Enabling AMD FSR 3 Frame Gen Boosts FPS On NVIDIA GeForce 10 GPUs But Not Recommended

03.10.2023 - 12:39 / wccftech.com

AMD FSR 3 launched last week and is already regarded as a major development in the upscaling tech world, bringing more performance to a wide variety of hardware.

In our AMD FSR 3 tests in Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum, we saw some big performance gains with FSR 3 and its frame generation feature. In certain cases, FSR 3 proved to offer higher FPS than its competitor, DLSS 3 Frame Gen with very similar image quality output at each preset despite the fact that there's no AI hardware required to run the technology. This enables FSR 3 on a wide range of hardware, not just from camp AMD but also from NVIDIA and Intel. Even consoles are expected to take full advantage of FSR 3 with upcoming support.

AMD FSR 3 supports much older GPUs too such as NVIDIA GeForce 10 series. The support is limited to just upscaling but Daniel Owens put the older GeForce GTX 1060 and GeForce GTX 1070 cards to the test and see what happened when FSR 3 Frame Generation was enabled. During his testing, he noticed that enabling FSR 3 Frame Gen did boost the overall FPS. Using the Native AA mode on a GeForce GTX 1060 GPU, he got around 20-22 FPS on average with ~200ms of latency but with the frame-gen feature enabled, the FPS boosted to 32-34, an uplift of over 50% which is great.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - FSR 3 Native AA (Image Credits: Daniel Owens):

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 - FSR 3 Native AA With Frame Gen (Image Credits: Daniel Owens):

While technically unsupported, it looks like NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 series and older hardware can benefit from increased FPS when AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation is enabled however the gameplay experience won't be great. With frame-gen enabled, the latency was pretty much the same around ~200ms which made the overall experience choppy and not smooth at all. Meanwhile, switching to FSR 3 Quality mode resulted in a similar FPS but with sub-100ms latencies which was much playable.

Now FSR 3 Quality mode does scale down the image quality a bit compared to the FSR 3 Native AA mode but at least it was a better gaming experience that anyone would prefer over higher FPS and choppy gameplay.

The same results were seen with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 which saw an improvement in FPS with FSR 3 Frame Gen enabled. Also, it should be pointed out that NVIDIA Reflex works with FSR 3 but not with Frame Gen. The Reflex tech can be used to further cut down the latencies by a bit for smoother gameplay. On AMD Radeon RX 7000 GPUs, you get support for anti-lag+ when frame-gen is enabled while the older hardware only supports anti-lag through HYPR-RX.

So it looks like AMD's decision to not offer FSR 3 Frame-Gen on older hardware makes sense since the FPS isn't that high enough to benefit from the technology. Considering how