Ever since Nvidia revealed frame generation with the RTX 4080, I have been dreading the day that a game developer uses it as a requirement to get to an acceptable frame rate. And while we’ve gone almost four years without that happening, it seems like Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is going to cross that line.
This past weekend, developer TT Games released the system requirements for the new Lego Batman game, and while at first glance they seem kind of reasonable for a Unreal Engine 5-based game, a closer look reveals that the company wants you to turn on frame generation just to hit 30 fps with the minimum settings. That’s not really how frame generation should work.
If this isn’t just an error, it suggests that the minimum spec will only really be able to get 15-20 fps without frame generation, and at that point, no amount of AI frames is going to save it from being an unplayable mess.
What is Frame Generation For?
For the uninitiated, it’s easy to look at frame generation and just assume it’s a magical boost to your frame rate. But to understand why it’s a bad thing to lean on frame gen in order to hit 30 fps, it’s important to know how this technology actually works.
Essentially, frame generation uses a machine learning model to generate frames based on a rendered frame and motion vector data taken from the game engine. While this frame is being generated by your GPU, the actual rendered frame is held back for a tiny bit, and then both the original frame and the generated frames are then paced out by either your CPU or your GPU.
By its very nature, this process introduces latency, or input lag. At a higher frame rate, the added latency is barely noticeable, if at all, but there’s a reason that even AMD and Nvidia recommend that this feature is only turned on if you’re already getting a decent frame rate – typically at least 30 fps, but preferably 60 fps or above. At a lower frame rate, like the 15 fps suggested by these Lego Batman requirements, you’re already getting extremely high latency, and frame generation will only make it worse, even if it “looks” more smooth.
Not to mention, at lower frame rates, there isn’t enough data generated by the rendered frames and the motion data to accurately generate an extra frame. That means, the lower your frame rate is when you enable frame gen, the more likely you’re going to run into artifacts and other visual glitches.
It’s too early to know whether or not Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight will actually run at such a low frame rate without frame generation. But if it does, playing this game is going to be an awful experience unless you have a powerful enough gaming PC to brute force good performance out of it.
Frame Gen with Old Hardware
What makes things even weirder is that TT Games requires at least an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 to run Legacy of the Dark Knight, which would be a pretty modest spec on its own. But, even with this now-ancient graphics card, it’s still recommending frame generation – but DLSS frame gen doesn’t even work on this old of a GPU.
Instead, for these older GPUs, TT Games is relying on FSR or XeSS frame generation, which still works much in the same way as Nvidia’s tech, but because it’s not accelerated by specialized cores in the GPU, it’s slower and not as accurate. That just makes a bad performance situation even worse.
Crimson Desert was another game that relied on FSR frame generation to boost performance on handhelds like the Steam Deck or Xbox Ally X, for instance, but that game relied on this technology to reach 60 fps, not 30 fps.
TT Games doesn’t even mention handhelds in the system requirements for Legacy of the Dark Knight, so it’s pretty safe to assume this game isn’t going to run well on portable systems. And that’s a shame, because it’s the type of game that’d be awesome to pull out on the train or on a long flight across the country.
A Bad Port in a Sea of Good Ports
What’s particularly wild about Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight having such ridiculous PC requirements is that the best PC games so far this year have been extremely well optimized. Crimson Desert, Resident Evil: Requiem and Pragmata have all run like a dream, and while none of these games are running on Unreal 5, they do make the latest Lego game stand out a bit more.
What makes it worse is that these Lego games are designed for kids, and while there’s sure to be some out there whose parents have expensive rigs, it’s entirely possible that these inflated system requirements are going to place the game out of reach for many.
Just based on the previews we’ve seen so far, Legacy of the Dark Knight does look very nice. It’s making good use of what appears to be ray traced global illumination and reflections, and the cloth textures on the detective’s cape look excellent. But if all of that comes at the cost of a playable frame rate, it’s just not worth the trade off – at least not on PC.
If TT Games’ system requirements are accurate, most people will be better off playing this game on consoles where, at least for now, frame generation isn’t a thing. Although, it does seem like the PlayStation 6 and Xbox Project Helix will support the technology, so I’m sure this isn’t the last time we’re going to see developers try to pigeon-hole frame generation into a game that doesn’t run well in the first place. I hope I’m wrong.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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