Blizzard’s hero shooter has a very clear proposal, in principle it is a first-person team shooter with the same premises as the classics like the Call of Duty or Counter-Strike sagas. However, add in the fact that each player controls a different character with different skins, roles, and abilities. Overwatch was therefore the transfer of concepts from MMOs and MOBAs to first-person shooters. However, it has been forgotten and now Blizzard has decided to give it a second chance in the form of a second name only part and being Free to Play, to see if they can revitalize their game again.
Over 500 FPS in Overwatch with new NVIDIA graphics
What’s the point of a graphics card generating more frames per second than our computer screen can display? Well, that’s what NVIDIA showed in Overwatch 2 running on its RTX 4080 and RTX 4090. Which at first glance seems like absurd nonsense given the numbers you can see in the performance graphs shared by Jen Hsen Huang.
If there is something that differentiates PCs from consoles today, it is being able to use monitors with high refresh rates that go beyond 60Hz, which allows much higher frame rates, which is essential for competitive gaming and esports. Of course, if we talk about speeds above 360 FPS, it doesn’t make sense anymore, however, NVIDIA’s message is not to talk about the power of its graphics cards, but about the usefulness of its accessory technologies and especially the adoption of AI. in graphics for games, because it is its differential element compared to AMD.
We have to leave this each new image reproduced on the screen does not depend solely on the graphics card, but also other things like CPU and peripheral latency. This is why NVIDIA has already released Reflex in its time to reduce input capture latency. That is, what we write with the mouse and keyboard, as well as the output. It is necessary to start from the fact that the higher the frame rate, the shorter the duration in time of each of them. Thus, any cut of milliseconds is already an acceleration. However, that’s only half the story.
NVIDIA’s secret is frame interpolation
NVIDIA’s example with Overwatch 2 also affects the rest of the titles. If we have the same game, that we play under specific conditions and that we upgrade our graphics card, then we will realize that we will reach a point where adding an increasingly powerful one does not help everything. The reason? The frame time corresponding to the central processor can no longer be reduced unless it is changed to a more powerful one. And that’s where DLSS 3 and its frame interpolation comes in, which is the old trick of generating a new frame from the information of two already existing ones and in the frame buffer.
At high speed we find the paradox that it is very likely that two frames are consecutive, they are in the memory of the graphics card waiting to be launched. This is where the DLSS 3 optical flow engine works and uses dozens of tensor cores an intermediate frame is generated in record timethus increasing the speed of the game. Since these intermediate frames, when generated from others, do not require CPU time, it makes it possible to achieve such frenetic rates in competitive games without problems. .
In other words, NVIDIA’s message is not that you need an RTX 4080 or 4090 to achieve high frame rates, but that at some point you don’t need to generate new images in the traditional way and this is where Deep Learning takes the helm.
Does not translate into competitive advantage
The reason the processor is needed to generate a new screen list is because it needs to capture player actions with mouse, keyboard, or control knob, as well as update elements on stage . Which of them are active? Where are they? Which ones collided? It makes it exist a separation between the rate at which the game update information is updated and at which the graphics card of our PC generates the images.
To understand it, we must start from the fact that the processor will always generate a new list of screens at a precise speed, so the action will continue even if we do nothing, that’s when one of our actions changes the future of the game that the effects of this on the game are calculated. This check is not performed in real time, but from time to time it is checked cyclically. That is, we can have a game running for example at 120 FPS and outputting them at 8.33ms, but the internal engine is running at 60 FPS and therefore the CPU captures input data every 16.63 ms. Thus, the reaction time of the player does not increase.
We don’t know how fast Overwatch 2 reads player actions, but we’re sure the 532 FPS you get with an i9-12900K and RTX 4090 isn’t how fast the game engine runs. Also, we don’t think it will exceed 120 FPS, which is the limit on consoles.
