I’ve been dying for Steam Deck frame generation — so why is it so disappointing? - Related to top, it, xt, disappointing?, i’ve

AMD missed its shot for the top

Table of Contents Table of Contents One step behind You miss the shots you don’t take.

There’s an unfortunate irony in the world of PC gaming right now. As soon as AMD decided to concede the flagship battle to Nvidia, Team Green put out what might be its most disappointing flagship offering in a decade in the form of the RTX 5080.

Each generation, we talk about the dynamic between AMD and Nvidia. And for close to a decade now, there’s been a linear progression between the two brands. AMD originally focused on budget offerings to undercut Nvidia’s mainstream range, but it slowly built up power each generation to eventually contest what Nvidia was able to do at a flagship level. We got two generations of a true, one-to-one battle between AMD and Nvidia. And right when AMD was about to get a leg up, it decided to drop for the count.

There’s some essential historical context here. In the early 2000s, ATI and Nvidia duked it out for GPU supremacy, but that changed toward the end of the decade. AMD bought ATI in 2006, and by 2010, it scrubbed the ATI name entirely. It continued to battle Nvidia at the high end, but that slowly morphed in the years that followed.

In 2013, Nvidia launched the first Titan card, cementing itself as a performance leader. It continued to do so for the next two generations, and by the time AMD eventually released its Polaris and Vega offerings, a narrative was already in place. AMD delivered more effective value for the money, but if you were purely after raw performance, it was Nvidia’s game.

AMD hit a reset in 2019 with the first RDNA architecture. Instead of focusing on the high end where it would lose to Nvidia’s RTX 20-series offerings, it focused on midrange graphics cards. And it worked. By the RDNA 2 generation, AMD was able to contest Nvidia’s RTX 3090 with its own RX 6900 XT. But then Nvidia struck back in a Titan-esque fashion, and it looks like AMD hunkered down to rerun its Navi playbook.

Nvidia released the RTX 3090 Ti, once again cementing it at the top of the performance charts. AMD countered with the RX 6950 XT, but it was too late. Then, in the next generation, AMD once again came out swinging with its flagship RX 7900 XTX, but once again, Nvidia was one step ahead. The RX 7900 XTX could compete with the RTX 4080, but the cream of the crop RTX 4090 was left uncontested. Rumors have swirled about an RTX 4090 Ti, which I wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia left in the tank in case AMD took the fight to the flagship level once again.

In at least the last decade, it feels like AMD has always gotten the short end of the stick. GCN graphics cards were powerful and popular, but they were the target of cryptocurrency miners, making them hard to come by. Vega offered flagship performance but at insane power demands compared to Nvidia. And most not long ago, you could get peak 4K performance with RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 offerings, but you’d have to give up ray tracing power and Nvidia’s DLSS.

It’s always seemed like AMD is just one tiny step behind Nvidia, so I understand why the organization wanted to hit a reset as it did with Navi. It’s just a shame that reset is coming when Nvidia decided to put out a particularly disappointing generation of GPUs.

Alright, now we’re back to the RTX 5080. It’s a very strange GPU to evaluate, but I’ll try to paint a picture of why it’s disappointing. For starters, the card is half the price of the RTX 5090, but it comes with about 70% of the performance. That inherently means it’s a more effective value, but I recommended the more expensive card in my RTX 5090 review. I don’t recommend the RTX 5080, at least for most people. That may seem like a contradiction, but it’s not. It’s a paradox.

When talking about cards like the Titan, and now, the RTX 5090, price doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t. These GPUs serve to put Nvidia on top of the performance stack, and there’s a group of devout clients that will pay whatever price Nvidia slaps on the box, regardless of the impression you may get from YouTube comments and Reddit threads. They may grit their teeth. They may overdraw their bank account. But they’ll buy the best simply because it’s the best.

That standard doesn’t apply to the RTX 5080, not only because it’s $1,000 less than the RTX 5090, but also because it’s not the best. Value plays a much more significant role, and Nvidia dropped the ball on that front. The RTX 5080 is slower than the RTX 4090, and it’s a mere 18% faster than the RTX 4080 Super. For context, the base RTX 4080 was around 30% faster than the RTX 3090, and the RTX 3080 was about 30% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti. We’re talking about a deficit of close to 50% compared to what Nvidia delivered in previous generations.

Raw performance may be Nvidia’s game. But value is AMD’s, and PC gamers are in desperate need of a little bit of value right now.

This is, or at least would be, the perfect time for an AMD flagship that could take the fight to Nvidia’s 80-class offering. Nvidia may try to get the upper hand by releasing something more powerful or dropping the price of the RTX 5080, but PC gamers ultimately win in that situation. But we aren’t getting an AMD flagship this generation. If you have $1,000 to burn on a 4K graphics card, the RTX 5080 is your best option. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

I suspect we’ll get a value-focused battle lower down the stack with Nvidia’s RTX 5070 and AMD’s RX 9070 XT, but it’ll likely be a replay of what we’ve seen in past generations. AMD delivers enhanced value, but Nvidia asserts a top slot with attributes like DLSS 4. I’m not rooting for one team or the other here, but there’s a sobering reality the PC gaming crowd will have to reckon with sooner or later. If no one can contest Nvidia, the quality of hardware will quickly diminish.

Legacy software startup modernisation startup Kodesage has raised €[website] million Pre-Seed funding.

Legacy systems, deeply embedded in enterprise workfl......

When it comes to Nintendo Switch games, we’re in a bit of a holding pattern. Nintendo’s next console is right around the corner and new releases for i......

Table of Contents Table of Contents Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus vs. iPhone 16 Plus: specs Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus vs. iPhone 16 Plus: design and display S......

We finally have good news about AMD’s RX 9070 XT

AMD showcased its next graphics card, the RX 9070 XT, last month, but details about the GPU have been sparse. We might finally have some good news to share, though. , AMD is set to hold a press conference later this month that will detail the RDNA 4 architecture and the performance we can expect out of AMD’s next GPU.

Although we’ve long known that AMD would concede the flagship battle to Nvidia in the face of the RTX 5090, Team Red was particularly light on details when it introduced the RX 9070 XT. The organization didn’t so much as share specs for the new card, instead leaving it to board partners to fill in the missing details. Then, the card was reportedly delayed. AMD originally told us it would launch in a matter of “weeks,” only to backtrack and point toward a March release later.

VideoCardz says the improvement comes via Chinese outlet Benchlife, though we were unable to find the original story that VideoCardz cites. The outlet reportedly pointed toward an architecture event for RDNA 4 toward the end of February, perhaps gearing up for a release date in March that AMD has teased.

Although AMD hasn’t confirmed anything publically, it would make sense for the corporation to hold an event around this time. Nvidia is set to launch its RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 graphics cards this month, and AMD could angle its event to steal some limelight from Team Green. It would also be a great opportunity for AMD to detail its RDNA 4 architecture. We’ve learned about the specs of these cards from board partners, but AMD has yet to share any details about the architecture itself.

Regardless of when or if AMD holds an event, the next few months are heating up for the world of the best graphics cards. Both AMD and Nvidia have two new GPUs on the way, and all of them will likely duke it out in performance around the same price. Hopefully, buyers win when the cards show up so we don’t get a repeat of the disappointment we saw with Nvidia’s recent RTX 5080.

My favorite feature in Virtua Fighter 5: [website], a new PC port of Sega’s classic fighting game, isn’t its rollback netcode or 4K visuals. It’s that ...

You can have a ton of consumers on your PS5, ensuring that you and your entire friend and family group can access their content on the console. However, y...

Last week, we tracked more than 75 tech funding deals worth over €1 billion, and over 10 exits, M&A transactions, rumors, and related news stories acr...

I’ve been dying for Steam Deck frame generation — so why is it so disappointing?

Table of Contents Table of Contents Making up for lost hardware The little devil of frame generation.

This past week, my prayers were answered. I’ve been patiently waiting for frame generation to show up broadly on the Steam Deck. The ROG Ally and ROG Ally X have it via AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), and Windows handhelds more broadly can use Lossless Scaling. But the Steam Deck can’t use frame generation, at least not in games that don’t come with native FSR 3 support — and there aren’t a ton of those that even run well on the Steam Deck.

Last week, the Decky-Framegen mod was officially released into beta on GitHub. It’s basically a DLL swapper, allowing you to use FSR 3 Frame Generation in games that only support DLSS Frame Generation. If you’ve used Decky Loader on the Steam Deck before, the installation process is simple. You just drag the plugin to your Plugins folder on the Steam Deck — located at /home/deck/homebrew/plugins — switch back to game mode, and apply the plugin to any game in the list. It’ll add a launch command to the games you select, and you’re off to the races.

In a game with DLSS Frame Generation, you’ll suddenly have the ability to not only select DLSS but also toggle on Frame Generation. This is still just FSR 3, but it’s applied via native DLSS support in a game.

It sounds like a perfect solution, and that’s what I thought. I immediately queued downloads for Silent Hill 2, Final Fantasy XVI, and Cyberpunk 2077, wondering what kind of performance I could get in these games that, without frame generation, run pretty poorly on the Steam Deck. But I was in for a rude awakening. Decky-Framegen works, and I’m not going to uninstall it from my Steam Deck. But actually using the mod forced me to reset my expectations.

In my recent look at DLSS 4, I wrote the following: “DLSS is it’s at its best when it’s pushing the next level of visual quality; it’s at its worst when it’s making up for hardware that can’t hit the mark.” That sentiment is what drives the conversation here around frame generation on the Steam Deck. It doesn’t enable you to play games that you otherwise couldn’t play. It just makes games you can already play look smoother.

There are a couple of problems here. First, and most obvious, is your base frame rate. Frame generation works its best when you can feed it with a high, consistent frame rate.

Let’s deal with the high portion first. FSR 3 uses frame interpolation, where the system renders two frames and finds the difference between them to generate a frame in between. The higher your frame rate, the less of a difference there is between the two frames, and the easier it is for the frame generation algorithm to figure out what should go in between. The lower your frame rate, the more difference there is between two frames, and the more difficult it is for the frame generation algorithm to figure out what should go in between.

Latency also becomes an issue when your frame rate isn’t high enough. The way FSR 3 works, the system constantly needs to keep an extra frame buffered. That adds latency, and that latency is compounded when you already have a frame rate that feels unresponsive. The Decky-Framegen mod might be able to make 20 frames per second (fps) look like 40 fps, but playing the game feels like you’re running at 15 fps. That’s the idea, at least.

These are issues that plague any frame generation tool, from Lossless Scaling to Nvidia’s new DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation. They’re more prominent on the Steam Deck — or any handheld, for that matter — due to the low-performance overhead, but they’re still issues regardless of the platform you play on. There’s one issue specific to handheld gaming PCs, though, and that’s what really kills the experience.

I stated that frame generation wants a high, consistent frame rate, and the consistency is why frame generation doesn’t work well on the Steam Deck. The one game I was most excited to play after learning about Decky-Framegen was Final Fantasy XVI. This game is unsupported on the Steam Deck due to how demanding it is, but I put 90 hours into it when it was released on the PS5, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to put in 90 hours more. I downloaded the demo with Decky-Framegen at the ready, and the experience was terrible.

The frame rate was consistently in motion. Animations were never smooth, and it felt like the game ran in slow motion when the performance dropped. I thought it was just Final Fantasy XVI, but it wasn’t. The same issue happened in Silent Hill 2. Disabling the frame generation made the game less smooth — to the point that it was unplayable — but it still felt like a enhanced experience than when I used frame generation. And that’s when I ran into some unfortunate truths about using frame generation on a handheld.

There are two reasons consistency makes such a big difference. The first is the feel of the game. When your frame rate is in flux, the frame pacing gets through completely off. Between two frames, there might be a gap of 25 milliseconds, but between the next two frames, there’s a gap of 35ms. When the frame time is constantly in motion like this, it’s difficult to place the generated frame in the right spot. The motion looks like it’s constantly stuttering.

The other reason concerns the overhead that frame generation requires. It’s easy to forget that frame generation effectively lowers your performance. The algorithm needs to run, so in a constrained performance environment like the Steam Deck, you’ll get less performance with frame generation turned on versus off. The idea is that the extra generated frames can make up for the performance loss by essentially doubling your frame rate.

That overhead leads to a situation that you can see above in the frame time graph. In order for frame generation to work, the system needs to render a second frame before even displaying the first one. When your frame rate is constantly changing, that leads to a snowball of performance loss when the frame generation can’t keep up. By the time the second rendered frame (third total frame) is shown, the frame generation algorithm is still working on the next batch, forcing you to wait to see another frame. The result is this constant stuttering every block of three frames.

Frame generation is at its best when it’s pushing the next level of visual quality. It’s at its worst when it’s making up for hardware that can’t hit the mark.

My dream that frame generation on the Steam Deck would unlock some new level of performance was ultimately nothing more than that — a dream. But I still have the Decky-Framegen mod installed, and if you own a Steam Deck, I’d suggest you install it, too.

What Decky-Framegen does really well is make games that run smoothly look even smoother. For instance, I use the ROG Ally X with Bazzite installed as my main gaming handheld, and that device comes with a 120Hz display. Decky-Framegen is incredible for pushing games that normally run at a consistent 60 fps up to a consistent 120 fps. It’s like magic.

It’s just key to keep your expectations in check. The Decky-Framegen mod is great, but its use cases are a bit more limited than they may appear at first glance.

The [website] Summit London 2025 is just around the corner! Set to take place on March 25-26 at the prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Centre, this two-day ...

Tana, an online workspace platform embedded with advanced analytics, has raised a $14M Series A round led by Tola Capital, with participation from Lig...

The Fantastic Four: First Steps | Official Teaser | Only in Theaters July 25.

The wait for Marvel’s First Family is over. Marvel has unveiled the firs...