Nvidia's CES 2025 presentation showed off its new RTX 50-series graphics cards proudly, with the RTX 5090 through RTX 5070 all offering around double the performance of their previous-gen counterparts in the RTX 40-series. Nvidia credited this in its keynote to the brand-new Blackwell architecture. However, a look at Nvidia's in-house benchmarks reveals that the 2X improvements in games come more from the software suite of DLSS 4 than pure silicon vs. silicon matchups.
Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS, has been a tentpole feature in Nvidia's consumer graphics cards since the RTX 20-series. DLSS 4's software suite includes a bevy of new and improved AI features that increase in-game performance and visual quality over last-gen's DLSS 3/3.5. Software and hardware improvements lead to upgrades in DLSS's Super Resolution upscaling, ray reconstruction, and frame generation, a feature which AI generates one extra frame per rendered frame.
DLSS 4 steps this up to Multi Frame Generation, a process that can generate up to three frames based on one rendered frame. This can effectively step a 30 FPS experience up to 120 FPS by generating and inserting the extra frames. But as with regular framegen, it's really about frame smoothing than truly boosting performance — user input still gets sampled at a far slower rate, and latency concerns linger.
