Frame Generation Is Not Performance. Stop Letting Publishers Pretend It Is.

Frame Generation Is Not Performance. Stop Letting Publishers Pretend It Is.

Tested on: Ryzen 7 5800X, RTX 3080 (DLSS 3 capable), RTX 4080 (DLSS 4 / MFG capable), 32GB DDR4 RAM | Steam Deck OLED as baseline reality check

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Look. I've been watching this trend quietly for about eight months, running my own frame-time captures, and I've hit my limit. Publishers are shipping games that can't hold a stable 60fps on mid-range hardware, slapping a "Powered by DLSS 4" badge on the menu screen, and calling it optimized.

It's not optimized. The frame generation number is fake. And the industry's willingness to treat it as real performance is one of the most expensive sleight-of-hand tricks "The Suits" have pulled on PC gamers in years.

Let me be precise about what's happening, because the language matters.

What Frame Generation Actually Is

Frame generation—whether DLSS 3 Frame Gen, DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation, or FSR 3.1 Frame Generation—is not rendering more frames. It is interpolating frames that do not exist.

Here's the pipeline. Your GPU renders a real frame. Frame generation then analyzes the motion vectors between that frame and the previous one, and synthesizes a new frame—a calculated guess at what the screen "should" look like between two real frames. DLSS 4's Multi Frame Generation takes this further: it generates up to three synthetic frames for every one real frame your GPU actually renders.

The display counter says 120fps. The real render rate is 30fps. Those are not the same number. They are not even close to the same thing.

Let's look under the hood at why that matters.

The Input Latency Bill You're Paying Without Knowing It

Real talk: your controller input does not know frame generation exists. When you pull the trigger, the input goes to the CPU, which processes it, which sends it to the GPU, which renders the next real frame. Frame gen inserts synthetic frames between real frames—but those synthetic frames are built from data that was already there before your input.

This means the action you took doesn't appear in a synthetic frame. It appears in the next real frame, after multiple synthetic frames have already been displayed. At 30fps real render rate with 3 synthetic frames: your input takes 33ms to show up on screen, sandwiched between frames the GPU invented while waiting for real geometry.

NVIDIA's own Reflex technology exists to counteract this. But it's a mitigation, not a solution. And not every game implements it correctly—or at all.

The result: games that report 120fps feel sluggish in ways your brain can't immediately identify. You know something is wrong. The frametimes tell you why.

How Publishers Are Abusing It

I benchmarked three recent AAA releases—none of which I'm naming individually because this is a systemic problem, not a pile-on—that follow the same playbook:

• Native performance at "recommended" specs (RTX 4070, 1440p, High): 45–52fps. Consistent. Ugly, but stable.
• DLSS 4 Quality + Frame Generation enabled at same specs: 98–110fps displayed. Frame times on the real frames: 18–22ms with spikes to 35ms in particle-heavy scenes.
• Marketing bullet point: "100+ FPS on RTX 4070 at High Settings."

That statement is technically true. It is functionally dishonest. The RTX 4070 is doing 50fps of actual work. Frame generation is doing the rest. When I pull up CapFrameX and look at the real frame pacing—the frames the GPU actually rendered—I see a 45fps game. The GPU isn't faster. The game isn't better optimized. The counter just lies more artistically.

Here's what pushes it into genuine consumer fraud territory: the "recommended" spec lists an RTX 4070. The RTX 4070 is DLSS 3 capable, which supports frame generation. If you have a 3080, which I do for reference testing, you don't get Multi Frame Generation at all—you're DLSS 2 only. The "recommended" specs are written assuming you'll use frame gen, and never tell you that.

The DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation Problem

DLSS 4 MFG generates up to three synthetic frames per real frame. At face value, this sounds incredible: quad the performance for "free." In practice, it's the ceiling case of everything I just described, raised to an absurd extreme.

If your native render rate is 25fps—which is marginal, stuttery, on the edge of unplayable—DLSS 4 MFG can output 100fps to your display. The display counter looks fine. The input latency is catastrophic. The motion clarity is a mathematical approximation. Any fast motion, any quick camera pan, any particle explosion: the synthesized frames can artifact visibly. I've captured footage of it. You can see the smearing if you know what to look for.

More critically: 25fps real render rate means your CPU and GPU are struggling. Frame gen doesn't fix the CPU bottleneck. It doesn't fix the shader compilation hitching. It doesn't touch the asset streaming that's causing a 200ms freeze when you open a door in an unoptimized hub world. It paints over the symptoms while the actual engineering problem festers underneath.

The Steam Deck Tells You the Truth

Here's my consistency check on every game I review: if it doesn't run on the Deck without frame gen as a meaningful product, the "optimized" claim is suspect.

The Steam Deck doesn't have NVIDIA tensor cores. FSR 3 Temporal Upscaling is available, and FSR 3.1 Frame Generation exists on Deck hardware through the AMD iGPU—but the Deck's real-world frame generation performance is modest. What the Deck shows you, more than anything, is the native render quality of the game.

Games that are genuinely optimized—tight shaders, efficient asset streaming, reasonable draw call counts—run at 40–60fps on the Deck. Games that are paper-over disasters hit 18–25fps on the Deck with constant hitching and the frame gen option grayed out because the hardware can't sustain it.

I know which camp most recent AAA releases are falling into. My bench data says so.

The $70 Question

If you're being asked to pay full price for a game, here's what I expect from the engineering team:

• 60fps minimum, native, on hardware within one tier of the "recommended" spec.
• Shader pre-compilation that actually works—not "pre-compiling" that takes eight minutes and still hitches on first traversal.
• Asset streaming that doesn't freeze the entire engine when it loads a new zone.

Frame generation, when it's a tool to push a game from 60 to 120fps, is legitimate. That's the use case it was designed for. You hit your performance target, you enable frame gen as a premium option for high-refresh monitor users, and you communicate clearly that native 60fps is the baseline.

Frame generation deployed because your engine cannot reliably hit 60fps natively on recommended hardware is not a feature. It's a cover-up. And you're paying $70 for it.

The Wallet-to-Value math on that is simple: a game shipping at 45fps native with frame gen duct-taped over it is a $40 game charging $70. The frame gen isn't value you're receiving. It's obfuscation you're paying for.

What You Should Do Before You Buy

Before you click purchase on anything marketing "DLSS 4 ready" or "Frame Generation supported" as a headline feature, ask one question: what is the native framerate on recommended hardware?

Not the frame-gen framerate. Not the "with DLSS Quality" framerate. Native. Raw. What does the GPU actually render?

If the answer isn't in the review you're reading, the reviewer either didn't test it or didn't think it mattered. Both are failures. Find benchmarks that show you native render performance. Pull up CapFrameX data if any creator has posted it. Look at the 1% and 0.1% lows—not the averages—because frame gen smooths averages while leaving the nasty spikes intact.

If a publisher won't provide pre-release review code without restricting benchmark publication, that's also data. That's them telling you they know the numbers look bad.

The Verdict

Frame generation technology: Good tool. Legitimate use case. Not inherently dishonest.

Frame generation as a substitute for optimization: Technical failure dressed up in marketing language. Publishers using it to mask 45fps games as "100fps capable" are lying to you about what you're buying.

My standard hasn't changed. A game that needs frame generation to hit 60fps on its recommended hardware doesn't meet the $70 litmus test. It meets the $35-wait-for-a-sale litmus test. Maybe the $25-in-six-months litmus test if the optimization patches never come.

Show me the native frame times. Show me the 1% lows. Show me the Deck results. That's the audit. The frame-gen number is marketing.

I don't review the marketing. I review the code.

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Wallet-to-Value Ratio: A $70 game requiring frame gen to hit its advertised performance target = 0.50. Wait for the 50% sale or a patch that fixes the underlying optimization. Whichever comes first—probably neither.