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 potentially 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.