Upscaling and Frame Generation are disasters meant to conceal unfulfilled promises from GPU makers for 4k gaming, and as a coverup for the otherwise horrible performance some modern games have, even at 1080/1440p resolutions.
Upscaling will never, no matter how much AI and overhead you throw at it, create an image that is as good as the same scene rendered at native res.
Frame Generation is a joke, and I am absolutely gobsmacked that people even take it seriously. It is nothing but extra AI frames shoved into your gameplay, worsening latency, response times, and image quality, all so you can artificially inflate a number. 30FPS gaming is, and will always be, infinitely better as an experience, than AI frame doubling a 30fps experience to 60FPS.
and because both these technologies exist, game devs are pushing out less optimized to completely unoptomized games that run like absolute dogshit, requiring you to use upscaling and shit even at 1080p just to get reasonable frame rates on GPUs that should run it just fine if it was optimized better (and we know its optimization, because some of these games do end up getting that optimization pass long after launch, and wouldnt you know… 9fps suddenly became 60fps)
It’s using information from multiple frames, as well as motion vectors, so it’s not just blind guesses.
And no, it’s not as good as a ‘ground truth’ image, but that’s not what it’s competing against. FXAA and SMAA don’t look great, and MSAA has a big performance penalty while still not eliminating aliasing. And I think DLSS quality looks pretty damn good. If you want something closer to perfect, there’s DLAA, which is comparable to SSAA, without nuking your framerate. DLSS can match or exceed visual fidelity at every level, while offering much better performance.
Frame gen seems like much more of a mixed bag, but I think it’s still good to have the option. I haven’t tried it personally, but I could see it being nice in single player games to go from 60 -> 240 fps, even if there’s some artifacting. I think latency would become an issue at lower framerates, but I don’t really consider 30 fps to be playable anyway, at least for first person games.
And yes, it has been used to excuse poor optimization, but so have general hardware improvements. That’s an entirely separate issue, and doesn’t mean that upscaling is bad.
Also I think Nvidia is a pretty anti-consumer company, but that mostly has to do with business stuff like pricing. Their tech is quite good.