Unless you run an AI data center, Nvidia's announcements this CES have been rather muted. There were updates to GeForce Now cloud streaming and DLSS upscaling technology, but no new graphics cards. That's normal—Nvidia has an occasional quiet year in consumer tech, and the RTX 50-series GPUs only came out last year. Unfortunately, it turns out that these DLSS updates actually make games run worse on older GPUs.
The new version of DLSS, called DLSS 4.5, works very well. Already, lighting looks much more realistic even when ray tracing or HDR isn't used, and in the spring dynamic frame generation will be introduced, which will be able to adjust the number of AI frames inserted into your game on the fly, so you don't waste computing resources creating more frames than necessary or than your monitor can produce. I personally saw examples of both of these use cases at CES, and as someone who mostly plays games without scaling whenever possible, I was so impressed that I may want to get a new GPU and make the swap.
And I emphasize this “new GPU” part. Unfortunately, DLSS 4.5 only works best on the latest Nvidia cards. It was released in beta yesterday for all Nvidia GeForce RTX cards, but gamers on older RTX 3000 series cards are already reporting problems. Posted by user X Mostly positive reviews (by using Tom's Equipment), Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU users may see performance drops of up to 24% in Cyberpunk 2077and a drop of 14%. The Last of Us Part 2. These are just a few examples, but others have posted in the comments about their headaches, just like Reddit users.
This is no small problem. The RTX 3080 Ti may be a few generations behind, but it was at the top of the line at the time. More importantly, according to Steam's own data, the RTX 3060 is currently the most popular video card on Steamand it's weaker than the RTX 3080 Ti. And technically, DLSS 4.5 is available for even weaker RTX 2000 series, which will inevitably face even more serious problems.
So where did this huge loss in productivity come from and what can you do about it? This is likely due to the new AI transformer model powering the DLSS, which Nvidia said was created with the RTX 40 and RTX 50 series cards in mind. While you can use DLSS 4.5 with an older GPU, it doesn't seem to be intended to do so.
What are your thoughts so far?
Luckily, if you decide to try DLSS 4.5 on an old card and don't like what you see, you don't have to worry about it. The public implementation of DLSS 4.5 is currently in beta and must be applied to games by selecting the “Model M” or “Model L” preset in the Nvidia app (under “Latest” and “Custom” respectively). Choosing a different model, such as the K model, should get you back to normal. When the full version of DLSS 4.5 comes out on January 13th, I imagine things will get even simpler.
However, it doesn't look good that most Nvidia gamers can't use this great new feature. Since this can be reversed, it won't break anything, but it also shows that Nvidia is starting to leave all but the most loyal GPU customers behind. And as someone who mostly only uses scaling on weaker hardware like the Steam Deck, I find it especially odd that scaling already comes down to using performance software when you don't have enough raw power. In theory, this should make the target audience gamers with weaker cards.
Credit: Michelle Erhardt
But for my fellow cheap gamers, it's not all doom and gloom. Along with DLSS 4.5, NVIDIA also announced a native Linux client for Nvidia GeForce Now along with Amazon's own Fire TV app. This expands the cloud gaming platform to even more users, and since GeForce Now has a free tier, it's a pretty good deal. Play it right by, say, buying a Fire TV on sale and downloading a free game, and you'll be able to play using the latest Nvidia GPUs on the big screen while spend less than $20. Of course, you may have to deal with some latency and video compression when doing this – just like with cloud gaming – but as DLSS 4.5 shows, even using local hardware comes with its own challenges.
