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.
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 mean look it might become a useful tool in the future, not denying that. But what we are seeing is DLSS5 being shoved into a lot of mainstream games as a replacement for polish. We can let the big studios drive themselves into the ground chasing profits and slapping on whatever new tech they think will give them a sales boost, no complaints here.
But as it stands it’s a capability that’s over hyped for what it is, like you said yourself, art teams aren’t using it as part of their art direction so it’s clashing with the designs, and the hardware level barrier for entry isn’t worth the money it costs to get there.
That’s all subject to change, it could become a staple of the industry, it could become the linchpin that lets smaller games perform while still letting the game have great design. But right now there’s too much opposition for too little benefit. It could be great, sure, but people playing games now don’t care what it “could” be. They care what it “is”, and right now for the most part what it “is” is an over hyped buzzword feature that jacks up the “cost” of a game for no real benefit to the player.
And to give a counter example, the same thing was said about Ray tracing when it initially came out. It was cool but it would practically set your PC on fire at the time, but even then, people liked it. It was overpriced and not really that different, but some people thought it was cool. DLSS5 doesn’t even have that.
I mean I’ve tried DLSS5 on a bunch of games in my library. On most of them, it tanks my framerates and sometimes looks like absolute ass. But in two of my games (Cyberpunk 2077 and Stellar Blade) it looks and runs incredibly, and it’s hard not to see the potential.
As far as everything else you’ve said I 100% agree. It’s just not there yet, I think one day it will be though. I’m lucky I got my 5070 right before the prices started getting jacked up, so I’m privileged to be able to experiment with what’s already out. And believe me when I say the results vary - at the moment. Even as a fan of the tech and I can confidently say it’s not ready. And yes, studios that cram it as a staple feature in place of good optimization and, quite simply, a good game, then they’re gonna fail because they released slop. But that’s not the destiny of every game that uses it. I’m telling you, one day this tech is gonna be in mass produced hand-held devices. At the current rate of Nvidia GPU prices, they’re not gonna be the ones mass producing it and winning. Only a matter of time till China comes out with a 32gb Vram, Blackwell tech x4 GPU for like $200, meanwhile the 16gb equivalents today will cost under $100. Because Nvidia (while I admit they do produce cool tech) are greedy capitalist bastards. All the AI slop companies are greedy capitalist bastards. And I continue to blame the capitalist bastardary more than I do the shortcuts AI unlocks. If the economy wasn’t so shit and things in general were more affordable, and one of these GPUs were affordable after a few months of saving like things were 20 years ago, we’d be much happier with this. However we’re overall unhappy with it because it’s not being developed for affordable entertainment, but instead being used for surveillance powered by datacenters that destroy our environment so a handful of lizards can make billions, while we’re literally struggling to afford groceries. I want to burn down those remote, gated billionaire communities and replace THEM with datacenters for OUR general use.