Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight Looks Like It Needs Frame Gen to Run Well, and That's a Bad Thing

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. 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 us