The latest edition of DF Direct Weekly arrives today, discussing Red Dead Redemption’s 60fps upgrade for PlayStation 5 consoles, plus controversy surrounding Microsoft’s Forza Motorsport presentation – where debut media features ray tracing effects considerably more impressive than the shipping game’s. We also follow up on our recent coverage on AMD’s FSR 3 frame generation by seeing just how effective the technology is on console-equivalent hardware in the wake of Ascendant Studios suggesting that they’re looking into its application for Immortals of Aveum.
We’re on the record in expressing some degree of caution about frame generation on consoles, for all the reasons stated here. Essentially, frame generation has a computational cost of its own, so even if you have a game running at a rock-solid 60 frames per second, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that your frame-rate is amplified to 120fps. The same thing applies when considering a 60fps upgrade from 30fps, of course. On top of that, there are latency concerns (input lag will be worse) plus the issues we saw with frame-pacing in our first look.
However, I wanted to see what could be done with FSR 3 for consoles and we have PC components that are very close, or at least ballpark, to console hardware. On the CPU side, we have the AMD 4800S Desktop Kit, which is literally the Xbox Series X CPU paired with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. We also have the non-XT version of the RX 6700, which in terms of RDNA 2 compute units and texture mapping units is eerily similar to the PlayStation 5 graphics core. We call this our ‘Frankenstein’s Console’ and with FSR 3 in Immortals of Aveum, there are some interesting results to share.
0:00:00 Introduction0:01:25 News 01: 60fps Red Dead Redemption patch released on PS50:12:03 News 02: Forza Motorsport reaction – and what’s up with the game’s RT downgrade?0:28:56 News 03: FSR 3: could it work on consoles?0:43:42 News 04: Ubisoft adds Denuvo DRM to Assassin’s Creed Mirage post-release0:51:20 News 05: Horizon Forbidden West to be first two-disc PS5 title1:03:03 News 06: Intel Arc A580 budget GPU leaks1:11:34 News 07: Nightdive mulling unofficial game enhancements1:17:30 Supporter Q1: John, how was your trip to Japan?1:32:08 Supporter Q2: Should Sony increase the internal storage on PS5?1:34:26 Supporter Q3: If the Switch 2 uses DLSS at low handheld-class resolutions, will this hurt image quality?1:37:30 Supporter Q4: What do you suggest to prevent OLED burn-in while gaming?1:43:07 Supporter Q5: Can you end the show with ‘This Is Digital Foundry, bidding you farewell und auf wiedersehen’?
Let’s begin with the most obvious application – 120 frames per second gaming. Ascendant Studio targets 60 frames per second in Immortals of Aveum, though a recent patch introduced a hit to performance in favour of improved image quality. Even so, there is the scope for a 1080p120 presentation using FSR 3, which I tested using FSR 2 performance mode at low settings, upscaling from a native 540p. The result? Anything from 70fps to 100fps, settling on an average 90fps across my capture. There’s a potential application here then and perhaps a more bespoke implementation could improve those performance numbers. Even so, this would require VRR to work in order to be effective – and variable refresh rate support for FSR 3 on the PC side does not seem to work right now. These results falls into line with my expectations: we can’t hit 120fps because frame generation has its own computational cost.