Frame gen is the gaming tech equivalent of a fondant cake: it looks incredible in screenshots, but the moment you actually play the game, it can feel like drywall is vomiting into your soul. In this video I tested Nvidia’s new DLSS 4.5 Frame Gen beta to see if they’ve finally fixed the big Achilles heel: latency. I used an RTX 5050 (the lowest-end GPU that supports the new stuff), paired with a beefy enough CPU in a Corsair 3500D build so we’re not hiding behind a CPU bottleneck. I started in Cyberpunk at 1080p Ultra to get a sane baseline (mid-60s to ~80fps, ~15ms latency), then ramped through 2x, 4x, and the new 6x options (plus preset A vs preset B). The “pretend frames” do go up, but the dissonance gets worse: you’re seeing 180–240fps worth of smoothness while the input latency can feel like 30fps, with extra visual artifacts (that sunlit tarmac distortion was rough). When I went full goblin mode with 1440p RT Overdrive, frame gen had an actual meltdown—hundreds to thousands of milliseconds of latency. Stalker 2 was the surprise: modest frame gen from a good baseline felt genuinely playable, and dynamic targeting my 240Hz monitor wasn’t awful—just not worth the extra heaviness. My takeaway is the starting point matters massively, and I’d rather have granular control (give me 1.5x) than “number go up” multipliers that kick diminishing returns straight into your teeth.