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.
So traumatised by AI ads on YouTube that I think this post is a tai chi ad.
Hey, wanna get rid of that stubborn belly fat? Try this chair tai chi.
I don’t care about or want this technology
Not gonna lie, I’d try this in the same way I’ve tried AI for 5 minutes like a morbid curiosity thing. I’m also gonna admit that I can see it working with a very specific category of games, if it didn’t have a performance impact. Those games being the kind of games I have absolutely no interest in; sports games. I can see it for porn games too but I’ve not played more than a few and didn’t really see the appeal, but I can imagine it’d be a cool thing for some people.
None of that has any effect on this being a purely bad thing though, I’d rather stop using technology completely than being forced to use AI in any way.This comment is nonsensical AI hate. It’s a mechanical trick to produce interesting developer controlled detail that is hard otherwise to render directly. It might turn out to cost too much for much practical usage for years or forever or it might be sufficiently accelerated by hardware such that it becomes a mainstay this will be a function of what makes pretty graphics better not your hang ups.
It’s a brute force hack that adds tiny details no one will ever notice during actual gameplay, at the cost of the majority of your frames
No
Saw a Fallout 4 mod that would do this and immediately imagined my PC on fire.
Well its a good thing no one plays games anymore, its just benchmarking and dick measuring right? Right?
i miss when GPUs just rendered the game, and that was all.
None of this upscaling, AI graphics altering bullshit that is there ultimately to distract from the impotent promises of 4k gaming, which is unnecessarily ridiculous to begin with.
4k is only ridiculous if you play games seated at a desk. Videogames are still ultimately a livingroom toy at their heart, and there are people who’ve graduated from game consoles to PCs and still want to play on the couch. That means distance from your TV, which means the TV has to be pretty large. Lower resolutions on a TV that size do not look good.
The relationship between screen size and distance to viewer decides at what resolution you won’t be able to notice more detail at a higher resolution. 4K on a desktop monitor can make the same amount of sense (or not) as on a TV (or phone, or any other device with a display really).
That’s not true at all. 1080p on an appropriately large tv at a proper viewing distance will be far worse as those pixels are stretched out. The subpixel aliasing on that would be absolutely brutal.
Which is bull, because we’ve been playing games from our couches for like 40 years and there were beautiful, amazing, wonderful graphics long before the 4k propaganda.
Here is what gaming looked like 40 years ago hint it looked like dogshit but we loved it
Modern gaming looks fantastic in 4K.
Sure buddy.
I mean… no?
I’m not sure what else to say to that.
Pretty sure lots of old games still look great. Why else would there be modern pixel art games still coming out? The graphics of yore may not have been advanced but they had an art style which is more important than graphics and more than most modern AAA games.
No, I think you denying reality because of sunk cost fallacy has said enough.
Weapons grade copium on your part lol
Sure Pal.
You know it, buddy.
Your dismissiveness of reality doesn’t change the reality
Ummmm 4k is way less important at couch distance compared to desk distance. Most of us don’t have TVs that occupy the same field of view from the couch as a monitor does at the desk. For example I have a 32 inch monitor at my desk 1.5 feet away and a 65 inch TV about 10 feet away. Sure the TV has 4x the viewing area but my viewing distance is more than 4x so the picture is not as crisp.
You are almost right. It depends on viewing distance as you correctly noted the given viewing distance and screen sizes its pretty easy to tell the difference between 1080p and 4K in most people’s living room especially since big ass screens are cheap and big ass houses expensive.
If you were watching a movie you might be right, but that won’t compensate enough for how low that pixel density is on that size of a TV on a video game. The subpixel aliasing will be notably worse on the TV.
When will they realize that good graphics does not equal a good game?
That’s if you even consider AI generated frames to be “good graphics”.
I love beautiful graphics. I’m not picky about them and don’t insist on photorealism only (Valhala is a beautiful game and uses this strange mix of high and low fidelity graphics), but I do love me some good photorealistic rendering.
I’m not interested in this “AI tries to predict the pixels between actual rendered ones”. It’s just a push towards average, like everything else big data, when it works well. And maybe this one does work well but I still dgaf because I don’t want slop frames.
And I suspect that’s a reason you don’t see true frame to frame comparisons between AI upscaling and that same frame fully rendered at the higher resolution. It’s difficult for random reviewers to get the exact same frame rendered like that so I mostly see frames taken from the same viewpoint, but you can’t do apples to apples comparisons because the scene is dynamic and things other than the camera have changed. But nvidia could generate the same frame both ways for a direct comparison but only seem to want to show comparisons like DLSS off (at low res) vs DLSS on (at high res) or different DLSS versions against each other, which I think is telling.
Not anytime soon since gamers are still overwhelmingly indicating they will pay out the nose for the latest graphics.
Ehhhhh have you seen the numbers lately? People seem to be moving away from AAA titles more and more.
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?
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
Don’t forget about making Cloud, a Japanese inspired character, look like Scarlett Johansson.
are you blind? Cloud is clearly already inspired by Scarlett Johansson
Well, gonna be real gay when that transgender protagonist is now in a romantic scene with a dude.
No worries, we’ll just undude the dude in the romantic scene as well and oh shit now we have two transes
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?
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.
Yes, I think that’s a pretty accurate way to describe it.
What’s the point of running 4k over 1080p?
Yes. It does make the game look better at the cost of framerate…
???
I think you’re missing the point of the question here. DLSS was meant to “fake” performance, i.e. you could have the game run at an upscaled 4k, when your PC can’t do native 4k. Now it’s reducing the performance at those upscaled 4k again, so you could just run native 4k at the same FPS.
is there a good guide to the different levels of dlss? what if I want to fake better performance to a degree because, i don’t know, maybe my potato got moldy and stardew is getting choppy
You know what AI reminds me of? That Xavier the renegade angel episode where the monks built that machine to do the monk chants for them and all but two monks remained afterwards and the two that were left in the monastery were playing video games and had put on weight. And the monks said something like: surely engaging in western luxuries will not make us lazy.
Edit : ayyyyy full episode https://www.wco.tv/xavier-renegade-angel-episode-11-vibracaust
I gotta re-watch this show now. Such a banger
There aren’t enough drugs in the world to get me to understand that show.
Okay so I figured it out a while back and an old manic-depressive friend always used to tell me there’s no point to that show, it’s a nonsense show; He’s so wrong and always has been, I always tried to tell him if you paid attention to the story line and not the trippy shit, you’ll realize season 1 is about Xavier trying to live the life that he has created for himself through his own previous misfortunes and follows the search for the father’s killer. Season 2, is about Xavier figuring out who he once was and is trying to connect to his past and is on the search for an ultimate connection to his past and inner self until he realizes he’s been insane the whole time.
You’re welcome : https://www.wco.tv/anime/xavier-renegade-angel/?season=all
total polar opposite of its original purpose.
Generating stock value?
that too, but I w as referring to enabling shittily coded games to run on midrange hardware
But it’ll keep the hype cycle going for a little bit longer! Line must go up!
I wouldn’t use it, even if it was adding performance. Nvidia really found a new technology that is even worse than Frame Generation.
DLSS5 looks bad, but after using for a little while frame generation does have some use cases. It requires a high refresh monitor to be worth anything first and foremost to ensure there’s space for the interpolated frames between a high base frame rate. I use a 144hz monitor, so with 2x frame rate I still get a perfectly playable 72fps based latency.
I found it to be good while playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 because it let me turn up the other settings while consistently looking smooth. It’s a slow enough game that the increased latency isn’t noticeable.
It’s especially helpful for CPU bound games like Helldivers 2 and Victoria 3 because the interpolation happens after the main rendering. I could not get HD2 above ~90fps with my CPU, but with frame gen on the CPU only had to render 72fps. [EDIT: The latency was actually worse than 72fps for the reasons Juki listed below] It also meant I could turn DLSS scaling off, which meant the generated frames were based on native renders and everything looked better. Victoria 3 went from a painful 20-30fps to a much more tolerable 4-60.
All that said it does have serious issues. The increased latency means I’ll never use it for a reaction time based shooter like Enlisted or Deadlock. A few games just don’t look good with it. Star Wars Jedi Survivor had poor performance anyway, but turning frame gen on both makes it feel like it plays worse while also adding terrible ghosting effects and artifacts.
I’ve been interpolating movies and tv shows since 2015, so I think I was better able to set my expectations for the downsides of interpolation.
While I don’t disagree that frame gen at high refresh rates does look pretty decent, I feel the need to correct the input latency part… In your 72fps example you actually have the latency of effectively 36fps because the GPU has to hold back a frame in order to have two frames to interpolate between. It doesn’t (currently?) do extrapolation so this holding back a frame is a hard limit and applies pretty much equally from 2x frame gen all the way up to 6x. This isn’t exactly catastrophic for single player or PVE multiplayer but I would steer clear in PVP
Nvidia reflex 2 should sorta kinda tackle this by taking the updated input => camera position and reprojecting the image before rendering but 1) this will require the game to support it (e.g. declaring UI, crosshairs etc to exclude) and 2) only serves to tackle the game feel portion of the problem - in pve you’ll still be working with old pixels and your response times will still suffer accordingly.
Again, great tech but worth knowing the limits!
Okay, thank you for describing that, I drew a couple charts to help me think through the situation. The lettered frames represent the image sitting on the gpu. It’s called B1 because it’s a frame that needs to be interpolated from frame B, so frame B needs to be rendered first before interpolation can occur. The numbers represent units of time, so in the first chart at time unit 2 Frame A is being displayed on the screen while Frame B is being rendered by the card.
The first chart I drew I made an assumption that the interpolation is basically free due to my understanding that the DLSS functions use specialized cores that could be running in tandem with the rendering of frame B. Then I realized that was an assumption and went over it again assuming frame B needed to be fully rendered and so interpolation would need to take a unit of time before displaying.
I think this illustrates what you’re saying.
I’ve been interpolating movies and tv shows since 2015, so I think I was better able to set my expectations for the downsides of interpolation.
why???
Because when I do it on a dedicated GPU instead of a cheap TV processor to hide the artifacting I like how it looks.
AI frame generation makes sense on lower hardware but to turn your games into slop? Why the hell? Why not enhance the 3d rendering or ray tracing with this ** crap.
I would actually argue it does not. Frame generation requires a minimum of 45-60 FPS so with such a requirement it does not take a game from unplayable to playable. Additionally, those frames don’t lead to the same experience as if the GPU had natively rendered the game because it does not account for the user input for those frames. It literally delays the next frame to insert a fake frame in between, leading to an increase in latency, so the only experience improvement is a smoothing of the rendering but it makes the visual quality worse and the latency worse. To me, this does not make sense and has been very wrongly advertised by nvidia with claims such as an 5070 = 4090, so so wrong.
Edit: frame generation is only appeasing the people for whom higher FPS = better, without looking at the real user experience such as frame pacing, latency, visual quality etc.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Never seen that unfortunately. Nvidia cards are always sold a bit above MSRP while AMD cards are sold far above MSRP. And of course AMD itself targets an MSRP as close to nvidia as possible while still being a tiny bit lower. Gotta keep profit margins rather than increasing market share I guess.
You know shit’s crazy when you’re rooting for INTEL to treat customers better than AMD or nvidia.
Yeah, okay that sucks. But makes comparisons easier i guess? Nvidia wins at default unless you want good open source Linux drivers. Which arent a lot of people to be fair.
I really hope Intel will still release consumer GPUs in the future. The B580 was a pretty nice GPU at MSRP. But i couldnt even recommend it to anyone because it almost always was 30% above MSRP where i live. With that price you could have gotten just a better card in every metric.
I believe HairFX is Unity’s version of AMD’s TressFX, so not an Nvidia tech in this case.
Yeah, sorry. I meant Hairworks.
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.
haha you make it sound like any GPU will be affordable in the first place
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?
Frame generation is for when you can play at native 60 FPS but want more. More native frames don’t give you less noticeable input lag. But more (fake) frames still feel smoother. That’s the sweet spot for frame gen: playing at 120 FPS when your card can only do a little more than 60 FPS native (some native frames are sacrificed to the AI gods to get the fake frames to interleave with the real ones).
The advertising is ridiculous though.What the hell is even the point of that? (Other than to sell graphics cards…)
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.
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…
If chopping people’s arms off to make them run faster is a strategy then this is equivalent to chopping of someone’s legs to make them prettier.
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!
