Nvidia releases stats proving DLSS and Frame Generation are here to stay – sorry, angry gamers
It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my work that I spend much of my free time browsing gaming and technology-related social media. This includes r/pcmasterrace, a PC gaming community currently embroiled in a virtual civil war over a highly divisive topic: AI-powered resolution upscaling and frame-gen technology.
The debate at the moment is largely focused on Nvidia’s DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation (apologies to Intel and AMD, but XeSS and FSR are often left out of these conversations), with most PC gamers falling into one of two camps:’ DLSS is great’ and ‘DLSS is rubbish’. Well, it turns out the former camp is a lot bigger than the latter, based on new stats from Nvidia.
The use of DLSS has steadily increased since its introduction in 2019 (in an update from Battlefield V), with Nvidia’s user data now indicating that more than 80% of players with RTX GPUs enable DLSS in their games – with some individual games having even higher percentages. The use of DLSS is also becoming increasingly common among developers, with more than 540 games and apps supporting it, including 15 of the 20 most played PC games of 2024.
The DLSS debate
Ultimately, a community like r/pcmasterrace isn’t really going to be representative of the broader PC gaming community: it’s a gathering place for hardcore gamers and PC builders, and that kind of clientele inevitably leads to hot-blooded discourse. .
Some argue that tools like DLSS and frame-gen are a good way to squeeze extra performance out of your PC, while others complain about input latency, ‘fake frames’ and the modern prevalence of AI in gaming. The naysayers are not entirely without justification either; DLSS has historically encountered a number of issues with maintaining image quality, frame blur, and input latency – although, like all emerging technologies, it only continues to improve with each generation.
Personal? I’m unsure about it. On the one hand, I believe that DLSS has improved a lot since the first iteration, and the Multi Frame Generation feature is coming to the newly announced version. Nvidia RTX 5000 GPUs feels a bit like dark and forbidden magic – a piece of software quadruples my framerate without me actually having to do anything? Witchcraft!
But on the other hand, it cannot be denied that they do exist some disadvantages of DLSS and frame-gen technology. While I don’t subscribe to the ridiculous “fake frames” argument I often see making the rounds on Reddit – come on guys, it’s not like the common frames are lovingly handcrafted by generations of artisan framers in a Tibetan mountain village – it is not yet a perfect tool, and there is one obvious pitfall here.
An AI-powered gaming world
As my colleague Isaiah Williams recently noted: DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation can deliver phenomenal results – but there are fears among PC gamers that this could lead to developers relying too much on AI technology in games, especially when it comes to PC port optimization.
Now that consoles are also starting to implement similar technology – with the terribly named ones PSSR landed on Sony’s PS5 Pro last year and a DLSS-like feature may be coming to Nintendo Switch 2 – it’s clear that scaling is here to stay, even before looking at Nvidia’s latest stats. As the hardware requirements of modern triple-A games continue to grow, there is fear among gamers that developers will see it as a band-aid for poor game optimization – while users with older hardware that don’t support upscaling are left out. the cold.
It’s a legitimate fear, although I don’t think we should use it to pollute all of Nvidia; DLSS and Team Green’s broader gaming software suite are frankly very impressive, and the GPU giant is now consciously focused on mitigating the downsides of upscaling and frame-gen through generational improvements and features like the latency-reducing Reflex 2.
Additionally, the blame for poor optimization in PC games lies with developers and publishers – while an argument can be made that Nvidia enables this behavior, I think it’s fair to say that Team Green develops and implements these tools purely with the aim to improve game performance. As for the argument that players with older GPUs shouldn’t be left out of the equation, unfortunately, we all have to upgrade eventually. So the next time you see a spirited discussion about frame-gen on Reddit, maybe consider cutting Nvidia some slack.
Do you have any urgent thoughts about this? If you read this article all the way through, I bet you will too. Tell me how much of a genius (or idiot) I am in our brand new Ny Breaking comments section below!