It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my work that I spend quite a bit of my free time browsing gaming- and tech-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 is largely focused on Nvidia’s DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation right now (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 bullshit’. Well, it turns out the former camp is a lot bigger than the latter, based on new statistics released by Nvidia.
DLSS use has been steadily on the rise ever since its introduction back in 2019 (in an update to Battlefield V), with Nvidia’s user data now indicating that more than 80% of players with RTX GPUs turn on DLSS in their games – with some individual games sporting even higher percentages. DLSS adoption is becoming more commonplace among developers too, with more than 540 games and apps supporting it, including 15 of the top 20 most-played PC games of 2024.
The DLSS debate
At the end of the day, a community like r/pcmasterrace won’t be truly indicative of the wider PC gaming community: it’s a gathering place for hardcore gamers and PC builders, and that sort of clientele inevitably leads to some hot-blooded discourse.
Some argue that tools such as DLSS and frame-gen are a good way to squeeze extra performance from your PC, while others complain about input latency, ‘fake frames’, and the modern prevalence of AI in gaming. The naysayers aren’t completely without justification, either; DLSS has historically run into some issues with maintaining image quality, frame blurring, and input latency – although like all emergent technologies, it’s only improved with each generation.
Personally? I’m on the fence about it. On the one hand, I do believe that DLSS has improved a great deal since its first iteration, and the Multi Frame Generation feature coming to the newly-announced Nvidia RTX 5000 GPUs feels a bit like dark and forbidden magic – a piece of software quadruples my framerate without me actually needing to do anything? Witchcraft!
But on the other hand, there’s no ignoring that there are some downsides to DLSS and frame-gen tech. While I don’t subscribe to the ridiculous ‘fake frames’ argument I often see bandied about on Reddit – come on guys, it’s not like the regular frames are being lovingly handcrafted by generations of artisanal frame-makers in a Tibetan mountain village – it’s not yet a perfect tool, and there’s one obvious pitfall here.
An AI-powered world of gaming
As my colleague Isaiah Williams recently pointed out, DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation can provide some phenomenal results – but there are fears among PC gamers that this could lead to developers falling into an over-reliance on AI tech in games, particularly when it comes to the optimization of PC ports.
As consoles begin to implement similar tech too – with the terribly-named PSSR landing on Sony’s PS5 Pro last year and a DLSS-like feature potentially coming to the Nintendo Switch 2 – it’s clear that upscaling is here to stay even before looking at Nvidia’s latest stats. As the hardware demands of modern triple-A games continue to grow, there’s a fear among gamers that developers will start viewing it as a band-aid for poor game optimization – while users running older hardware that doesn’t support upscaling are left out in the cold.
It’s a legitimate fear, though I don’t think we should be using it to crap all over Nvidia; DLSS and Team Green’s wider gaming software suite are frankly very impressive, and the GPU giant is now consciously focused on mitigating the drawbacks of upscaling and frame-gen through generational improvements and features like the latency-reducing Reflex 2.
Besides, the blame for poor optimization in PC games lies with developers and publishers – while there’s an argument to be made that Nvidia is enabling this behavior, I think it’s fair to say that Team Green is developing and implementing these tools purely with the goal of improving game performance. As for the argument that players with older GPUs shouldn’t be left out, well… unfortunately, we all have to upgrade eventually. So next time you see a spirited argument about frame-gen on Reddit, maybe think about giving Nvidia a bit of slack.
Got some pressing thoughts about this? If you’ve read this article all the way through then I’ll bet you do. Tell me how much of a genius (or moron) I am in our shiny new TechRadar comments section below!
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christian.guyton@futurenet.com (Christian Guyton)
