Since the disastrous launch of the RTX 50 series, NVIDIA has been unable to escape negative headlines: scalper bots are snatching GPUs away from consumers before official sales even begin, power connectors continue to melt, with no fix in sight, marketing is becoming increasingly deceptive, GPUs are missing processing units when they leave the factory, and the drivers, for which NVIDIA has always been praised, are currently falling apart. And to top it all off, NVIDIA is becoming increasingly insistent that media push a certain narrative when reporting on their hardware.
It covers the breadth of problems pretty well, but I feel compelled to point out that there are a few times where things are misrepresented in this post e.g.:
The MSRP for a 5090 is $2k, but the MSRP for the 5090 Astral – a top-end card being used for overclocking world records – is $2.8k. I couldn’t quickly find the European MSRP but my money’s on it being more than 2.2k euro.
NVENC isn’t much of a moat right now, as both Intel and AMD’s encoders are roughly comparable in quality these days (including in Intel’s iGPUs!). There are cases where NVENC might do something specific better (like 4:2:2 support for prosumer/professional use cases) or have better software support in a specific program, but for common use cases like streaming/recording gameplay the alternatives should be roughly equivalent for most users.
Production apparently stopped on these for several months leading up to the 50-series launch; it seems unreasonable to harshly judge the pricing of a product that hasn’t had new stock for an extended period of time (of course, you can then judge either the decision to stop production or the still-elevated pricing of the 50 series).
I personally find this take crazy given that DLSS2+ / FSR4+, when quality-biased, average visual quality comparable to native for most users in most situations and that was with DLSS2 in 2023, not even DLSS3 let alone DLSS4 (which is markedly better on average). I don’t really care how a frame is generated if it looks good enough (and doesn’t come with other notable downsides like latency). This almost feels like complaining about screen space reflections being “fake” reflections. Like yeah, it’s fake, but if the average player experience is consistently better with it than without it then what does it matter?
Increasingly complex manufacturing nodes are becoming increasingly expensive as all fuck. If it’s more cost-efficient to use some of that die area for specialized cores that can do high-quality upscaling instead of natively rendering everything with all the die space then that’s fine by me. I don’t think blaming DLSS (and its equivalents like FSR and XeSS) as “snake oil” is the right takeaway. If the options are (1) spend $X on a card that outputs 60 FPS natively or (2) spend $X on a card that outputs upscaled 80 FPS at quality good enough that I can’t tell it’s not native, then sign me the fuck up for option #2. For people less fussy about static image quality and more invested in smoothness, they can be perfectly happy with 100 FPS but marginally worse image quality. Not everyone is as sweaty about static image quality as some of us in the enthusiast crowd are.
There’s some fair points here about RT (though I find exclusively using path tracing for RT performance testing a little disingenuous given the performance gap), but if RT performance is the main complaint then why is the sub-heading “DLSS is, and always was, snake oil”?
obligatory: disagreeing with some of the author’s points is not the same as saying “Nvidia is great”
Thanks for providing insights and inviting a more nuanced discussion. I find it extremely frustrating that in communities like Lemmy it’s risky to write comments like this because people assume you’re “taking sides.”
The entire point of the community should be to have discourse about a topic and go into depth, yet most comments and indeed entire threads are just “Nvidia bad!” with more words.
Obligatory disclaimer that I, too, don’t necessarily side with Nvidia.
But it does come with increased latency. It also disrupts the artistic vision of games. With MFG you’re seeing more fake frames than real frames. It’s deceptive and like snake oil in that Nvidia isn’t distinguishing between fake frames and real frames. I forget what the exact comparison is, but when they say “The RTX 5040 has the same performance as the RTX 4090” but that’s with 3 fake frames for every real frame, that’s incredibly deceptive.
He’s talking about DLSS upscaling - not DLSS Frame Generation - which doesn’t add latency.
I think DLSS (and FSR and so on) are great value propositions but they become a problem when developers use them as a crutch. At the very least your game should not need them at all to run on high end hardware on max settings. With them then being options for people on lower end hardware to either lower settings or combine higher settings with upscaling. When they become mandatory they stop being a value proposition since the benefit stops being a benefit and starts just being neccesary for baseline performance.
They’re never mandatory. What are you talking about? Which games can’t run on a 5090 or even 5070 without DLSS?
Correct me if I am wrong but maybe they meant when Publisher/Devs list hardware requirement for their games and includes DLSS in the calculations. IIRC AssCreed Shadows and MH Wilds had that.