Why don't we have motion smoothing on current consoles?
Why don't we have motion smoothing on current consoles?
Probably a dumb question but:
With the upcoming GTA 6 where people speculate it might only run at 30FPS, I was wondering why there isn't some setting on current gen consoles to turn on motion smoothing.
For example my 10 year old TV has a setting for motion smoothing that works perfectly fine even though it probably has less performance than someone's toaster.
It seems like this is being integrated in some instances for NVIDIA and AMD cards such as DLSS and Fluid Motion Frames which is compatible with some limited games.
But I wonder why can't this be a thing that is globally integrated in modern tech so that we don't have to play something under 60FPS anymore in 2025? I honestly couldn't play something in 30FPS since it's so straining and hard to see things properly.
Because it introduces latency.
Higher framerates only in part improve the experience due to looking better, they also make the game feel faster because what you input is reflected in-game that fraction of a second sooner.
Increasing framerate while incurring higher latency might look nicer for an onlooker, but it generally feels a lot worse to actually play.
If your TV can do it why does the console need to do it also?
Motion smoothing means that instead of showing:
- Frame 1
- 33ms rendering
- Frame 2
...you would get:
- Frame 1
- 33ms rendering
- #ms interpolating Frames 1 and 2
- Interpolated Frame 1.5
- 16ms wait
- Frame 2
It might be fine for non-interactive stuff where you can get all the frames in advance, like cutscenes. For anything interactive though, it just increases latency while adding imprecise partial frames.
It will never turn 30fps into true 60fps like:
- Frame 1
- 16ms rendering
- Frame 2
- 16ms rendering
- Frame 3
It's worse
- render frame 1 - 33ms
- render frame 2 -33ms
- interpolate frame 1|2
- show frame 1
- start rendering frame 3...
- wait 16ms
- show frame 1|2
- wait 16 ms
- show frame 2
- interpolate frame 2|3
- start working on frame 4...
- wait 16ms
- show frame 2|3
- wait 16 ms
- show frame 3 -> this is a whole 33ms late!
- ...
And that's while ignoring the extra processing time of the interpolation and asynchronous workload. That's so slow, that if you wiggle your joystick 15 times per second the image on the screen will be moving in the opposite direction
Hm... good point... but... let's see, assuming full parallel processing:
- [...]
- Frame -2 ready
- Frame -1 ready
- Show frame -2
- Start interpolating -2|-1 (should take less than 16ms)
- Start rendering Frame 0 (will take 33ms)
- User input 0 (will be received in 20ms if wired)
- Wait 16ms
- Frame -2|-1 ready
- Show Frame -2|-1
- Wait 4ms
- Process User input 0 (max 12ms to get into next frame)
- User input 1 (will be received in 20ms if wired)
- Wait 12ms
- Frame 0 ready
- Show Frame -1
- Start interpolating -1|0 (should take less than 16ms)
- Start rendering Frame 1 {includes User input 0} (will take 33ms)
- Wait 8ms
- Process User input 1 (...won't make it into a frame before User input 2 is received)
- User input 2 (will be received in 20ms if wired)
- Wait 8ms
- Frame -1|0 ready
- Show Frame -1|0
- Wait 12ms
- Process User Input 1+2 (...will it take less than 4ms?)
- Wait 4ms
- Frame 1 ready {includes user input 0}
- Show Frame 0
- Start interpolating 0|1 (should take less than 16ms)
- Start rendering Frame 2 {includes user input 1+2... maybe} (will take 33ms)
- Wait 16ms
- Frame 0|1 ready {includes partial user input 0}
- Show Frame 0|1 {includes partial user input 0}
- Wait 16ms
- Frame 2 ready {...hopefully includes user input 1+2}
- Show Frame 1 {includes user input 0}
- [...]
So...
- From user input to partial display: 66ms
- From user input to full display: 83ms
- Some user inputs will be bundled up
- Some user inputs will take some extra 33ms to get displayed
Effectively, an input-to-render equivalent of between a blurry 15fps, and an abysmal 8.6fps.
Could be interesting to run a simulation and see how many user inputs get bundled or "lost", and what the maximum latency would be.
Still, at a fixed 30fps, the latency would be:
- 20ms best case
- 53ms worst case (missed frame)
Input latency for one, because the next frame is delayed where the interpolated frame is inserted.
And image quality. The generated frame is, as I said, interpolated. Whether that's just using an algorithm or machine learning, it's not even close to being accurate (at this point in time).
You really don't want to use frame generation on low frame rate content.
Motion blur helps cover up low or choppy fps. I assume consoles enable it by default in games that have it.