Inevitably, the latest DF Direct Weekly arrives today, with plenty of discussion about Starfield in the wake of the review embargo, while we also talk about the compromises required to get Baldur’s Gate 3 out this year on Xbox Series consoles. Series S loses the challenging split-screen feature, with its addition planned for some point in the future. However, I want to spend the lion’s share of this blog discussing the reaction to AMD’s FSR 3 frame generation technology and potential integrations on current-gen consoles, because we can’t help but feel that a certain level of expectation management is required.
It seems that people are very excited about the possibilities here and to be fair, I get it. Myself, John and Alex experienced FSR 3 on PC versions of Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum, and in terms of image quality and frame-rate increases, it’s clear that the technology is legit and it’s definitely comparable to DLSS 3. And yes, it’s also going to be open source, meaning that it can be deployed on practically any graphics hardware including the current generation of consoles.
However, it’s also fair to say that expectations for the console implementation are sky high and perhaps unrealistic based on what we know of it so far. Of course, Digital Foundry will be reviewing FSR 3 in due course and we should have a much tighter grip on what the technology is capable of then, but right now, a number of caveats should be slapped on to possible console implementations.
0:00:00 Introduction0:01:14 News 01: Starfield: reviews and reactions0:44:09 News 02: Baldur’s Gate 3 to hit Xbox this year, without Series S split-screen0:49:45 News 03: PSA: FSR 3 won’t fix console performance1:00:39 News 04: Volition closes after 30 years1:08:30 News 05: Sonic Superstars impressions!1:12:52 News 06: Armored Core 6 is good on PC1:20:49 Supporter Q1: Did you see Switch 2 at Gamescom? And do you think the Switch 2 in portable mode could run Switch 1 software with docked mode settings?1:25:15 Supporter Q2: Do you think running games designed for CRTs at super high resolutions makes sense?1:29:49 Supporter Q3: Should DF give medals for technically accomplished games?1:35:14 Supporter Q4: What games would you like to see remastered by Nightdive Studios?
First of all, we need to talk about latency. The concept of frame generation relies on the idea of rendering the current frame and the one beyond it, with a combination of motion vectors and optical flow analysis producing the intermediate frame. So, potentially, there is extra lag there – the time taken to render the extra frame, along with the time taken to calculate the intermediate one. Nvidia’s solution in DLSS 3 is to use its Reflex latency reduction technology to mitigate the extra lag. AMD has its own driver-level Anti-Lag technique, plus a new Anti-Lag+ tech we don’t know much about.