What is Frame Generation? The GPU technology explained in 2025?

Now that we’ve outlined how Frame Generation works with AMD’s and Nvidia’s respective takes on the tech, we can look at the differences in performance and the supported games. AMD’s FSR 4 currently supports nearly 40 games and counting, including Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, FragPunk, Civilization 7, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. In contrast, there are around 76 games that support FSR 3, with some exclusive to FSR 3.1.

In contrast, there are currently over 150 games that support Nvidia’s DLSS 3 and counting, with 75 games confirmed to support DLSS 4 soon. This includes support for games such as Alan Wake 2, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Silent Hill 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Marvel Rivals.

What you’ll notice is that Frame Generation is not available for everything you could ever want to play on PC, whether it’s handled by AMD or Nvidia hardware. While the open-source driver-based AMD AFMF can fill in the gaps by unsupported games, it will not deliver the same level of performance boost by comparison. Given the two most recent versions, it makes the most sense to compare FSR 4 vs DLSS 4 for the best possible performance.

While Nvidia DLSS 3’s Frame Generation and DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation have left a strong impression as the leading options, the gap is certainly closing as AMD’s FSR 4 looks to hold its own. This is likely due to being exclusive to the RX 9000 series instead of being more open as with AFMF, FSR 2, and FSR 3 from before. We can see this is evident in Digital Foundry’s benchmarking especially.

AMD’s RX 9000 lineup is roughly equivalent to midrange RTX 50 series hardware, so the comparisons in upscaling performance with the RX 9070 XT and RTX 5070 Ti are about as even as things can get. While the general frame rates are a little lower in FSR 4 compared to FSR 3, it’s generally said that the image quality is higher as a result, but you’ll have the option of both on a recent AMD GPU.

We can see this with Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart in 4K. The RX 9070 XT delivers average framerates of 109, where the RTX 5070 Ti averages 106. However, with FSR 4 Performance mode, that drops down to 101, whereas the RX 5070 Ti shoots up to 128. Things are comparable in terms of image and smoothness, but Nvidia pulls ahead slightly, albeit not quite as dramatically as you may be expecting.

While it’s still early days for the latest versions of the Frame Generation tech, looking back to FSR 3.1 vs DLSS 3.7 can give a wider indication of how it performs for the previous-generation RX 7000 and RTX 40 series cards. Remember, both FSR 3 and DLSS 3 also work on the latest GPU generations, just not the other way around. We can see the quality and performance differences from Ultrawide Tech’s benchmarking from late last year.

We can see what FSR 3’s Frame Generation and DLSS 3’s Frame Generation can do on the previous-generation graphics cards, AMD’s 7900 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti. Natively, neither card can achieve 60fps in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in 1440p on the Epic preset, but upscaling (FSR and DLSS) gets boosted to 76fps and 60fps, respectively. Frame Generation, however, greatly improves things to 147fps and 98fps apiece. This also makes 4K60 not only possible but also goes beyond these figures, as the former gets close to 120fps and the latter excels to nearly 80fps.

Demanding games, such as Cyberpunk 2077, are a tall order for native hardware in higher resolutions than 1080p. The RX 7900 XT and 4070 Ti can barely achieve 30fps in 1440p with the game at Ultra preset with ray tracing enabled. Through Frame Generation, the figures climb to 94fps and 85fps each, with both cards able to achieve 4K60 (and above).