u/Hazzard

Good to know! That'll extend my copium another 24 hours nicely, if need be. If it doesn't come out then, I'll really be back to having _no idea_ when it might drop.

Honestly, I might be huffing hopium, but I'm holding out some hope for Monday. There's been a lot of movement for weeks now, shipments to warehouses, drivers being marked as released in SteamDB, games getting marked as Steam Frame Compatible, stuff like this.

Honestly, I expected it to become available right after the Steam Machine reservation process finished, but that was interrupted by the Summer Sale, which wrapped up on Thursday. They say never to release anything on a Friday, so... I'm _hoping_ they're just waiting until Monday to announce the price and open reservations.

The only concrete information we've gotten was in the interviews when it was announced, where we were promised "less than Valve Index". Unfortunately that's rather vague, as it's unclear whether they meant Index, Index+controllers, or Index+controllers+tracking stations.

I'm assuming the price will be approximately what Index+Controllers is, maybe a bit more. You can see those prices in your region by looking up the Valve Index on steam.

Yeah, that's reasonable. I think it's pretty cool tech, even if my own priorities and my display prevent me from using it as well.

The only place I really take issue with it is when someone like Capcom pushes it hard in a game like MH: Wilds to reach 60FPS. 30->60 is adding 33ms of input lag, _in an action game_, reaching a level of input lag we haven't seen in the mainstream since N64 games that couldn't push past 15-20FPS.

Once you're at least at 60FPS native, you're only adding 16ms of input lag, and that begins to feel like a pretty reasonable trade if you really like that smooth look.

What? Your numbers are right, if you were running the game at 100FPS it would take 10ms to render a frame. Plus your 10ms of additional latency from holding the frame. 10ms + 10ms is 20ms.

If you were running the game natively at 50FPS, it would take 20ms to render a frame. That's the same number. The total input lag from rendering is identical. Add in the slowdown from your GPU rendering the in-betweens and it's even a little bit worse.

VSync may complicate this though, depending on the method, since you may already be holding a frame for some amount of time, I hadn't considered that. I personally use VRR, so it isn't much on my setup.

This doesn't surprise me. Raw math, frame gen makes no sense to me unless you're already hitting 120 FPS natively, and therefore you need at minimum a 240Hz display to make use of it.

Basic math, to generate frames, you must have the next frame ready to generate an in-between. Which means your frame display is delayed by a frame, meaning your input lag is equivalent to natively running at _half_ the rate you're natively running at. And this is assuming flawless, instant frame generation. For "motion smoothness", a vague, not all that important element of game feel, IMO.

So, crunch some numbers. Natively running at 60? Neat, you can have the "motion smoothness" of 120 for the input lag of 30. Not worth it IMO, 30 feels pretty rough when you're used to 60.

Native 120? Alright, the difference in input lag to 60 is way less. 8ms of added lag is tolerable, and with 4x frame gen you can drive a 480Hz monitor. Pretty good, and the time gap is small enough you'll have minimal visible errors in the generated frames. The question of course being... do you own a 480Hz monitor? Not to mention 120 has _solid_ motion smoothness already, so it's still kind of a questionable trade. I'd still personally prefer native 120, but it's at least reasonable.

A debatable sweet spot might be 80-100, 40-50FPS is more than halfway to 60 from 30 (in milliseconds), and you can multiply into more _reasonable_ monitors than 480Hz. 360Hz to fully leverage 4x frame gen is something you're _more_ likely to actually own.

End of the day though, my core takeaway is that frame gen is _incredibly_ niche. You either need to be obsessive about motion smoothness without caring about input lag, have a _hella_ fast monitor and great performance, or uh... most likely, not understand any of this and want framerate go bigger.

Been using the 8BitDo TMR sticks for a while, and they're great so far. There's no super long-term usage yet, the technology just isn't old enough yet for anyone to have 10+ years of real world usage, but it's fantastic hardware thus far, and I have faith in it to last as long as I'll want to use the controllers for, unlike say, my Switch Pro Controllers (which I promptly replaced with 8BitDo controllers with TMR after discovering how bad the drift was on my OG ones).

Haha, you're not wrong. Ours tend to ebb and flow with whatever urgent priority upper management has set as well, and it tends to take slack alongside our tech debts. Our management _is_ listening and getting better though, I'm hopeful that in a few years we truly _will_ catch up on our tech debts and have all our managed products in good shape at once.

That said, even in that environment, we've had some pretty incredible 20% success stories. Some of my own experiments from when I've had the time have become proper released features, although I mostly use it to skip the bureaucracy and address my pet peeve tech debts, which isn't the point but _is_ nice to be able to do. And one of our major internal products, with a large dedicated team and roadmap, began as one developer's 20% project a few years back.

The best companies will do something like "20% time", leaving one day a week or something to work on _whatever_, which is fantastic for stuff like this. Some of your employees almost certainly have the best ideas, if you just trust them with the space to prove them out.

Great way to get cool stuff like this _without_ unpaid labour.