Nvidia’s RTX 50-series could be a huge flop if gamers reject DLSS 4

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 are real, and well, they’re not as spectacular as many gamers hoped at first glance – at least when you aren’t using DLSS 4.

I’m worried about what that means for the $550 RTX 5070 PC that gamers seemed so jazzed about, and whether the entire RTX 50-series could wind up being a flop if DLSS 4’s fantastic new Multi Frame Generation fails to pick up steam fast. (It should!) And I have the numbers to back up my fears.

The “Blackwell”-powered RTX 50-series doesn’t deliver tangible improvements in value or raw rendering performance from generation to generation, full stop. The GeForce RTX 5090 brute forces its way atop the benchmark charts thanks to Nvidia cramming it with 33 percent more CUDA cores than the RTX 4090, which helps it achieve 27 percent faster speeds at 4K resolution – for an 18 percent increase in price and much higher power consumption. It’s definitely brutal and badass, but meh for a new generation.

The RTX 5080 is even less impressive, delivering only 15 percent more performance than the RTX 4080 Super it replaces at 4K, and a paltry 11 percent improvement at 1440p. Plus, it still only has 16GB of GDDR7 memory despite costing $1,000. Meh.

Balancing this out, of course, are the massive performance gains provided by Nvidia’s new DLSS 4, and more specifically, its Multi Frame Generation feature. MFG inserts up to three AI frames between two “traditionally” rendered frames to send frame rates and visual smoothness soaring. The tightly paced frames it spits out can make even janky games like Star Wars Outlaws feel as snappy as the legendary Doom 2016. As I said in our RTX 5090 review, it’s a true, literal game-changer, and it will work in 75 games and apps from day one.

But the RTX 5080 shows that Nvidia is willing to bet an entire graphics card’s existence on DLSS 4’s promise. And the RTX 5080 isn’t the only one.

Worrying about the RTX 5070 series

Shortly after Nvidia revealed the Blackwell generation, we analyzed the RTX 50-series specs, trying to estimate where “traditional” gaming improvements will fall. We came damn close to nailing it, guessing that the RTX 5090 would wind up roughly 33 percent faster (it wound up at 27 percent) and the 5080 would wind up 10 to 15 percent faster (reality: 11.5 to 15 percent).

How’d we do that? Simple: We simply compared their CUDA core counts to their predecessors. Blackwell GPUs are built using the same 4N process at TSMC, so there was no easy uplift coming from a transistor node jump, and instead of prioritizing traditional performance gains, Nvidia focused much of its attention on beefing up the RTX 50-series’ AI tensor cores to accommodate DLSS 4’s delightful DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation feature, as well as more future-looking technologies like Neural Rendering and Mega Geometry.

Again: DLSS 4 is so much more than just “fake frames.” It drastically improved gaming fluidity and smoothness in our playtesting in a handful of games made available to press before launch. AI upscaling is killing native rendering now, and it makes sense for Nvidia to prioritize it in a generation where AMD’s Radeon crew already admitted that it isn’t targeting highest-end performance.

If the DLSS 4 dream fails to materialize, however – if the rest of the 75 launch games exhibit visual artifacts or glitches more pronounced than we’ve seen, if gamers reject the extra latency AI frames require, a million other ifs – the RTX 50-series could wind up being one of the most disappointing GPU generations in recent memory.

We’ve already seen CUDA core counts correlate to the RTX 5090 and 5080’s performance. That’s a bad omen for the RTX 5070 series, despite beings priced $50 lower than before.

The same CUDA comparisons project the $750 RTX 5070 Ti as being the “star” of this generation, with a roughly 17 percent increase over its predecessor, plus an upgrade to memory capacity, bandwidth, and speed that could help boost performance even more. A ~20 percent performance increase generation-to-generation is still pretty mediocre as far as a progress goes, but it’s a more tangible improvement.

The reception for the $550 RTX 5070 could be even frostier if our estimates continue to hold; that GPU only has 4 percent more cores than the existing 4070. It sticks to the same 12GB of memory as its predecessor, too, albeit of the faster GDDR7 variety. We’ll have to wait to see how it handles in real life when it launches later this spring, but the 5070 has the potential to make the RTX 5080’s minuscule generational gains look comparatively massive.

Nvidia hasn’t announced lower-end GPUs yet. What we’ve seen from the RTX 5070 laptop GPU makes us nervous about the RTX 5060, as a graphics card with just 8GB of VRAM in 2025 doesn’t cut it. We can’t opine too much about that until the card is announced and tested though.

What’s clear is that Blackwell’s traditional rendering performance doesn’t move the needle forward by much. The RTX 50-series was built for an AI-augmented future and it will live or die based on DLSS 4’s reception.

Betting it all on DLSS 4

Good news! I absolutely adore DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Gen in practice. So do Adam Patrick Murray and Will Smith, my cohorts on PCWorld’s video team who have been knee-deep testing RTX 50-series GPUs for weeks now. Check out our long discussion about DLSS 4 in the time-stamped video below if you want to hear our deeper thoughts.

But make no mistake: Nvidia’s entire RTX 50-series lineup bets that DLSS 4’s humongous, AI-powered gains in fluidness and frame rates will be embraced by PC gamers. And that is indeed a gamble.

DLSS 4 blew my hair back during testing, but many PC gamers derisively call AI-generated frames “fake frames.” The RTX 40-series’ Single Frame Generation faced withering criticism at launch due to visual glitches and latency concerns. I’ve seen many, many fewer of those with my hands-on time with Multi Frame Generation – or perhaps they’ve simply blown by too fast for my eyes to notice, churning out at insanely high frame rates.

We’ve only had access to a handful of MFG-equipped games, and last generation, DLSS 3’s Single Frame Gen could be very hit or miss depending on the game you’re playing. (Microsoft Flight Sim notoriously had issues with glitchy text, for example). Making DLSS 4 available in 75 games and apps at launch will put a lot of software in gamers’ hands for testing, which is excellent and a huge improvement from past norms, but it remains to be seen if they all deliver the same finger-licking performance as Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Outlaws, and Alan Wake 2.

Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry

How to enable DLSS 4 in all those games won’t necessarily be obvious, either. While some games are being updated for DLSS 4 by developers, many of the 75 games and apps will require you to enable “DLSS Override” options deep in the Nvidia App, which tells the software to replace older DLSS 3 files with the new DLSS 4 capabilities.

Will gamers know to do that? Will those DLSS Override games perform as smoothly as native titles? Will lower-tier cards like the RTX 5070 and 5060 deliver enough raw performance to hit 60 or more frames per second, the baseline needed to mitigate MFG causing devastating, swimmy-feeling lag? Will developers rush to add DLSS 4 to even more titles?

Nvidia clearly is gambling on “yes” to all of the above. From what I’ve played, DLSS 4 can deliver heavenly, snappy gaming experiences that are simply impossible with traditional rendering. But if Nvidia can’t convince gamers that AI-generated frames are more than simply “fake frames,” the entire GeForce RTX 50-series could wind up being viewed as a flop – because as we’ve already seen from the RTX 5080 and 5090, Nvidia bet this generation’s future on AI and DLSS, not traditional rendering.

Further reading: AI upscaling killed native graphics gaming. We’re better off for it