I was confused about what it meant by "Lossless" since it's frame gen... there's no compression, or anything to lose, it's starting from nothing.
As far as I can tell it means nothing, it's just the branding for the "Lossless Scaling" tool on Steam. There's no new lossless algorithm involved here.
My understanding is the tool originally was focused on upscaling, and "lossless upscaling" was the apps main feature (along with allowing you to apply other kinds of upscaling).
So the frame generation part is more accurately "the lossless upscaling app's unique frame generation", but it's shortened to just lossless frame gen even though that's not really accurate.
Another useful use case is that the tool works on videos with mpv to interpolate to a higher frame rate. I know that subjectively not everyone likes that for film, but for footage that doesn't rely on sets and the like such as sport and Youtube videos it's a nice improvement.
In terms of quality vs performance, I'd say it's somewhere between the lower quality SVP default and the higher quality (but very resource intensive) RIFE implementation. There's also LSFG_PERF_MODE=1 and decreasing the flow rate, but the former was a pretty obvious decline in quality, but might be needed on slower GPUs.
EDIT: Another piece of advice I'll give is to set PROTON_USE_WOW64=1 if you're trying to run a 32-bit game, as there isn't a 32-bit build for lsfg-vk at the moment. The env above allows 32-bit games to use 64-bit dependencies, provided it's a Windows game and you use a recent version of Proton (Experimental and likely Proton GE 10 or greater).
So I'm 0-1 so far (Samsung-screened SD OLED). Tried Baldur's Gate 3 with a large variety of settings, it either crashed upon boot or booted with no video.
I know it's a DX11 game so it rarely agrees with tools like this, but I was hoping, lol. If I try anything else, I'll edit this same post so as not to take over the thread.
EDIT: OMG. Make that 1-1. It was user error, I'd accidentally slid the files into the folder next door instead of the plugins folder.
After fixing it, I booted it up and... WOW. I already had BG3 set to 720p Balanced, after doing the x3 multiplier (because who cares about input lag in this game) I'm now up into the 75 to 90 FPS range.
This is absolutely NUTS, I've never consistently gotten more than 30 on the Deck on this game. What a game changer, at least for non-action games. Will have to see how bad the input lag feels on action titles, but just speeding up modern/slower RPGs alone is a big, big thing.
Thanks for the heads up!
I have a couple of RPGs where I have zero concern on input lag, but they could definitely use a frame boost. I'm going to give this a try today. ๐
I've tried it with 2 games in my Legion Go with CachyOS.
Heaven's Vault: It launched without forcing a particular version of Proton, but it did nothing, same framerate with it on or off.
Tacoma: I had to force GEProton in order for the game to run. It did nothing, same framerate with it on or off.
And yes, I've followed the instructions and put "~/lsfg %COMMAND%" as an environment variable. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if it just doesn't work with every game.
Since it didn't crash you, but didn't seem to kick in, check and make sure that you're not full screen on your in-game settings. Go windowed or bordered instead.
I have used it a handful of times on Windows and that was always a prereq to get it to do anything.
Hey, I figured out what I had done wrong, I dropped the files in the wrong place. Everything seems to be working now.
If you're still struggling, this YT video shows you where you have to put everything to get it all to work. If CachyOS is Arch based it should be pretty similar.
Make sure games are windowed or borderless and that you don't have an external frame cap like steam overlay.
Stupid question, but what how does this work on deck hardware, I thought framegen was only supported on newer GPUs?
Different framegen techs have different requirements. Some like DLSS and the newer FSR require specific GPU hardware, some require being built into the game specifically. Lossless is great because it works on most hardware and most games.
My understanding here is that it's working as part of the Vulkan pipeline, but I don't have enough knowledge in that area to answer more accurately than that. This article discusses what the dev of lsfg-vk had to do to get lossless framegen working on Linux, and it can give some insight into how it's working.
Lossless Scaling's implementation runs on leftover shader compute units, so it's hardware agnostic, but heavily limited in terms of latency and quality of the interpolation.
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