You will never ever get decent 1% lows in most titles, the software stack is architecturally fucked in the popular engines and can’t do it. You would need a CPU that’s literally 100x faster than today’s top models for it to be able to compile shaders on-demand within a single frame without hitching. (Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that there’s a massive gulf between what the hardware/drivers need - compiled pipeline objects built/known ahead of time - versus what game engines are doing, building pipelines on the fly on demand, surfacing new permutations frame-by-frame)

When getting rid of actual performance bottlenecks is too hard or costs too much, just make something up.

XeSS is actually pretty great, played Talos Principle 2, a UE5 game on the Steam Deck at 800p 30fps thanks to XeSS.

My comment isn't denigrating frame generation, which can be useful.

It's pointing out the absurdity of calling "45fps plus 1-for-1 frame generation" as if it is in any sense "90fps". It's not, and you aren't hitting a 90Hz refresh rate target at any more with it than you were without it. In point of fact, it lowers real FPS because it consumes resources that would have otherwise been available for the render pipeline.

I wish reviewers in particular would stop saying e.g. "120fps with DLSS FG enabled" and instead call out the original render rate. It makes the discourse very confusing.

I chose the two scenarios I did to illustrate that "frames per second" is clearly not meant to be measured in terms of times the display refreshed, but rather in terms of times content was actually rendered by the game engine.

In my opinion it is quite difficult to provide a definition of "fps" that somehow makes 45-fps-native-with-frame-doubling be counted as 90 but doesn't also make either of the ludicrous examples I presented be counted as 90.