Modern gaming can be confusing due to all the terms, like when benchmarkers say “Cyberpunk 2077: 4K DLSS quality (1440p), MFG x3”. Uhm, what does THAT mean exactly?

And why have things become more complicated? There was a time when PC gaming just required you to pick a resolution and texture quality, but now there’s so many different terms:

  • DLSS
  • XESS
  • FSR
  • Frame generation
  • Multi-frame generation
  • Upscaling
  • PT/RT
  • Path tracing
  • Ray tracing

What exactly does this all mean? And are they crucial gaming technologies - or marketing guff? I show them off in this video, via my two PCs - one of which has an AMD graphics card, and one has an NVIDIA graphics card.

(Link to direct YouTube video)

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey, everyone. Computer gaming has become quite confusing in recent years because you look up a benchmark video online, and they’ll say things like “Cyberpunk 4K DLSS Quality (1440p RT On, MFG *3).” You’re looking at it and thinking, “What the heck does any of that mean? Is it marketing fluff, or do you actually need all of those things? Do you need DLSS and MFG?”

I’m going to show you exactly what those fancy terms mean in this video. I’ve got two computers here, and I’ll show you on both of them. This particular one has a 4K monitor and an AMD graphics card—it’s a mid-range one. As a result, it struggles with 4K gaming, which is why, at the moment, it’s in a 1440p window. I’ll talk about that in a minute. Then, I’ve got this system which has an RTX 580. This Nvidia system is much better at gaming, but obviously, that’s mainly because this graphics card is a lot more expensive than the other one.

The purpose of this video isn’t for me to say, “You should buy an AMD graphics card or an Intel or Nvidia graphics card.” I just want to explain what all of the confusing gaming terms actually mean. There are three main groups of terms you need to be aware of, and that is upscaling, frame generation, and path tracing or ray tracing.

That’s where we start off with the AMD-based system I’ve got with the RX 6700 XT, which is more of a mid-range graphics card. At 1440p, let’s have a look. So, at 1440p, I’ve got a low preset on, and I’ve got no fancy stuff on—no upscaling, no ray tracing, and no frame generation. I’ll explain all of those terms in a minute. By default, I’m getting around 90 FPS when walking around here, which actually isn’t too bad, to be honest, but it is quite a low preset.

If I did want super fancy lighting, which is called ray tracing or path tracing, then all of a sudden, my FPS rates are going to be really, really low. That’s where upscaling actually comes in. To explain that, I’m going to close this game. Actually, if I completely close it and get a Linus meme face because I think it’ll be funny—but basically, let’s say you get a super low-resolution image from the internet. This particular one, if I actually look at the native size, yeah, that’s the actual size. Just down there, that’s the native size of this image.

Then, if I was to actually upscale it, let’s see what happens. So, that would be 4K. If I actually say I want it displayed at the full 4K, what you actually notice is this pixelated mess. The reason for that is the base image is so small that when you try to upscale it to a 4K monitor, it’s not going to look very good. That’s kind of the problem you have with computer games too.

While Cyberpunk looks pretty good, it’s only at 1440p. If I come along and I actually say in my settings I want to play at 4K—because, obviously, I’ve got a 4K monitor—and I apply that, even though I’m on a low preset, what actually happens is my FPS rate will dip down to the 40s. Some people consider that playable. If you’ve got a 144Hz monitor like I do here, then you don’t really want to game at 45 FPS. It’s not exactly going to feel very good; it’s going to feel quite slow and jittery and things like that.

So, I need to fix it somehow, and that’s where technologies like upscaling actually come in. That’s where we’re going to start off, because frame generation kind of leads on from that. Let’s start with upscaling first.

Right now, my game is running at 4K. If I actually go into here, I’ve got something called resolution scaling. If I go here to FSR 3, which is the latest version at the time of filming (but AMD are working on FSR 4), and I go to a performance preset—I’ll talk about what that means in a minute—I click on “Apply.” Instead of getting 40 FPS, I’m now getting pretty much double that, which is pretty good. Actually, the game looks pretty good.

There are going to be some issues with upscaling; I’ll talk about them throughout this video. But in general, what this has done is—it has taken the 4K image, and instead of doing 4K, it’s actually rendering it at a lower resolution and then upscaling it to 4K. Because this is actually FSR, which is encoded into the game, the upscaling is going to be better than if I simply go to a game that doesn’t have upscaling and I upscale it naturally via the system upscaler. It’s not going to be as good as something like this.

Because FSR, XeSS, and DLSS—which are actually developed by Nvidia, AMD, and Intel—they actually hook into the game. As a result, those upscales are often better than you otherwise would have. There are some times where it doesn’t look that good. I can feel that it just doesn’t look quite as good as you’d expect, especially for 4K gaming.

The reason for that is when I actually set things up in the settings, I went for performance mode. What that means is, even though I’m saying I want to game at 4K, what’s actually happening at performance mode is it’s internally rendering at 1080p and upscaling it by a factor of two, meaning it’s going from 1080p to the 4K resolution.

If, however, I said, “Right, I don’t really like that,” I can go to the quality mode. Don’t worry too much about, you know, quality and performance. To be honest, you just need to test out and see what works for you. But in this case, I’m going to go with quality, and yeah, my FPS has dipped. Instead of being, yeah, it’s now sort of mid-60s, which isn’t exactly ideal, but it does look a little bit better.

It’s always hard to show this off on a YouTube video because I could record this video at 4K, like I’m doing now, at a really high bitrate, but then the YouTube algorithm compresses things down. I can say with certainty that this graphical quality is better at that quality mode than with the performance mode, but it does have an FPS hit because, essentially, it’s rendering it at a higher base resolution. Don’t worry too much about that.

If we go back to the Linus Tech Tips example, basically, upscaling is all about working out the best sweet spot for where you want to be. So, you’ve got a low base image, and you might be saying it looks kind of good up to there, but then after that, it doesn’t look too good. You just play around with the settings and things like that.

That’s really what upscaling is all about—saying, “Yes, I want to game at 1440p, but my graphics card doesn’t support that, so instead I’ll render internally at a lower resolution, and then that will be upscaled.” It does work fairly well, and this technology is improving all the time. Upscaling is a pretty useful tool because, as you’ve seen, I’m now gaming at 4K or 1440p under the hood. I’m getting 70 FPS, and this particular monitor is only 60Hz, meaning anything above 60 FPS is going to be wasted. So actually, this is a good playable FPS rate, really.

That’s FSR, which is an AMD technology. But you can actually come along and use Intel’s one if you wanted—XeSS. You don’t need an Intel graphics card for that, so I could come along and do XeSS and use that one instead. To be honest, I think it performs fairly well. I mean, compared to FSR 3, I don’t notice any major difference, and I get a higher FPS rate as well. That’s actually quite impressive.

What that then means is I might be able to turn up the settings. So, maybe I can game at high instead—I don’t know. Let’s actually try that out. Yeah, okay, that’s actually working. I’m hitting 60 FPS, and the game looks better because I’ve been able to up my graphical presets. Things just look a little bit better; there are better textures, and things feel a bit more lifelike.

As you can see, even though I’ve got an AMD graphics card on this particular system, I could go with Intel’s algorithm because often these technologies are open-sourced, and you can use them irrespective of what graphics card you’ve got. Other than DLSS—often, that is an Nvidia-only feature, so you’d need an Nvidia graphics card for that.

Essentially, that is upscaling. It’s coded into specific games. What that does mean, though, is not every game supports DLSS from Nvidia, or FSR from AMD, or XeSS from Intel. Not every game supports that. So, if you’ve got a game that doesn’t support it, you can just rely on the natural upscaler. Or there’s a tool on Steam called Lossless Scaling. That’s actually a pretty fun application. Basically, what that allows you to do is upscale a game from a lower resolution, and then it uses its own algorithm. It does a pretty good job of that. I won’t dive into it too much, but that’s upscaling in a nutshell.

Essentially, you can game at a higher resolution, but internally, the actual graphics card and the game algorithms take care of rendering it at a smaller resolution and then upscaling it back.

Now, I’m going to move over to this system just so we can get slightly higher FPS rates.

(A few moments later.)

Right, it’s finally loaded. Hogwarts Legacy always takes a little bit of time because it always says “preparing shaders” on every single load. It is quite an annoying game in that sense. By default, I’ve got everything maxed out, and I’m doing native 4K renderings. There’s no upscaling—what you see is what you get, really. There are no tricks under the surface or anything else.

My FPS rate is between 55 and 60, with 1% lows in the 40s. That’s not really ideal. But actually, I could obviously use upscaling, which we looked at earlier, and things like frame generation and everything else as well to try and boost my FPS rate up—hopefully without getting a worse experience.

I won’t touch on upscaling too much because I already looked at it on my AMD system. In this case, I could come along and say DLSS Quality, which renders internally at 1440p—effectively a box there—but then gets upscaled up to the full 4K resolution. Suddenly, now I’m getting an FPS rate in the 70s. So instead of getting below 60, it’s now above 70, and my 1% lows are a lot better as well.

But actually, I might want to achieve more than that. If I really don’t want to lower my graphical settings, what I can look at doing is something called frame generation. This has been a bit controversial—people talk about “fake frames.” Essentially, what’s happening right now is my game, while I’m walking around, the graphics card is actually spitting out 70 frames every single second (FPS means frames per second). So basically, you’ve got those 70 frames—they are real, rendered frames.

What you can do with frame generation is have a technology that inserts a fake frame in the middle of real frames. If you add two times frame generation, instead of 70 FPS, you might get 140 FPS. But of course, it’s not quite as easy as that because when you turn on frame generation, you do actually get a little bit of an FPS hit. So I’m probably not going to go up to 140 FPS, but let’s actually have a look and see what happens.

I’m going to come in here and go to frame generation, which is currently off, and I’m going to say two times frame generation. Oh, actually, it’s close to two times. Yeah, so instead of 70 FPS, it’s now gone up to around 125 to 130. My 1% lows here are actually wrong—they’re not completely tracked, so don’t worry about that. In general, although I haven’t quite gone from 70 to 140, I’ve gone up to almost 130 FPS, which is pretty good.

As I said, frame generation is considered a little bit controversial because people sort of say, “If you’re spending loads of money on a graphics card, you shouldn’t have fake frames. Your graphics card should be powerful enough to render things without software trickery.” But the reality is frame generation is actually pretty good now. It was introduced with Nvidia—it was introduced with the 40 series of cards. AMD also rolled that out with FSR as well.

So when you have FSR upscaling on, you can do two times frame generation, which means a fake frame is inserted in between the real frames. I don’t like “fake” as a word because it’s not really fake frames—I mean, everything here is fake, really. But with FSR or DLSS, you can have a fake frame inserted in between the real frames, and it does lead to some pretty good results.

You’ll watch some YouTube videos that show there can be little visual artifacts and things like that. If you know what you’re looking for, you can sometimes see some problems once you’ve enabled frame generation. But in general, if you have a higher refresh rate monitor, frame generation is really good.

To test that more, I’m going to actually whack up the frame generation a little bit. Because I’ve got a 50-series card, I can actually have four times frame generation if I wanted. What that means is for every real frame, you then get three fake frames inserted in between to achieve that times-four. Essentially, one real frame and then the three fake ones for four times. What that means is my FPS rate should go up quite a lot now.

Yes, it does. Now I’m above 200 FPS. Again, ignore the 1% lows—that’s actually broken. But in general, what’s actually happening now is my 5080 graphics card is generating three frames for every real one. That’s essentially what frame generation is.

Just like upscaling, not every game supports FSR or DLSS or XeSS. As a result, you won’t always have native access to this particular version of frame generation. That’s why AMD and Nvidia have other technologies they’ve brought out where you can basically enable some level of frame generation, even outside of games that support DLSS. So, even if I’m playing a game that doesn’t support DLSS and frame generation, I can actually enable a setting within the Nvidia app that will allow me to achieve that, which is pretty cool.

There’s a general problem with frame generation, though, which is that in general, you should only enable it when you get at least 60 FPS. The frame generation algorithms need a lot of data frames, in other words, to work out how to add in the fake frames in between the real frames. So, if you were playing a game that only had, say, 15 FPS and then you said, “I want four times frame generation,” you’re not going to get a really smooth, buttery 60 FPS.

What will actually happen is you’ll get a jelly effect, where everything looks a bit weird, as though you’re literally gaming in a lump of jelly. It’s a bit hard to describe. So, frame generation is a little bit controversial—partly because people are talking about fake frames and real frames and all that, but also because you need to start off with a pretty good 60 FPS average to then have frame generation. If you’ve only got a 60Hz monitor like this one, then it’s pointless because if you go from 60 FPS to 120 FPS, you’re going to lose a lot of the benefit because it’s still only a 60Hz monitor.

But when you do get a higher refresh rate monitor—144Hz or 240Hz or whatever—then frame generation is actually an increasingly useful tool. So, that covers frame generation and the pros and cons of it, especially if you haven’t got a high refresh rate monitor.

Next, I wanted to talk about path tracing and ray tracing, which are slightly different technologies. People often conflate the two, but one of them is more accurate than the other. Actually, they’re a really useful set of technologies.

If I come to this particular bit of Cyberpunk—Cyberpunk is always a really good example for ray tracing—I’ve got ray tracing on, and everything’s completely maxed out. So, we can see here I’ve got ray tracing enabled. If I actually turn it off for a second—that’s it with path tracing disabled—it still looks pretty good. You’ve got the shadows from the headlights, the lights there, the shadows here, and everything else. It does look pretty good.

But at the same time, in my opinion, it doesn’t look quite as good and doesn’t draw you into the game or feel as immersive as when you have path tracing enabled. There’s a reason that people disable it, and that’s because actually tracing rays and light rays is really hard to do. That’s the whole point of these technologies—basically, path tracing and ray tracing, which are slightly different. They calculate different light sources and where they would fall onto particular surfaces.

It ends up making games look a lot more immersive. It’s actually pretty amazing technology. I mean, 3D modelers tend to get like 1 FPS maximum when they’re doing 3D modeling and using ray tracing and path tracing. The fact that games can actually even attempt to do it, even with some hacks and fudges, is pretty impressive. But it does come at a big cost.

Right now, I’m seeing an FPS average of 222 FPS, and that is with frame generation (three times) turned on—I’ve accidentally left that on. So it’s worth pointing out that if I actually turn on path tracing and ray tracing, things change. Path tracing is a step up from ray tracing. If I enable both of them for the best possible experience, what you’re going to see is, firstly, things do, in my opinion, look a lot better. The light looks a lot more natural, and things just bounce around a lot more.

It’s kind of hard to explain, especially when YouTube compresses video quality. But in general, light does reflect around quite a lot. If I reset my FPS counter (because it keeps messing up for some reason), I’m actually now getting a 120 FPS average. So, almost half of what I was seeing before—instead of 200, I’m getting 120. That isn’t exactly great, obviously. By enabling ray tracing and path tracing, my FPS was almost halved.

If you’ve got a more budget graphics card like my RX 6700 XT—which I’m not hating on; it works really well for me—it would struggle loads with path tracing and ray tracing, making the game completely unplayable. Nvidia cards, in general, tend to be better at ray tracing and path tracing. This isn’t me saying AMD is worse than Nvidia or vice versa—you should just buy whatever graphics card you can afford with your budget.

At the time of recording, though, Nvidia graphics cards are a lot better with path tracing and ray tracing. If you’re looking at gaming graphics and thinking, “Oh yeah, I really like the look of a ray-traced experience,” then you might, at the time of filming, want to consider an Nvidia graphics card.

I hope this video summarizes things quite well for you. If you’ve got any questions, please let me know down in the comments. Other than that, thanks for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, please click the thumbs-up button and subscribe to see more videos like this. Thanks for watching!