NVIDIA’s DLSS upscaling technology has transformed the PC gaming industry over the past few years. Since its debut in 2018 with the RTX 20 series graphics cards, DLSS has seen significant advancements, with NVIDIA adding features like ray reconstruction and frame generation. While I appreciate the ability to use DLSS to upscale and play graphically intense games at 4K resolution with smooth frame rates, this technology has also had negative effects on the PC gaming space. Despite its seemingly magical performance, games often end up looking and feeling slightly worse than they ideally should.
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DLSS causes visual distortions.
NVIDIA’s DLSS uses AI to upscale your games, a technology they call ‘Super Resolution.’ It works by taking a lower-resolution frame that’s natively rendered on your PC and outputting a higher-resolution frame. For instance, if you’re playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a 4K monitor with the DLSS Quality setting enabled, your graphics card renders the game at 1440p and upscales it to 4K resolution. Sounds ideal, right? Well, not quite.
Unfortunately, the upscaled output won’t look as good as a natively rendered 4K image. While it might appear close to 4K footage at first glance, the differences are noticeable to a trained eye. Upon closer inspection, you’ll see ghosting and smearing in distant moving objects—such as NPCs in a video game. This issue is more pronounced when playing fast-paced games and is one of the main reasons gamers avoid using DLSS in competitive titles like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone.
Fortunately, Nvidia claims that DLSS 4 will address this problem with a new transformer model that minimizes ghosting and enhances detail in moving objects. And the best part? You won’t need to upgrade to the RTX 50 series to benefit from this improvement. DLSS 4 Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction will be available on all RTX graphics cards after a driver update. But until NVIDIA rolls that out, you’ll have to cope with these annoying visual artifacts.
DLSS frame generation results in higher latency.
Using AI to artificially generate more frames might seem like a great way to achieve higher FPS in games. DLSS 3.5 can insert a frame between two natively rendered ones, while DLSS 4’s multi-frame generation technology—exclusive to RTX 50 series graphics cards—can add up to three more frames to further boost the frame rate. However, frame generation increases latency because the AI needs time to analyze the last rendered frame and predict the next one. This increase in latency is why the game doesn’t feel as smooth as it should.
As a result, gamers experience input lag, meaning the game doesn’t feel as responsive. While this might not be a big deal in single-player games, it makes a significant difference in fast-paced multiplayer games. For those who play online games competitively, where every millisecond counts, the latency hit from DLSS frame generation is a dealbreaker. It’s not worth enabling it to improve the perceived frame rate when it makes the game feel less responsive.
Developers are becoming complacent.
Remember when game developers used to put in a lot of effort to make their games playable on low-end graphics cards? It seems that trend has changed. Upscaling and frame generation technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR can be partly blamed for this shift. Many gamers on platforms like Reddit believe that developers rely on these technologies as a shortcut rather than focusing on optimizing performance.
Consider this: if a flagship graphics card like the RTX 4090 requires DLSS and frame generation to run a AAA game at over 60 FPS, what hope do low and mid-range graphics cards—which most people purchase—have? Take Silent Hill 2, for example. Even with an RTX 4090, you need to enable DLSS to achieve over 60FPS with maxed-out settings at 4K resolution. The same issue arises with Black Myth: Wukong, which runs at around 40FPS (in 4K) even with ray tracing disabled.
More developers are now expecting gamers to use DLSS to achieve a smooth 60 FPS gaming experience, even on high-end cards. Studios appear to be focusing more on reducing development time to maximize profits rather than optimizing their games as they used to. While modern games look stunning, game development seems to be heading in the wrong direction. Developers need to understand that most people can’t afford to spend over a thousand dollars on high-end GPUs.
Nvidia leverages DLSS to deceive customers.
When Nvidia’s CEO and founder, Jensen Huang, unveiled the RTX 5070 at CES 2025, he boldly claimed it would deliver the performance of the RTX 4090. However, he also mentioned ‘impossible without artificial intelligence’ immediately after. This crucial detail was overlooked by many, as Nvidia is using DLSS to obscure the true performance of the RTX 5070.
It’s important to note that the RTX 5070 supports multi-frame generation, allowing it to generate three additional frames using AI per natively rendered frame, whereas the RTX 4090 can only generate one. In this context, the RTX 5070 can match the RTX 4090’s performance. However, a side-by-side comparison of specs reveals that the RTX 4090 is significantly more powerful. Without DLSS, the RTX 4090 easily outperforms the newer RTX 5070.
NVIDIA’s performance slides for the RTX 5070 indicate that it is only about 20-25 percent faster than the RTX 4070 without DLSS multi-frame generation in games like Resident Evil 4 and Horizon Forbidden West. When a major company uses upscaling and frame generation technologies to make such exaggerated claims, less-informed gamers may end up purchasing the wrong graphics card due to unrealistic expectations.
DLSS does work like magic, but it comes at a cost. It is undeniably an excellent way to boost your frame rate while gaming. I use it when a demanding game—like Black Myth: Wukong or Cyberpunk 2077—can’t natively run at 4K/60 FPS with ray tracing enabled on my RTX 4090. However, I limit its use to single-player games since I don’t have to worry much about input lag or ghosting. Whenever I join a multiplayer match in Call of Duty, I make sure to turn it off. As long as you are aware of its disadvantages and know when to use it, you can benefit from DLSS upscaling and frame generation, especially on a mid-range PC.