this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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It covers the breadth of problems pretty well, but I feel compelled to point out that there are a few times where things are misrepresented in this post e.g.:
The MSRP for a 5090 is $2k, but the MSRP for the 5090 Astral -- a top-end card being used for overclocking world records -- is $2.8k. I couldn't quickly find the European MSRP but my money's on it being more than 2.2k euro.
NVENC isn't much of a moat right now, as both Intel and AMD's encoders are roughly comparable in quality these days (including in Intel's iGPUs!). There are cases where NVENC might do something specific better (like 4:2:2 support for prosumer/professional use cases) or have better software support in a specific program, but for common use cases like streaming/recording gameplay the alternatives should be roughly equivalent for most users.
Production apparently stopped on these for several months leading up to the 50-series launch; it seems unreasonable to harshly judge the pricing of a product that hasn't had new stock for an extended period of time (of course, you can then judge either the decision to stop production or the still-elevated pricing of the 50 series).
I personally find this take crazy given that DLSS2+ / FSR4+, when quality-biased, average visual quality comparable to native for most users in most situations and that was with DLSS2 in 2023, not even DLSS3 let alone DLSS4 (which is markedly better on average). I don't really care how a frame is generated if it looks good enough (and doesn't come with other notable downsides like latency). This almost feels like complaining about screen space reflections being "fake" reflections. Like yeah, it's fake, but if the average player experience is consistently better with it than without it then what does it matter?
Increasingly complex manufacturing nodes are becoming increasingly expensive as all fuck. If it's more cost-efficient to use some of that die area for specialized cores that can do high-quality upscaling instead of natively rendering everything with all the die space then that's fine by me. I don't think blaming DLSS (and its equivalents like FSR and XeSS) as "snake oil" is the right takeaway. If the options are (1) spend $X on a card that outputs 60 FPS natively or (2) spend $X on a card that outputs upscaled 80 FPS at quality good enough that I can't tell it's not native, then sign me the fuck up for option #2. For people less fussy about static image quality and more invested in smoothness, they can be perfectly happy with 100 FPS but marginally worse image quality. Not everyone is as sweaty about static image quality as some of us in the enthusiast crowd are.
There's some fair points here about RT (though I find exclusively using path tracing for RT performance testing a little disingenuous given the performance gap), but if RT performance is the main complaint then why is the sub-heading "DLSS is, and always was, snake oil"?
obligatory: disagreeing with some of the author's points is not the same as saying "Nvidia is great"
I think DLSS (and FSR and so on) are great value propositions but they become a problem when developers use them as a crutch. At the very least your game should not need them at all to run on high end hardware on max settings. With them then being options for people on lower end hardware to either lower settings or combine higher settings with upscaling. When they become mandatory they stop being a value proposition since the benefit stops being a benefit and starts just being neccesary for baseline performance.
They’re never mandatory. What are you talking about? Which games can’t run on a 5090 or even 5070 without DLSS?
Correct me if I am wrong but maybe they meant when Publisher/Devs list hardware requirement for their games and includes DLSS in the calculations. IIRC AssCreed Shadows and MH Wilds had that.
But it does come with increased latency. It also disrupts the artistic vision of games. With MFG you're seeing more fake frames than real frames. It's deceptive and like snake oil in that Nvidia isn't distinguishing between fake frames and real frames. I forget what the exact comparison is, but when they say "The RTX 5040 has the same performance as the RTX 4090" but that's with 3 fake frames for every real frame, that's incredibly deceptive.
He’s talking about DLSS upscaling - not DLSS Frame Generation - which doesn’t add latency.
It does add latency, you need 1-2ms to upscale the frame. However, if you are using a lower render resolution (instead of going up in resolution while rendering internally the same) then the latency will be lower because you have a higher frame rate
Yeah, so it doesn’t add latency. It takes like 1-2ms iirc in the pipeline, which like you said is less than/the same/negligibly more than it would take to render at the native resolution.
Which also means it's not possible to use it to go to 1000 fps
So it has limits? Oh no….. At 1000fps you can’t do much rendering effects at all. Luckily no one, and I do literally mean no one, plays games at 1000fps.
Yes, but that also means there's no FPS advantage at all at 500 Hz using DLSS and people do play at 500Hz
If you’re playing games at 500fps you don’t need DLSS. What is your point? Again - it’s for situations where you can’t get a good framerate at the settings you want to use.
How is this hard to understand?
My point is my 2060 can't reach 500 fps even if you run the game in DLSS. You need a more powerful GPU, DLSS can only increase your FPS if the FPS is terrible, it can't boost you from 250 to 500
But no one said it would?
It would if DLSS didn't add latency, but it does
It adds rendering time, not "latency" btw.
DLSS improves framerates at basically no cost, to let people hit playable or high framerates at quality levels they couldn't without it. It's not for hitting 500fps, it's for hitting 30/60/100 etc.
It doesn't render anything, so it can't add rendering time, it just generates an upscaled version of an already rendered frame
Ok so you definitely don't understand how DLSS works lol.
DLSS has to be implemented by the developers of the game. They literally have to use the DLSS APIs in their game code. DLSS requires things like the player input and motion vectors for all scenes, materials, and objects that are in the frame. It adds time to the rendering pipeline. The more powerful your GPU the less rendering time it adds.
We're getting way off track now anyway, so to go back to the start: DLSS Super Resolution is amazing because it lets you get a framerate bump with either little-to-no visibile change to IQ, to a very noticeable degradation of IQ depending on how much of a framerate bump you get. It is one of the most significant advancements in gaming this century IMO.
On my PC with a 4070 Super, I can play COD BO6 at a near locked 120fps on my 4K 120hz VRR tv at "4K" using DLSS, whereas my PC definitely cannot do that without DLSS. It looks like native 4K, and believe me I've taken many screenshots and compared them at 300% zoom lol.
That screenshot said generated, not rendered. DLSS generates the final frame taking the motion vectors and the rendered lower resolution frame. It does not go in the rendering pipeline since the lower resolution frame has to be completely done rendering
DLSS is applied in the rendering pipeline before post processing effects. It is part of the rendering pipeline.
You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re done here.
Thanks for providing insights and inviting a more nuanced discussion. I find it extremely frustrating that in communities like Lemmy it's risky to write comments like this because people assume you're "taking sides."
The entire point of the community should be to have discourse about a topic and go into depth, yet most comments and indeed entire threads are just "Nvidia bad!" with more words.
Obligatory disclaimer that I, too, don't necessarily side with Nvidia.