Players put a lot of work and even more money into trying to move the needle on their FPS counter higher and higher. Nvidia isn’t the only GPU maker who asks users to pay more for more frames, but it may be the first company to ask, will you accept it if—not some‚ but most of your frames aren’t rendered but generated thanks to AI? We’ve seen multiple demos of Nvidia’s multi-frame gen running in person. Judging solely by the FPS counts, it could be the most significant turning point for PC gaming of the past four years, as long as you have the money to afford another graphics card.
During a closed-door media session with journalists, Nvidia touted the power of its new, bulky, and expensive RTX 50-series cards. The pack is led by the $2,000 RTX 5090, with the desktop GPU running with 32GB of VRAM. Of course, it’s a more powerful card. It has 21,760 CUDA cores and the new Blackwell shader cores. However, the VRAM was explicitly upped for the sake of AI processing. Beyond its graphical capability, Nvidia focused much of its GPU announcement on its 5th-gen Tensor cores and 3,352 TOPS of generative AI processing capability.
The RTX 5090 is a GPU targeted at AI developers and gamers alike. But so what? Does AI processing mean anything for gamers? It does, at least for the sake of those extra frames. Nvidia pointed out its multi-frame gen capabilities, but the score is bigger than that. The update to its upscaler tech, DLSS 4, is the lynchpin of Nvidia’s hopes for its new cards. Nvidia claims a game like Star Wars: Outlaws will only run at 50 FPS at 4K and max settings on a 5090 and no upscaling. With DLSS 4, plus all the bells and whistles, Nvidia claims you can get more than 250 FPS with less latency than standard. It sounds too good to be true, and if you’re a PC gaming purist, it may well be.
What Does Multi-Frame Gen Do to Make Games Run Better?
© Photo: Kyle Barr / GizmodoIn essence, Nvidia’s frame gen uses a generating model to predict the next frame in a sequence, then inserts a new frame based on the normal, rendered in-game image. The current frame gen on DLSS 3.5 is supported by some titles to generate frames on a 1-to-1 basis. Previous versions of single frame gen could offer a solid bump in framerates, though a newly updated version should improve framerates to a larger degree. Nvidia says its new frame generation model is 40% faster than before and uses less VRAM; plus, it can model multiple frames based on a single rendered scene and insert it before the next rendered frame without impacting latency.
Nvidia said that if a game runs all of DLSS 4, the GPU handles five AI models at once, so you need the 50-series cards with their new Tensor Cores to run multi-frame gen. In-person, the framerates are immediately impressive. A machine with a 5090 running Cyberpunk 2077 at 90 FPS may be able to do close to 170 FPS in some scenes with multi-frame gen. An RTX 4090 PC hitting 130 FPS in Alan Wake 2 with ray reconstruction may be closer to 300 FPS in the same scene with a 5090 and multi-frame gen.
The tech is already impressive, but the real consideration gamers need to make is if they can stomach the concept they’re seeing “fake frames,” as detractors call it, instead of real rendered frames. In one demo, one onlooker pointed out a sudden flickering from a light source, though it may have had to do with an issue on the monitor. As for detail, I couldn’t spot much difference between a game with generated frames and one without. What helps is that Nvidia’s updated ray reconstruction should add more clarity to fine lines, such as overhead wires or chain-link fences.
For the sake of gameplay, Nvidia made sure to enable Reflex 2 to reduce latency. In a game like Black Myth Wukong, there wasn’t any noticeable change in the game running at 90 FPS versus a game running with higher framerates, other than the most marginal improvement in smoothness. The difference in 170 FPS versus 230 FPS in a game like Marvel Rivals may be more significant. Still, that’s only if you’re a wannabe pro gamer playing a shooter at such a high standard and need absolute precision.
These aren’t “fake frames” but aren’t rendered by the PC’s processors either. Multi-frame gen is a magic trick that requires misdirection. Users will be too busy playing the game and basking in the framerate ticker to notice any potential visual discrepancies when they—inevitably—appear. This takes time to parse out, something that can’t be done even with a few hours of demos. We’ll need to get our hands on these new cards to discover how this impacts our gaming experience.
What Games Benefit Most from Multi-Frame Gen?
© Photo: Kyle Barr / GizmodoNvidia promises 75 games and apps that will support the multi-frame gen, including future titles like Doom: The Dark Ages and Dune: Awakening. Among those initially supported are a few oddballs, like the climbing game Jusant and Deep Rock Galactic. Both games don’t tax the GPU to a significant degree when running. The nearly 7-year-old Deep Rock Galactic is normally more CPU-intensive. A better card will increase framerates, but not to the extent of a more intensive game. Add on multi-frame gen, and the number of frames you’d get would likely exceed the refresh rate of most high-end monitors you could buy at a reasonable price.
The high-end RTX 40-series cards, especially the 4090, were the pinnacle of what most users could get for desktop graphics. AMD and now Intel can compete in the low-to-mid-range GPU market, but Nvidia is the only one that promises “the best.” CEO Jensen Huang said as much during a Q&A the day after his CES keynote address. But the 4090 hasn’t been maxed out yet. You can still buy that card and get great performance when paired with a high-end CPU.
To run the 5090, you’ll need at least 575W of power, so in all likelihood, you’ll require a large, certified PSU, at the very least. You’ll want to pair it with the latest and greatest AMD or Intel desktop CPUs, and we still don’t know if any of the current or upcoming top-end processors will lead to any bottlenecks. The 4090 is already excessive but is safe and a known variable. The 5090 is big, and you have to have a reason to run it. Still, if you bought an expensive, high-end 240 Hz monitor and wanted to play your games at their peak in both looks and performance, the 5090 promises to do all that for a pretty penny.
Which Gamers Will Benefit From the DLSS Updates?
© Photo: Kyle Barr / GizmodoThat’s why multi-frame generation is so important. Only the new 50-series cards will have this quality. The 40-series will have the remodeled single-frame generation, though those cards, along with the 30-series and 20-series GPUs, will get access to the transformer model super-resolution, DLAA, and updated ray reconstruction. Nvidia claims its internal data shows close to 80% of players use DLSS. That’s strong adoption, but Nvidia hasn’t revealed which among those gamers are using the company’s cheaper or older GPUs.
Nvidia has not revealed any details about the anticipated RTX 5060 and RTX 5050. The more budget-end cards are rumored to have 8 GB of VRAM. It’s what the 5070 also packs, and although it seems light, Nvidia still said that the card will support multi-frame gen. Budget gamers would benefit far more from frame generation than those with the cash to drop $2,000 on a new GPU. They’re less likely to care about the “fake frames” complaint so long as they can play demanding games at playable framerates.
We know that the $550 RTX 5070 can handle multi-frame generation, so Nvidia promoted it to match the $1,600 RTX 4090’s performance. That’s a good sign for budget-end desktop PCs and laptops, though what really matters for users is whether they can stomach the idea that their frames are “fake” or generated. If the point is to experience what developers intended, then it really doesn’t matter where the frames come from as long as they enhance the experience.
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