The one setting that deflates playing Spider-Man Miles Morales on PC

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Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales is available on PC, building on the great success of the base game, Marvel’s Spider-Man, on PC earlier this year. Like the original edition, Miles Morales it is equipped with the latest PC gaming technology and smoothly polished to run on different hardware. It’s a great PC port. Except for DLSS 3 Frame Generation, i.e.

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Nvidia’s latest upscaling technology joins Intel XeSS and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) in the Miles Morales. These are all great upscaling options, but DLSS 3’s unique frame generation capabilities are a pain point. If you plan to pick up Miles Morales on PC, be sure to turn off DLSS Frame Generation to avoid the occasional AI image generation mess.

Problems created by artificial intelligence

Image used with permission of the copyright holder

Miles Morales joins the growing list of games that support DLSS 3. This technology combines DLSS Super Resolution, which is available on all Nvidia RTX graphics cards, with DLSS Frame Generation. On RTX 40 series GPUs like the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, your GPU can generate a unique frame every second with AI, significantly improving performance. One frame is rendered by your graphics card, one is by the AI and they go back and forth.

And indeed, DLSS 3 greatly improves performance, especially with a large processor bottleneck Miles Morales. The trade-off is picture quality with Frame Generation, which is particularly nasty in the fast-paced action that comes with any Spider-Man release. The Super Resolution part still works and looks fantastic.

Spider-Man Miles Morales DLSS Frame Generation Showcase

You can see a video of several gameplay segments in the video above with DLSS Frame Generation turned on. You can combine Frame Generation with DLSS Super Resolution, XeSS or FSR, but I kept turning off upscaling to get a clear view of what Frame Generation was doing. I shot this footage at 120 frames per second (fps) in 4K with only DLSS Frame Generation on and slowed it down by 50% (YouTube only supports up to 4K at 60fps). Be aware of encoding artifacts and YouTube compression when watching videos. There are definitely issues, but the video doesn’t show the full quality of playing the game on the actual screen.

Combat units see the biggest problems, especially with the snowy cityscape of Manhattan which Miles Morales Snow is a pain point in itself, as you can see in the two screenshots below. In the rendered frame, the snow is perfectly visible, but disappears in the AI frame.

This is a consistent trend. Particles like snow disappear with AI frames, which manifests as a slight judder with Frame Generation turned on. It’s never a problem in slow sections and is much less noticeable when swinging around town. But Miles Morales is a game in which you are constantly on the move, beating bad guys and flying through dense city streets. Having the image fall apart when there is any fast moving object is not ideal for this type of game.

To illustrate just how big the difference can be, you can see the AI frame stacked against the natively rendered frame below. One was recorded with frame generation on and the other with it off, so they are not consecutive frames.

Image used with permission of the copyright holder

And just to show that this isn’t an encoding problem, here’s the frame right after both scenes. The striped lines disappear, and when moving to the next frame in the scene, they return.

The problem goes beyond fast-paced combat and flashy finishing moves. DLSS Frame Generation does not take into account elements on your screen like HUD. When upscaling, these elements are ignored or masked because they are not demanding to display on the screen, and the reduction in quality is very visible. DLSS Frame Generation tries to create a new frame, HUD and all, which leads to unfortunate situations where the HUD smears across the screen as you can see in the screenshots below.

Although DLSS Frame Generation does not Miles Morales unplayable, choppy quality becomes apparent when anything on the screen starts to move quickly. The good news is that DLSS Super Resolution, FSR, and XeSS provide solid performance improvements with upsizing, so I’d recommend sticking with them.

Image used with permission of the copyright holder

It still needs a lot of work

Just like with Marvel’s Spider-Man when it was ported to PC earlier this year, Miles Morales is a litmus test for generating DLSS frames. It’s fast, and any image reconstruction technique — whether it’s upscaling, frame generation, or anything else — is pushed to its limits when there’s a lot happening on the screen quickly.

This is not unusual behavior for DLSS frame generation though. As you can read in my RTX 4090 review, these artifacts appear while cruising around Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 and even doing something as mundane as running through the grass Requiem from the story of the plague. They are not that strong or frequent, but they are present.

Image used with permission of the copyright holder

Frame generation isn’t going anywhere. AMD has already revealed that its upcoming FSR 3 will include a frame generation feature, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Intel looks at frame generation with its XeSS upscaling as well. However, there are currently some growing difficulties with the technology.

As time goes on, I have no doubt that Nvidia will continue to improve image quality for the DLSS Frame Generation. This happened with DLSS itself a few years ago, with the first version showing some annoying visual artifacts.