Steam Deck

I am curious as to why they would offload any AI tasks to another chip? I just did a super quick search for upscaling models on GitHub (https://github.com/marcan/cl-waifu2x/tree/master/models) and they are tiny as far as AI models go.

Its the rendering bit that takes all the complex maths, and if that is reduced, that would leave plenty of room for running a baby AI. Granted, the method I linked to was only doing 29k pixels per second, but they said they weren't GPU optimized. (FSR4 is going to be fully GPU optimized, I am sure of it.)

If the rendered image is only 85% of a 4k image, that's ~1.2 million pixels that need to be computed and it still seems plausible to keep everything on the GPU.

With all of that blurted out, is FSR4 AI going to be offloaded to something else? It seems like there would be a significant technical challenges in creating another data bus that would also have to sync with memory and the GPU for offloading AI compute at speeds that didn't risk create additional lag. (I am just hypothesizing, btw.)

One technical reason for why FSR 1 isn't very good but works in everything is that FSR1 is the only one that just takes your current frame and upscales it, all the newer ones are all temporal - like TAA - and use data from multiple previous frames.
Very simplified, they "jiggle" the camera each frame to a different position so that they can gather extra data to use, but that requires being implemented in the game engine directly.

I'm reasonably excited. I like the steam deck, and I'm off the opinion that we don't need an updated version just yet. A slower moving target for developers is best for long term game compatibility.

But eventually a new steam deck will arrive, and it will likely use the latest CPU/GPU, which will likely benefit from this new frame generation technology.

And perhaps some benefits will trickle down to the current steam deck, or maybe not 🤷‍♂️

But still, I'm optimistic for the future of mobile gaming.

I assume the next Ally and Go will be a test platform for AMD. The main focus is probably Steam Deck 2 and next XBox Infinite systems.

the idea of it improving battery is that generating frames is less performance intensive than running a certain framerate (e.g 60 fps capped game with frame gen at double the framerate consumes less power than running the same game at 120 fps). though its slightly less practical because frame generation only makes sense when the base framerate is high enough (ideally above 60) to avoid a lot of screen artifacting. So in practical use, this only makes sense to "save battery" in the context that you have a 120hz+ screen and choose to cap framerate to 60-75fps.

If one is serious about minmaxing battery to performance in a realistic value, people should have the screen cap at 40 hz, as it has half of the input latency between 30 and 60 fps, but only requires 10 more fps than 30 which is a very realistic performance target for maintaining a minimum on handheld.