to use a multiplier of 6x frame generation from Nvidia. And then with lossless scaling, maybe another 4x frame gen is going to get us right up to the target of our monitor. So, let's just flick over to lossless scaling. We'll jump up the frame multiplier here. And now we should be getting 15 to 360 fps frame generation. So we're almost approaching what this monitor can do. Let's just jump it up a little bit further. 5x frame generation. Now we're getting 450 fps from a 15 fps base frame rate. But of course to go all the way we are going to need to jump it up to a 6x multiplier to give us 6x frame generation from Nvidia through their multiframe generation feature and then 6x frame generation through lossless scaling. We are now doing 15 to 540fps frame generation. So how this works of course is 15 to 90 through Nvidia and then 90 to 540 through lossless scaling.

[00:15:29]And boy are we rendering a lot of frames. So, you can see that the monitor's frame rate or refresh rate counter at the top there is indeed showing us that we're getting 540 Hz.

[00:15:38]Now, maybe the frame pacing isn't the best, so it is flicking around from time to time, but yeah, I mean, the smoothness is just unparalleled. If we ignore absolutely everything about this configuration, we ignore how horrible it feels to play, if we ignore the visual issues, the smoothness that we are getting, the frame rate output is absolutely incredible. This is something that developers can be advertising with their games. This is something Nvidia can be advertising in their marketing.

[00:16:07]15 to 540 FPS frame generation is possible. The future of gaming is truly here. Now, as you might have noticed from my gameplay, as you've seen throughout this video, it is really hard to play. The latency is not improved from 15 fps in any way. So, while it has this weird smoothness of 540 FPS gaming where we sort of pan it around and yeah, it just it's a really smooth experience, really fluid, but then the latency makes the game very very difficult to play.

[00:16:37]We're still getting about that 150 milliseconds of input lag, which is yeah, not the best way to play. So, there are some genuinely impressive things about the way frame generation works when we're using it in this crazy sort of 12x mode. One of them is with fairly basic camera movements or in-game movements like we can see here. We've got these graffiti textures on the wall.

[00:16:57]And as we move side by side, you can actually see that they're handled really well. There's no obvious issues or artifacts. There's no garbling really as we're moving from side to side. So even though we're taking 15 fps and we're adding tons of additional frames into the mix, it seems to be able to reconstruct and interpolate these elements really well. And that's because it's using things like motion vectors and analyzing the frames and it's able to go, okay, so this graffiti dope here that we're seeing here, as we're moving across, in each frame, it should be moving by this much. And so it can update and give us no real noticeable artifacts. And even if we add in some relatively basic camera moves, these sorts of things, you know, are not too bad. We can sort of pan here, move things around, and for the most part, the textures and elements that we're seeing here are kept up reasonably well.

[00:17:46]we do get genuinely additional smoothness, genuinely additional clarity from using this level of frame generation. But then if you sort of look closely, this is where things start to fall apart. So if we if we move the camera and perform some movements at once, you might have seen that some of these graffiti elements can start to flicker as we're sort of seeing here.

[00:18:06]Things aren't being handled quite as well with this level of frame generation. But then of course as we move to these sorts of more complex things where you've got really fine details and elements like over here as we're sort of moving around here with the UI elements above some of the things that we're seeing. I mean these things are not handled particularly well. And then any sort of fast movement you can see it really falls apart for these sorts of elements and makes it very unpleasant to play. As well around the edges of the screen there are quite a few problems. So, right along the left and right sides as we're sort of doing these crazy camera movements, we see quite a lot of gobbling and artifacts, especially as we've got this UI element in the top right corner, it just doesn't make the game look particularly nice.

[00:18:46]So, the level of frame generation is limited in some ways, but if we're just sort of moving in a straight line like this and ignoring some of the things on the side, honestly, you wouldn't probably have guessed that I was rendering the game at 15 fps. certainly rendering it not natively at 540 fps but at a really you know probably something like maybe 30 or 60 fps. So we can of course go further than this. So let's really dial up and see if we can get the highest possible frame rate out of this system. So let's dial this up to the maximum that they will let us do which is a 20 times multiplier.

[00:19:20]And it seems like we are topping out at maybe 720 or maybe 800 FPS at the moment. We're of course exceeding the monitor's refresh rate due to tearing and that sort of thing. Um, so there will be some tearing that you might see in some of this footage. But yes, I believe with 20x frame generation, we are currently being limited to about 700 to 800 FPS. So, the amount of frames that we can generate on the GPU while also rendering the game is limited to some degree. Of course, if we're taking it from 15 to 120x, we should be getting well over 1,000 FPS, but we're not quite ready for that configuration. I am trying to get this up to a,000 FPS at some point, but it's just not possible at the moment. So, let's tweak a couple of things. See if we can really pump up the frame rate. The one thing that we can do is simply reduce the render rate of the game. give us a bit more GPU headroom to run the frame generation side of things. Let's reduce the frame rate down to 10 FPS and we're still getting around that 700 FPS mark. We are of course doing 10 now to 60 fps through multiframe generation and then that up to what appears to be about 700 fps. But we are screen recording at the same time using OBS. So let's just stop that recording. We'll head back into Cyberpunk. give us even more GPU headroom now to run frame generation.

[00:20:40]And as you can see, those frames are pumping up at certain moments. We're getting 60 to 1,185 FPS frame gen. So, we're currently doing 10 FPS to,200 FPS frame generation with this configuration. So, we're nearly hitting that 120x multiplier. It seems to fluctuate a little bit depending on the scene that we're looking at up in the sky. Sometimes, at least as we're moving over here, we're sometimes getting up to that that multiplier. In different scenes, we're getting different multiplier outputs. But yeah, 10 to 60 fps using 6x frame generation through Nvidia and then 60 to 1,200 FPS using 20x frame generation loss of scaling is indeed possible. But as you can see here, I mean, there's lots of issues. I mean, it just doesn't seem to be running super well. Maybe we need to bump up the frame rate just slightly. Maybe we're getting a few stutters from the base frame rate being a little too low. So, let's just quickly bump that up to 11 fps. But yeah, I mean, the visual output that you're sort of seeing on screen here, there's a lot of issues with this.

[00:21:45]The smoothness is pretty crazy as well.

[00:21:48]Um, so it's not the ultimate and optimal configuration for gaming, but it just goes to show that you can actually do things like 10 to,200 FPS frame generation if you have the right configuration. Let's give us a little bit more performance so we can really bump up these numbers. We'll turn off path tracing or just run the game using the normal rendering which would hopefully free up even more GPU resources to run the frame generation side of things. And yeah, now we're comfortably sort of sitting at the 10 to well it's getting up to about 1,200,300 at times depending on the base render rate of the game. Now there's lots of issues. Obviously the latency of this is absolutely horrible. You can sort of see me moving the mouse and then how responsive that actually is in terms of what you're seeing on screen. It is yeah, not at all a good way to play.

[00:22:37]Lots of visual artifacts on screen, that sort of thing. But yeah, of course, what we're seeing does sort of show you that it is possible. So, there you go. 10 to 1,200 FPS is possible. But, can we do something even crazier? Can we get this game running at 1 FPS to 120 FPS frame generation? I'm going to mess around with some things here. See if we can get that working. So, let's dial that in.

[00:22:59]And here we have it. This is the ultimate future of gaming with the maximum level of frame generation that I could get working in Cyberpunk 2077. I think we are currently running 2 to 240 FPS frame generation. I'm not 100% sure how Cyberpunk is working, at least out of the game. We're getting just 12 FPS output. Then that's being multiplied by 20x through lossless scaling, which does kind of break the game. I mean, it doesn't run super well. it seems to be lagging quite a lot. It's obviously completely unplayable. But in the future, if we're not actually rendering frames, not actually getting the input in and just running tons and tons of frame generation, this is sort of the experience that you could expect. Things not working super well and just being a really awful experience overall. But the important thing here is that there's no real limit to the amount of frame generation that you can do. Companies can create all sorts of crazy configurations for people to sort of advertise, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is going to be a good experience. Lossless scaling allows you to do as much frame generation as you like up to 20x, but again, that doesn't really mean that the 20x mode is going to be good or worth using, especially if you actually want to see all of the frames on the monitor at once. So yeah, you just have to be careful with frame generation and these sorts of things being advertised in spec sheets because we really don't want to get to this point where 15 to 30 fps frame generation is acceptable or accepted by the community in general. The experience is really not going to be good for people. You still need to be rendering a certain amount of frames so that the input lag that you're getting in the game is suitable and so that the difference between each frame for interpolation isn't so large that you're getting all these artifact issues.

[00:24:37]because a lot of the problems that we've been seeing throughout this video are caused by these extremely large differences between each frame. And especially when you're using crazy high levels of frame generation, you don't really see the rendered frames anymore.

[00:24:51]You're just getting the generated frames. And if those generated frames have lots of artifacts because the difference between the rendered frames is so large, then all you end up seeing on the screen for the entirety of your gameplay session are going to be frame generation and interpolation artifacts.

[00:25:07]So, I think this is while this is a very silly video. I've just sort of been goofing around sort of trying to use these crazy frame generation modes to show you what it's like. There is a point at the end of the day with this.

[00:25:16]We recommend minimum render rates for frame generation for a reason. And this is just sort of an extreme example to show you what happens when you don't really follow those minimums. 30 fps to 60 isn't nearly as bad as some of the things that we're showing here, but obviously 15 gets really bad. But the whole point is when using frame generation, it's not supposed to ruin the gaming experience for people. It's not supposed to drastically increase the input lag. It's not supposed to give you tons of artifacts. It's designed as a technology so that you can get a smoother experience. You can smooth out frames. You don't have to use motion blur to get that smoother experience.

[00:25:53]And you can use that on high refresh rate monitors while your base render rate is still pretty good. So, as we sort of said in a lot of our coverage, if your base render rate is around 60 fps, frame generation might be usable.

[00:26:05]If you're using it up around that 90 to 100 base FPS, you're going to get a really good experience out of frame generation. It's going to have low input lag, so the game still going to feel smooth and give you that high refresh rate experience, but then the output is going to be smoothed up to, you know, maybe 200 FPS if you're using 2x or 3 400 FPS or even higher. And that's going to justify purchasing expensive monitors like this 540 Hz model that we're using here. Cuz a lot of games, you know, they're pretty difficult to render at 500 FPS. But if you're using frame generation in the way that it's intended, which is to, you know, improve smoothness in these situations, then you can get a good experience at the end of the day. But we don't want to see it being used as a crutch for developers.

[00:26:46]We don't want to see developers targeting things like 30 to 60 or 15 to 30 FPS cuz that really is not how this technology is intended. is meant for high frame rate gaming with extremely high frame rate output from frame generation. And hopefully that's where the focus of development goes for these technologies in the future. So I guess that will pretty much do it for this video. I don't really know how this is going to turn out. I've just sort of been messing around with some of the frame generation features and I thought you know what is something like 10 to 1200 fps possible? It turns out it is with these combination of technologies.

[00:27:19]So hopefully this has been a bit of fun showing you exactly what that looks like. So, of course, you want to support Hardware Unbox, you do have Patreon.

[00:27:24]Links to that is in the description below. You can sign up and get all the usual benefits. But yeah, that's it for this one and I'll catch you in the next one.