The very bad news is, Nvidia says turning DLSS 5 on will currently reduce performance by 50-60%. And that’s across the board—no matter the game.
I wonder why companies just did not go back to mining. At least it generates some value, than power wasted on ai slop.
Wait, what is even the point of using an upscaling technology if it makes your game run slower than without it? Why wouldn’t I just run native res at that point? Is their only point that “it looks better” in their minds?
What’s the point of running 4k over 1080p?
Yes. It does make the game look better at the cost of framerate…
???
You can make black people look white in your games.
Wonder if it could also make female protagonists look like men, might be useful for the sort of people who complain that a game is woke when there is a women
Yes, their only point is that it looks better “in their minds”, as you say. This feature in particular isn’t meant to improve performance.
Personally I think the more subtle application of it can look pretty good, but it seems hard to control and does more harm than good. And that is even ignoring the massive performance impact that almost guarantees it to be unusable. Nvidia published some performance numbers that looked impressive, but that was using pretty agressive upscaling and 6X frame gen which is stupid because for frame gen to be decent you need a high base frame rate, which they didn’t get on anything other than the 5090 and arguably the 5080, or by pairing the GPU with a lower resolution that doesn’t really make sense for them (like you wouldn’t normally buy a 5070Ti for 1080p).
So it’s closer to an ML shader than actual supersampling?
Yes, I think that’s a pretty accurate way to describe it.
Instagram filter for your games is a term I’ve heard to describe what it is. They put all their crappy new features under the DLSS brand now, little to do with supersampling. At least personally I wouldn’t call frame-gen supersampling either, but this is even worse.
Live service gaming is about to get so much worse when companies start obsessing about adding this.
total polar opposite of its original purpose.
Generating stock value?
Stop supporting Nvidia. If you don’t see the writing on the wall, you’re part of the problem.
Inb4 the flak from fanboys who think that a $5 trillion corporation is in their best interest: they certainly aren’t in your interests as a gamer, and they’re making money (in part) off of those who have forgotten what gaming is about.
Also inb4: yes, losing some frames to not have to deal with Nvidia’s bullshit is worth it.
Inb4^2: AMD is not a saint. But whataboutism has never fixed anything.
haha you make it sound like any GPU will be affordable in the first place
PhysX, G-Sync, HairFX, etc.
The writing was on the wall for a long time already.
I will never get how Nvidia got THAT popular amongst gamers. Like sure, Nvidia always had some benefits in certain usecases. But how many people were actually capturing game footage as a job and needed the best hw encoders? How many gamers also used their gaming rig also as a workstation for things where CUDA is essential? A lot! For sure. But not >90% market share a lot.
I honestly blame AMD for consistently missing every opportunity to actually be competitive in the space. So much so that they’ve spawned a phrase. “AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.
It’s not hard for Nvidia to capture the market when AMD doesn’t compete at all for anything other than the low end market except in a blue moon. Their name is synonymous with mid range at best cards. If you want high end you literally only have one choice and I say that as someone who owns a 7900 XTX. Even that card, which was designed to be competitive with the 4080, comes with a whole lot of compromises that make the card only competitive in pure raster performance, Linux compatibility, and literally nothing else.
You mentioned some of the technologies that Nvidia cards have. You’re right that not everyone needs every feature but being on the other end of that spectrum also sucks. Not having compatible hardware encoders means you take a performance hit every time you screen share your game in discord. Not having CUDA means your card is basically ONLY good for video games (yes I know rocm exists but trying to use it is a frustrating experience compared to CUDA). Having Ray tracing performance that’s so far behind the competition means you’ll always be making a sacrifice in either quality or performance. Choosing AMD means consistently watching Nvidia create new technologies and waiting for AMD to reinvent them a generation later to lackluster support.
I’ve been AMD-only since forever, since before AMD cards even existed, my computer ran an ATi card when AMD bought them and when they went from being team green to team red. I swore off nVidia after they killed 3dfx, that’s decades ago.
I never had problems running games except when they were infected by nVidia’s fuckery, and I never had to put much effort in avoiding them.
Gamers just care more about big numbers and shiny things more than they care for the well-being of their hobby, and are directly responsible for part of the AI-shitshow we’re in nowadays.
Not having problems is the bare minimum. But my point is that the reason we have such a skewed market is because despite AMD making good cards, Nvidia makes better cards. They’re more feature packed and more performant. The only thing they’re not is cheaper than AMD. Cheaper gets you some customers but as long as the goal is to eventually “upgrade” to an Nvidia card they’ll never be the market leader. People just want to play games and whatever is able to play games the best is what they’ll want. Politics be damned. AMD has had 20+ years to fight Nvidia and their own reputation but failed at nearly every turn. That’s why we’re here.
Blaming consumers for AI doesn’t truly track to me when these companies feed into each other’s profits like some kind of snake of Ouroborus. Gamers never asked for ai. Games just became another place where ai is (unfortunately).
Yeah, you’re confirming that
gamerspeople care more about numbers and shiny things than principles. Who cares if you’re destroying your hobby, when you can have slightly better lighting in a game?
Gamers made nVidia’s fortune and nVidia is one of the main reasons for the crypto and ai messes. It’s not the only factor but it’s one.Just to be clear, I’m not arguing against your point. I’m largely agreeing with you. People do genuinely care more about enjoying their hobby than whatever principals they should be upholding to ensure it’s future. For most people the politics involved isn’t a consideration for something that’s usually an escape from reality. My goal was to explain why the status quo is the way it is and most of it does come down to whatever makes the games the prettiest. I can’t fault people for that. Everything in life shouldn’t require research and an ethics check. These kinds of issues are why we have elected officials and governing bodies and it’s their failures you should be upset at.
My goal was to explain why the status quo is the way it is and most of it does come down to whatever makes the games the prettiest. I can’t fault people for that.
You can and you should. Just blindly going through life chasing your own enjoyment at the expense of everything else is egoistical and detrimental to civil society. Egoism is what is destroying the world.
Everything in life shouldn’t require research and an ethics check.
Unfortunately it does, and while I agree we can’t fix everything at once, some things are easier than others.
These kinds of issues are why we have elected officials and governing bodies and it’s their failures you should be upset at.
Yeah, and that’s another thing where people should pay more attention, but they don’t because they care more about their immediate satisfaction, with hobbies and enjoyment, rather than long-term outlooks.
I agree. Especially the marketing department hyping up their upcoming products to an unhealthy degree really hurt their reputation. Because those promises always failed to deliver in the last >decade.
But personally i’m now 12(?) years only on AMD cards and i was never plagued by all the famous downsides AMD GPUs supposedly and actually have. Which doesnt mean there are tons of valid criticism to be made against them.
I get why Nvidia was and is the market leader. They offered the most feature complete and fastest products most of the time. Always with a bit of proprietary fuckery involved which personally always turned me off. There are a lot of valid reasons why somebody would prefer a Nvidia card right now or in the past.
My point was that i dont get why they are so disproportionally more popular. If you wanted the fastest halo product… sure there wasnt a contest since the 290X(which still is debatable). But AMD had almost always pretty great midrange offerings which most consumer buy anyway. Especially in the last three generation they had their shit together and were IMHO pretty competitive in every price bracket besides the very high end. Still, they lost even more market share.
But AMD had almost always pretty great midrange offerings which most consumer buy anyway. Especially in the last three generation they had their shit together and were IMHO pretty competitive in every price bracket besides the very high end. Still, they lost even more market share.
In the US maybe. Any time I looked at AMD cards in recent years, they were more expensive than nVidia equivalents. And that was even before Lisa Su started courting Donald Trump and the AI industry. There’s a cult following around AMD and they and retailers both abuse that.
I’m not in the US and AMD has always been cheaper for me. Hardware Unboxed made a few videos about pricing in recent years and in the regions they covered AMD was also always cheaper than Nvidia. Aside from a few outliers.
Personally I think they’re recent losses are probably a result of the fact that Nvidia is so dominant and Intel entered the market. It’s hard to compete against someone who’s got ~70% market share while a new guy shows up and manages to only steal from your slice. The advantage Nvidia has of being the world’s most valuable company has got to be near insurmountable for AMD at this point. Even if AMD had an outright better product there’s a, not so small amount of people, who would probably still buy Nvidia just to be on the winning team.
I will never get how Nvidia got THAT popular amongst gamers
It was the only gfx card maker back then that doesn’t sucks, and the only real competitor is AMD and they kinda sucked. Games made back then are mostly optimised for nvidia. And then they have shadowplay which capture footage from x second/minute ago with a press of a button, which popularised sharing funny clips. AMD only get better like a few years ago, then Intel enter the race. Today Nvidia doesn’t really offer much advantage for most people because of the price. If chinese gfx card maker catch up, Nvidia will probably have to fully pivot to AI company to survive.
Upscaling was a mistake, I always turn it off and end up with higher or at least the same frame rates. It’s just another fucking thing like motion blur, chromatic aberration and lens flare. It makes the game look and feel worse at the expense of performance.
I always use DLSS Quality if available (and sometimes it is the only kind of render scaling available) and always have a ~20% performance boost with almost no image quality loss.
Upscaling was meant for older gpus. To lower the resolution in the game while making it fit the monitor resolution. I have no clue why flagship models need upscaling.
No, it was meant to offset the performance loss of raytracing in games. That is why it was introduced.
I’ve started downscaling
So, while the little RTX 5060 can churn out a 258 fps result in NBA 2K27 at 1080p Ultra settings with ray tracing and DLSS 5 enabled, the game underneath will actually be running at around 43 fps.
Lol. Nvidia with the toilet paper math. “You’re only getting 6 frames but it’s actually 11 billion frames.”
Like, I’m playing Bully. Render the locked 30, barely consume any power and shut up. “Run your computer at full tilt all the time so your games can run like shit!” I cannot stand any frame gen. Makes games look like static.
Like, I’m playing Bully. Render the locked 30, barely consume any power and shut up
I am getting older and honestly only recently came to appreciate 60fps, it blows my mind to hear people say shit like “doesn’t do 120fps, unplayable.” …like wtf?
I think that “more fps” is important when there’s things that move quickly compared to their size. My go-to game here is Batman: Arkham City - in the steel mill sections, there’s a lot of “sparky” particle effects; in general, there’s a lot of dust flying about. That stuff does look noticeably better at 90 fps than it does at 60 fps. My eyes can’t really see the difference at 120 fps, but I can definitely hear the GPU fans, so locked to 90 is fine. Makes absolutely no difference to the gameplay at all, of course.
Games that are designed for 30 fps tend not to have the same kind of particle effects, mostly because they would look terrible. I do feel sorry for the graphics artists having their hands tied, rather than being able to fully express themselves, but all engineering is about weighing things up and finding the right compromise, of course.
Yassifying all of your games with a slop filter is the complete opposite of artistic expression, of course.
I always just play at locked 60 fps. It’s a simple life.
in some cases only 1% of pixels are actually rendered.
I wouldn’t use it, even if it was adding performance. Nvidia really found a new technology that is even worse than Frame Generation.
Can’t wait for this vendor lock even more now.
So developers will create crap models, crap lighting, and then let DLSS 5 take care of the rest and now not only will AMD and Intel users get a subpar gaming experience, so will the bulk of Nvidia users who can’t afford the flagship card.
The future of gaming looks bright, like a train in a tunnel while your on the tracks.
They don’t want you to buy a card they want you to rent streaming gaming. It’s not about you buying the flagship cards - they don’t want you owning a card at all.
I don’t think DLSS5 can work well with low poly/quality models and textures. Look up footage of it being used on San Andreas, it looks awful, even moreso than usual.
Looking at the basic performance charts Nvidia has provided us so far, the ultra-high frame rate figures are based on 6x Multi Frame Generation.
Let this sink in for a moment.
Are you saying that the 50-60% lower framerate is with with 6x framegen on?
Yes, pretty much. Each those diagrams and numbers Nvidia put on screenshots, look down at the bottom it says Multi Frame Gen 6x. It’s small, most people would miss.
Edit: Removed explanation, it was a bit unnecessary complicated.
I want to make sure I understand this right. The 6X here means that for every one real frame generated by the GPU, the next six frames that follow will be AI generated?
I’m pretty sure its 1 real frame every X frames so 6x would be 1 real, 5 generated.
This is how I understand it too. 6x frame generation means 6 times the amount it had before. If it had 10 frames before, then 6x means 60 frames in total, which are 50 of them fake frames. Note to anyone reading this: Frame Generation is also adding lag. So anyone saying Frame Generation is increasing performance just because the numbers go higher, did not understand what it is. In fact Frame Generation is decreasing performance.
Now imagine you use DLSS and RayTracing, and to feel good you add Frame Generation. What an abomination is this?
What the hell is even the point of that? (Other than to sell graphics cards…)
A marketer’s dream (but garbage to everyone else).
Man you’re basically not even playing the game at that point.
Just one 6th of it.^^
at best. that’s just framegen. You forgot upscaling. it internally renders at 540p…
In that answer, I forgot indeed. And the DLSS 5 image styling on top after upscaling… First Ai: Image upscaling, on top second Ai: DLSS 5 styling, on top third Ai: Frame Generation. And that assumes that the original input image from the developers was created without Ai. I mean Unreal Engine has some builtin Ai features and so on.
The article goes into this.
Looking at the basic performance charts Nvidia has provided us so far, the ultra-high frame rate figures are based on 6x Multi Frame Generation. So, while the little RTX 5060 can churn out a 258 fps result in NBA 2K27 at 1080p Ultra settings with ray tracing and DLSS 5 enabled, the game underneath will actually be running at around 43 fps.
258 / 43 = 6I haven’t looked at the raw numbers, but if the A.I. is reducing performance by 60%, you can do some basic math and estimate that your game would have 110FPS normally. So the A.I. technically comes out ahead by a lot of frames. But, are those frames actually valuable? 60fps is enough for me personality, and 120fps is more than enough for almost everybody, so anything more than 120 is basically fluff.
Also I don’t really want to play a game where 5/6 of frames are “fake”. Imagine just walking along in Elden Ring and you glitch through a wall, but the wall never existed, it was hallucinated by the A.I. based on surrounding geometry, and then you get hit by a random fireball the A.I. accidentally left out. I would be pissed. I can’t even imagine all the strange visual artefacts and glitches the A.I. would introduce. Like your character gaining and losing fingers in The Sims multiple times per second.
It’s not even just 1/6 frame, because there is upscaling with Ai before, plus the upscaled image is probably changed a bit with the new DLSS 5 imagery. So the one full frame isn’t even a full frame.
What’s the upscaling with A.I. “before” that you’re talking about?
DLSS can upscale the image. Lets say from 1080p to 4k, with Ai. Then the DLSS 5 cosmetics are added, these new ones we see in the screenshots. That’s also Ai. And at last 6x Frame Generation with 5 generated images in between real images, with Ai.
Isn’t the input lag going to be insane if the game runs at, say, 10 fps? This would have to come with some kind of new render pipeline where the simulation can somehow still run at a higher framerate.
Exactly (we almost posted at the same time, where I explicitly talked about this in the other reply, lol, also with 10 fps as example. :D). There is a reason why Nvidia does not share the latency. I have no idea how this is legal.
I don’t really get how frame generation works, but at what point are you extrapolating so much that it gets out of sync with the gameplay? Surely there’s a limit…
The game can pass movement vectors so they gen image can adapt.
The main images are fully rendered
It delays the task frame from showing and then generates between frame, then more between frames and again more (6x 5 total frames)
Looking at the basic performance charts Nvidia has provided us so far, the ultra-high frame rate figures are based on 6x Multi Frame Generation. So, while the little RTX 5060 can churn out a 258 fps result in NBA 2K27 at 1080p Ultra settings with ray tracing and DLSS 5 enabled, the game underneath will actually be running at around 43 fps.
I can feel the molasses from here.
Just generate more fake frames with a second 5090!
Nvidia’s new SLAI technology!
Doing a shitty job of something at exorbitant cost? Sounds like “AI” to me!
As someone who works with 3D software everything about this trend annoys me to no end. I don‘t benefit from any of this. Instead hardware becomes unaffordable. And before anyone mentions AMD, last time I checked Nvidia still had more bang for your buck in Blender despite everything.
I pray my current hardware survives for a long time because it‘s looking grim out there.
Good thing that this shit won’t run on AMD cards anyways lmao. AMD saving me once again.
If I had a video card that could run this I’d be so disappointed.













