The DLSS Promise
The promise of DLSS was that my 5-year old 3070 would still be able to run high-end games at 1440p with some general compromises to quality, but instead I see forum posts saying "what do you mean performance is fine on my 5080 I get 90fps at 1080p with framegen" as if that's remotely reasonable.
I always viewed DLSS as a longevity play, an antialiasing tool that had the secondary benefit of allowing you to tweak the resolution down with fewer drawbacks. But the marketing worked so well that we started to get pixel-peeping journalists comparing screenshots and concluding that actually DLSS is better than native, and now in 2025 the default assumption is that you'll have it running at 75% res or lower regardless of your system - this is fucked! Also half of the frames you're seeing are just interpolated!
It's not like there's no logical case for these algorithms being ubiquitous - 90% of the time, two consecutive frames look basically identical, so why waste all those precious FLOPS drawing them properly? But the times they perform worst are the times where motion fluidity matters most - in action-packed motion - so you end up needing a high starting frame-rate anyway!
I should have known that this would happen eventually, but even with that knowledge I don't think I'd have expected it to happen so soon. It's definitely been accelerated by the ubiquitous UE5's incredibly lazy top-down approach to performance. Just start with all the features and optimise it later. Can't see a downside to choosing an entire graphical feature-set before you have any assets.
Hmm, the game is basically done - should we spend another 6 months polishing up the rendering pipeline to produce the exact same frames but faster?
Look the Threat Interactive kid has terrible abrasive vibes but he's right about this stuff - you can "get used" to how these games look when they have a strong art team producing high quality work that distracts from all the fizzle, but that doesn't mean it doesn't look like shit.
When I first booted Clair Obscur, I genuinely had to put it down after half an hour because I was so frustrated with how it looked and performed. The art direction saved the overall experience, but the smeary fizzly image never went away. I love that game but it looks like a migraine.
It's weird to look at Battlefield 6 with its BIOS-level Anti-Cheat and EA ownership with any sense of admiration, but it's looking like if I wanted to I could play it without pulling my hair out (Secure Boot notwithstanding) over graphical presets. But then, this is a (bafflingly) competitive-oriented title with an in-house engine so maybe it's not a fair comparison.
idk man I just can't shake the feeling that DLSS was a scam, that giving up on native rendering just muddied the waters enough for an engine with a truly terrible design philosophy to take over with its own much worse TAA.
When I bought my 3070 it was a card that could do 120+fps in most contemporary games at 1440p, now if I wanted to upgrade to a 5070 I'd be getting worse contemporary performance and the expectation that I turn on the "come on little GPU, just a little longer" features from day 1. Oh, and it costs £60 more.
Not that I'm planning to upgrade with Nvidia when I do make that purchase - I think I'd rather take my chances with AMD's drivers at this point.