He specifically cited bad battery life on the ROG Ally and Lenovo Go, saying that getting only one hour of battery life isn’t enough. The Steam Deck (especially the OLED model) does a lot better battery wise, but improving power efficiency should really help with any games that are maxing out the Deck’s power.
Uh, I feel like this is better taken with a low level of enthusiasm: reading the article there’s no mention of how it’s supposed to improve battery, it’s mentioned how it’s AI based, and most concerning for us, both the Ally and Go use the Z1/Z1 Extreme… that have a 10 tops npu.
the idea of it improving battery is that generating frames is less performance intensive than running a certain framerate (e.g 60 fps capped game with frame gen at double the framerate consumes less power than running the same game at 120 fps). though its slightly less practical because frame generation only makes sense when the base framerate is high enough (ideally above 60) to avoid a lot of screen artifacting. So in practical use, this only makes sense to “save battery” in the context that you have a 120hz+ screen and choose to cap framerate to 60-75fps.
If one is serious about minmaxing battery to performance in a realistic value, people should have the screen cap at 40 hz, as it has half of the input latency between 30 and 60 fps, but only requires 10 more fps than 30 which is a very realistic performance target for maintaining a minimum on handheld.
Agreed. 40 Hz / Fps is a good idea. On the Steam Deck OLED with 90 Hz screen one could also limit to 30 Fps, which would still run the screen at 3 * 30 = 90 Hz for better input latency than 30 Hz while only consuming 30 Fps power. I’m not talking about Frame Generation from AMD, but the Steam Decks feature. Compared to AMD Frame Gen it would not increase latency, but reduce it. This is universal functionality on the Deck that is available for every game. Wish this was available on Desktop too.
I assume the next Ally and Go will be a test platform for AMD. The main focus is probably Steam Deck 2 and next XBox Infinite systems.
I’m reasonably excited. I like the steam deck, and I’m off the opinion that we don’t need an updated version just yet. A slower moving target for developers is best for long term game compatibility.
But eventually a new steam deck will arrive, and it will likely use the latest CPU/GPU, which will likely benefit from this new frame generation technology.
And perhaps some benefits will trickle down to the current steam deck, or maybe not 🤷♂️
But still, I’m optimistic for the future of mobile gaming.
Oh yeah, new tech is cool and potentially useful. My point was that this particular excitement is not too likely to improve anything on the current hardware we have.
Here is my view and a small timeline:
- FSR 1 (Jun 2021): Post processing. Can be used with any game, any graphics card on any system. Quality is not very good, but developers do not need to support it in order being usable.
- FSR 2 (Mar 2022): Analytical and Game specific. Analyzes the content of the ingame in order to produce better output than FSR 1. Can be used only with games that have integrated support for. Still system and graphics card agnostic.
- FSR 3 (Sep 2023): Improved version of FSR 2. Therefore the previous point applies here too, but has a bit more features and should produce better quality. It was late on arrival and was controversial at launch.
- FSR 4 (maybe 2025): AI and hardware dependent. Not much is known, but we can expect that it requires some form of AI chip on the GPU. We don’t know if it will be usable with other GPUs that have such a chip or is restricted to AMD cards. As this is analytical, it requires games to support this, therefore its Game specific as well. It’s expected to have superior quality over FSR 3, maybe rivaling XESS or even DSR. But it seems the focus is on low powered weaker hardware, where it would benefit the most.
One technical reason for why FSR 1 isn’t very good but works in everything is that FSR1 is the only one that just takes your current frame and upscales it, all the newer ones are all temporal - like TAA - and use data from multiple previous frames.
Very simplified, they “jiggle” the camera each frame to a different position so that they can gather extra data to use, but that requires being implemented in the game engine directly.Kind of.
The big thing that actually defines FSR2 is that it has access to a bunch more data, particularly the depth buffer, motion vectors, and also, as you said, uses data from previous frames.
The camera jiggle is mostly just to avoid shimmering when the camera is stationary.
Exciting development!
