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 don’t care about or want this technology
Doing a shitty job of something at exorbitant cost? Sounds like “AI” to me!
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!
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. 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.
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???
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.
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.
Yeah, the only case where frame gen makes sense is when you care more about smooth motion than responsiveness, and you’re willing to pay for it with the inherent artifacting.
Games (and TVs) have gotten a lot better at latency compared to the 100+ms PS3 days, so it wouldn’t phase me if someone with a ultra high refresh rate monitor says they prefer having it on because of how smooth it is, but there are big drawbacks.
Wasn’t the original premise of DLSS to add performance and now they even falling on that?
I’m not as familiar with it, but from what I understand DLSS was switching rendering to a lower resolution then used algorithms to upscale the video to make it look as if it is high res.
It is. According to Nvidia, DLSS is a family and brand now, consisting of different technologies. So the name DLSS started as upscaler only, but now it contains the image styling and other techs in the same name. Which is great, because it confuses everyone.
Nah, keep giving Nvidia money
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.
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?
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.
What the hell is even the point of that? (Other than to sell graphics cards…)
A marketer’s dream (but garbage to everyone else).
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.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.
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 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)
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.
If I had a video card that could run this I’d be so disappointed.
Good thing that this shit won’t run on AMD cards anyways lmao. AMD saving me once again.
From my understanding DLSS 5 can be targeted. Meaning the developer can choose to make a chair look more realistic while reducing the effects for others objects (like NPCs). I think the marketing group dropped the ball on the utility of DLSS 5 and went with the most dramatic NPC altering features. I’ve seen some DLSS5 lighting comparisons in Cyberpunk and I have to admit… It’s pretty damn good.
If the materials rendering part were integrated into the rendering pipeline as a standard thing that could be called with an API, that could be pretty good. Just pass along some info about the material and let it render like any other basic shader. But because it’s a post-processing shader that needs to analyze the entire image and work out materials on the fly to objects that have already been rendered, it murders the frame rate and can make mistakes on its guesses. There’s something legitimately interesting burried in there, but this is the worst possible way to implement it.
But because it’s a post-processing shader that needs to analyze the entire image and work out materials on the fly to objects that have already been rendered, it murders the frame rate and can make mistakes on its guesses.
Yeah, this sounds dumb as fuck. They’re rushing and making the worst choices possible to push big marketing ideas.
Same as anything AI: if they slow down and make sure everything is done by the book, it could really be a useful tool, but they’re too high on power to care about any of this.
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.
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.
in some cases only 1% of pixels are actually rendered.
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.
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.
Exactly for those reasons the last gaming notebook I bought (used) was all AMD. Comes with some caveats but it’s better than supporting Nvidia.
They’ve not been for the gamers for a long time
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.The crypto mess isn’t Nvidia’s fault. The biggest crypto coin wasn’t even mined on GPUs anymore when the cryptocalypse happened and GPUs got literally unaffordable and unobtainable for a few years. The Ethereum devs made their mining algorithm require lots of VRAM in an attempt to make their blockchain more democratic because ASIC miners would not work as well. This backfired by suddenly making gamer GPUs the sweet spot for mining Ethereum. Nvidia profited a lot. But the Ethereum devs are actually to blame. They fucked this up hard and then dragged out the algorithm switch to from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake for years. After Ethereum switched to PoS, GPU prices were recovering slowly - until the AI rush started.
The RAMpocalypse literally has been caused by Sam Altman buying the (western) world’s RAM production without even being able to put it anywhere. This is basically venture capital ruining it for everyone.
Nvidia is a big player and their intel-style market segmentation sucks. But they actually make produce GPUs. The real fuckery is venture capitalists enabling OpenAI’s CEO to ruin the tech market for everyone.Capitalism has an Epstein class problem. Without those CEOs, the RAMpocalypse hadn’t happened. Nvidia couldn’t sell GPUs which have no place to actually get installed in. The AI company financing circle jerk had been busted by the US government.
The current mess is literally the democrats fault. They could have done proper politics instead of their abstruse post-woke shit. Trump had never won. Musk had not gutted governmental oversight (there wasn’t much, but it at least existed).
Fucking democrats wasting their power to do irrelevant shit to nag the rednecks into voting Trump instead of doing literally anything else.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.
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).
But this is exactly what you get for “not caring for anything but raw performance and features”. You get features that noone asked for and especially features that’ll bind you into their ecosystem. They tried since forever. Hairfx, physx and now dlss/“ai”.
You’re right though, I might sadly add. People don’t care. 5090 is fastest? Then 5090 it’ll be.
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.
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.
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 believe HairFX is Unity’s version of AMD’s TressFX, so not an Nvidia tech in this case.
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
The only game I would use this for is the Hellraiser game about to be release. Yes, I’m a bit morbid. Otherwise I’m good with Palworld graphics.
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
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I’ve always been a firm believer that the better a game looks, the worse the game will actually be overall. While not always true, but I’d much prefer the focus on fun rather than how close to real life it can look… if I wanted to see shit that looks that good I’d go interact with the outside.
