You can see the rest of the announcements in the above slide deck. There’s more marketing hype around the performance boost offered by DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation (MFG), which, as we discussed in our own in-depth testing, tends to be a highly inflated way of looking at performance. It’s not that MFG is bad, per se, but even Nvidia’s own numbers should cause some raised eyebrows. Like this performance result from Portal RTX:
Updates to the RTX Remix toolset combined with neural rendering features like the neural radiance cache deliver more than double the performance compared to the Remix beta. And then we look at the details.
Base RTX Remix beta performance was 125 FPS — that’s with DLSS 3.5 and frame generation. Runtime optimizations and texture streaming account for a 22% increase, and there’s another 18% improvement from the neural radiance cache. Together, those would result in performance of 175 FPS, an impressive 40% improvement. Then DLSS 4 MFG4X, on top of that, “increases” performance by 73%. But what it really does is drop the base non-framegen performance from ~88 FPS to ~76 FPS.
Either way, it’s still running fast enough that the result should be very playable and look incredibly smooth, particularly if you have a 240 Hz 4K monitor. But that’s also with an RTX 5090, which in our testing provides up to 60% higher performance than the RTX 5080 for demanding ray traced games, 75% higher performance than the RTX 5070 Ti, and 143% more performance than the RTX 5070.
By those metrics, 4K with performance upscaling and MFG4X on an RTX 5070 might only get around 125 FPS in Portal RTX on an RTX 5070, and it would feel more like 31 FPS in terms of input sampling and latency. That’s still playable, but nowhere near what the MFG numbers might suggest in terms of user experience. 120 FPS via MFG isn’t the same feel as a native 120 FPS, or even 120 FPS with regular framegen. And how will Half-Life 2 RTX run, given it’s presumably an even more demanding game? We’ll find out next week.
As we’ve noted in so many of our recent GPU reviews, the fundamental problem is supply and demand. The demand — and record $130 billion in revenue — for AI and data center GPUs and hardware dwarfs what Nvidia or any other company might make on consumer GPUs for gaming right now. Until that changes, we’re not likely to see sufficient supply to meet demand for gaming GPUs, never mind finding GPUs available at their ostensible MSRPs.
One thing Nvidia didn’t talk about yet is the widely rumored impending announcement of the RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5060. Prices have started popping up online, and the full specs have been leaked multiple times. The TLDR: They’re both 128-bit memory interfaces, and it looks like they’ll launch with 8GB configurations, with an optional 16GB 5060 Ti as an upgraded solution. Prices and availability are still unknown factors.
