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DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 2 days ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world
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The very bad news is, Nvidia says turning DLSS 5 on will currently reduce performance by 50-60%. And that's across the board—no matter the game.

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[-] jaycifer@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

DLSS5 looks bad, but after using for a little while frame generation does have some use cases. It requires a high refresh monitor to be worth anything first and foremost to ensure there’s space for the interpolated frames between a high base frame rate. I use a 144hz monitor, so with 2x frame rate I still get a perfectly playable 72fps based latency.

I found it to be good while playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 because it let me turn up the other settings while consistently looking smooth. It’s a slow enough game that the increased latency isn’t noticeable.

It’s especially helpful for CPU bound games like Helldivers 2 and Victoria 3 because the interpolation happens after the main rendering. I could not get HD2 above ~90fps with my CPU, but with frame gen on the CPU only had to render 72fps. [EDIT: The latency was actually worse than 72fps for the reasons Juki listed below] It also meant I could turn DLSS scaling off, which meant the generated frames were based on native renders and everything looked better. Victoria 3 went from a painful 20-30fps to a much more tolerable 4-60.

All that said it does have serious issues. The increased latency means I’ll never use it for a reaction time based shooter like Enlisted or Deadlock. A few games just don’t look good with it. Star Wars Jedi Survivor had poor performance anyway, but turning frame gen on both makes it feel like it plays worse while also adding terrible ghosting effects and artifacts.

I’ve been interpolating movies and tv shows since 2015, so I think I was better able to set my expectations for the downsides of interpolation.

[-] jukibom@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

While I don't disagree that frame gen at high refresh rates does look pretty decent, I feel the need to correct the input latency part... In your 72fps example you actually have the latency of effectively 36fps because the GPU has to hold back a frame in order to have two frames to interpolate between. It doesn't (currently?) do extrapolation so this holding back a frame is a hard limit and applies pretty much equally from 2x frame gen all the way up to 6x. This isn't exactly catastrophic for single player or PVE multiplayer but I would steer clear in PVP

Nvidia reflex 2 should sorta kinda tackle this by taking the updated input => camera position and reprojecting the image before rendering but 1) this will require the game to support it (e.g. declaring UI, crosshairs etc to exclude) and 2) only serves to tackle the game feel portion of the problem - in pve you'll still be working with old pixels and your response times will still suffer accordingly.

Again, great tech but worth knowing the limits!

[-] jaycifer@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Okay, thank you for describing that, I drew a couple charts to help me think through the situation. The lettered frames represent the image sitting on the gpu. It's called B1 because it's a frame that needs to be interpolated from frame B, so frame B needs to be rendered first before interpolation can occur. The numbers represent units of time, so in the first chart at time unit 2 Frame A is being displayed on the screen while Frame B is being rendered by the card.

The first chart I drew I made an assumption that the interpolation is basically free due to my understanding that the DLSS functions use specialized cores that could be running in tandem with the rendering of frame B. Then I realized that was an assumption and went over it again assuming frame B needed to be fully rendered and so interpolation would need to take a unit of time before displaying.

I think this illustrates what you're saying.

[-] sakuraba@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

I’ve been interpolating movies and tv shows since 2015, so I think I was better able to set my expectations for the downsides of interpolation.

why????

[-] jaycifer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Because when I do it on a dedicated GPU instead of a cheap TV processor to hide the artifacting I like how it looks.

this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
396 points (97.1% liked)

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