Want to add Nvidia's latest frame generation technology (open in new tab) to AMD's FSR (open in new tab) superscaling? Well, it turns out it can actually be done. So far.

There are two reasons why this is possible. First, Nvidia's new frame generation capability can be enabled as a stand-alone feature within the broader DLSS 3.0 resolution and performance scaling platform. Second, Nvidia's competitors in the resolution scaling market, namely AMD and Intel, are well suited to allow at least some iterations of their own superscaling technology to run on competing GPUs.

Of course, the converse is not true: Nvidia's DLSS only works on Nvidia GPUs, and indeed Nvidia's frame generation technology only works on the latest RTX 40 series graphics cards, such as the RTX 4090 (open in new tab). Currently, neither AMD nor Intel offers frame generation technology similar to Nvidia's; AMD's is promised for 2023. But even if they did, it would not be possible to run AMD's frame generation and Nvidia's DLSS on an AMD GPU, for example.

This raises some interesting questions: how long will this situation last? Could mix-and-matching of various superscaling and frame generation technologies become the norm; what if Nvidia's graphics look better and run faster with AMD's FSR and Intel's frame generation solutions?

It's the trifecta of graphics.

Even if it is highly speculative, for now it is actually possible to compare the performance of the new RTX 4090 GPU running Nvidia's frame generation technology alongside its own DLSS scaling, and for the sake of comparison we will use AMD FSR and indeed Intel XeSS (open in new tab) can also be run. Happily, Igor's Lab (opens in new tab) did just that.

Their conclusion is that Nvidia's frame generation technology works fine with both FSR and XeSS. Furthermore, the performance difference between FSR and DLSS in that context is slight, with XeSS lagging behind very slightly. However, a closer look at the results based on Spider-Man Remastered shows that it is AMD's FSR that has the fastest frame rate.

When we are no longer drowning in Black Friday PC gaming deals (opens in new tab) hubs, we will probably test it ourselves. For now, if we want to maximize the RTX 4090's frame rate, a mix of Nvidia and AMD scaling techniques is going to do the trick. The truth is a bit more complicated. For example, using the highest quality scaling settings, it is DLSS that is slightly faster.

There is also the subtle issue of image quality when comparing competing scaling techniques. Furthermore, support for such mix-and-match will inevitably vary from game to game. One cannot assume that it will be available for all titles.

And let's not forget about latency: might mixing Nvidia's frame generation with other super-scaling incur latency costs? In other words, as if this scaling technical stuff wasn't already complicated enough, the whole thing just got more complicated. But as hard as it is to keep up with this rapidly evolving subgenre of graphics performance, there is no denying that the end result is likely to benefit us all.