As an experimental build of the forthcoming Nvidia-made DLSS 5 leaks into the wild, allowing modders to go wild with the AI-driven sloppifying upscaling tech, word also began to escape that—when tweaked correctly—it is possible for it to sometimes make games look slightly better. Certain games, in specific circumstances. But forget all that, as Nvidia has officially confirmed to PC Gamer that running DLSS 5 will reduce the framerate of any game by 50 to 60 percent. Uh, great.
I was not forged in a Digital Foundry, and as such am no leading expert in graphics technology, but I’m fairly sure that the whole point of upscaling is that it allows you to make games look more impressive than your machine’s tech can make them look on its own. It uses quantum wizardry and ancient dark majicks to let the game display at higher resolutions and with better framerates—DLSS 4, for instance, was able to generate three synthetic framerates for every one real one, as well as run ray-tracing more efficiently. However, modders were reporting yesterday that they were noticing a huge hit to performance whenever they ran the leaked version of DLSS 5, and now it seems that’s not just a flaw with the pre-release build.
Half off!
According to PC Gamer, Nvidia confirmed at a tech demo last week that DLSS 5 currently reduces performance on every game by 50 to 60 percent. That is, it’ll halve your framerates for the sake of having in-game characters look like haunted ghouls. And this is the case for even the most top-end GPUs. Which perhaps falls short of a win-win.
Nvidia attempted to defend this by claiming that six months ago, the new AI-driven tech required two RTX 5090s to run at all, so today’s shitty performance represents a huge improvement in a relatively short length of time. The official release for DLSS 5 is September 3, which doesn’t really allow for any huge leaps forward ahead of what we have today given it’s [check’s calendar] September 1. However, perhaps in another six months it’ll have been tweaked to the point where it can do anything useful?
Still, if you were on the fence about the laughingstock that has been DLSS 5, thinking that perhaps you prefer your in-game characters to look like slightly deflated blow-up dolls, this news seems like a pretty final nail in the coffin. The fence coffin. Not to mention that it’s currently either impossible or outrageously expensive to try to buy a GPU that might be able to run the tech, should it improve in the near future. You know what? I’m coming around to the idea that this genAI business just might not be a net benefit for humanity.