Offloading Lossless Scaling Frame-Gen to secondary GPU eliminates overhead
Last week, YouTuber Ryan Spencer uncovered an interesting way to enable Lossless Scaling Frame Generation without gaming performance overhead on his laptop and desktop: use a secondary GPU to run Lossless Scaling.
As long as the secondary GPU is powerful enough, with integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics used for laptop testing and a GTX 1050 Ti used for desktop testing, you too should be able to use Lossless Scaling’s universal Frame Gen without incurring a performance overhead on your primary GPU. Remember that you need more potent secondary GPUs for Lossless Scaling Frame Generation at 1440p and higher resolutions.
The methodology principle used makes total sense, especially in the context of laptops. Even gaming laptops trend toward using stronger iGPUs, so they become ideal for easily inserted Frame Generation used alongside powerful dedicated GPUs.Now, it’s worth clarifying that this method, which relies on a dual GPU setup, has unique upsides and downsides.
The main unique upside is overhead-free frame generation for games rendered on the primary GPU. Still, depending on your GPU and setup, this overhead reduction may not even be needed, or it may be entirely possible. If the game in question natively supports Frame Gen on your primary GPU, enabling it almost always grants a straightforward performance boost with minimal overhead.
Where Lossless Scaling is implemented, it makes most sense where games don’t already support Frame Generation for your GPU or your GPU’s version of Frame Generation (i.e., AMD FSR 3.1, Nvidia DLSS 3 or earlier) only supports Single-Frame Generation. Enabling Multi-Frame Generation in Lossless Scaling, backed by a separate dedicated GPU, quickly becomes a compelling option for those likely to be priced out of an Nvidia RTX 50 Series upgrade shortly.
While the practicality of this method does become a bit dubious for most games with a native Frame Generation implementation, it does get a lot more interesting when one considers the features consistently available to Lossless Scaling users, even across games. While in-engine on the primary GPU paced with your real frames will likely always be the best way to do Single-Frame Generation, taking the compute-heavy method of inserting Frame Generation (Lossless Scaling) and offloading it to a secondary GPU shows great practice in hardware utilization fundamentals, particularly if you’re enticed by DLSS 4’s Multi-Frame Generation but stuck on older GPU architecture.
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