NVIDIA's latest update proves upgrading your GPU doesn't matter anymore

Once, each new generation of graphics card promised to bring large performance gains, and if you wanted to play the latest and greatest AAA games at high resolutions, you needed to upgrade or be left behind. However, NVIDIA's continued improvements to DLSS have made upgrading less important than it used to be.

Gamers are obsessed with frame rate

For several decades, gamers were rightly obsessed with chasing higher and higher frames per second (FPS). Each new generation of graphics cards would bring better frame rates, and gamers would respond by buying higher resolution monitors that support higher refresh rates.

And that makes perfect sense. The higher FPS—up to a certain point anyway—give you an advantage in competitive games, especially if the game involves very careful aim. If you're playing a single-player game, you may not be fighting for your life against other players that spend hours refining their skill, but a smooth single-player experience is definitely preferable to a choppy, laggy one.

Even if you're not chasing a stable 240 FPS in your single-player RPGs, that gives you margin to increase the resolution of your monitor without turning your immersive gaming experience into a slide show instead.

However, that hardware arms race between monitors, games, and powerful GPUs is largely over. AI has put an end to it.

Real frames don't matter anymore, AI does

For most of gaming history, frames were rendered at "native" resolution. In other words, if you had a 1920x1080 monitor, and you had a game's resolution set to 1920x1080, then your graphics card would be directly pumping out images with a resolution of 1920x1080.

How many frames a GPU could produce was the golden standard gamers cared about.

That all changed when NVIDIA introduced Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and frame generation.

What do DLSS and frame gen do?

DLSS works by rendering a game at a lower resolution, then using artificial intelligence to increase the resolution to resolution the user wants. So, for example, if you wanted to maximize your performance using DLSS, you could render a frame at 960x540 and then use AI to upscale it to 1920x1080.

When it first released, DLSS was a bit rough around the edges—literally. However, it is now a mature technology. I can't reliably tell the difference between DLSS 4 (Quality) and native rendering, except my FPS is notably higher with DLSS on.

Frame generation (usually just called frame gen) also relies on AI, but instead of using AI to upscale a low-resolution frame to a higher one, it is used to create "fake" frames . These fake frames are displayed just like frames that are actually rendered, which effectively boosts your FPS.

If the fake frames were of poor quality, you'd instantly notice something looks weird. Objects would shift around, motion would look jerky, and other visual artifacts would be quite obvious. However, since it was released, frame gen has come a long way.

DLSS and frame gen are the future

The improvements to DLSS and frame gen have been remarkable, and NVIDIA's latest release, DLSS 4.5 —which includes an improvement on frame gen—only proves just how extraordinary the technology has become.

When it becomes available this spring, it'll be able to generate up to 5 AI frames per real frame rendered. If you're struggling to reach 144Hz or 240Hz, it could very easily be enough to get you there. As an added bonus, it'll generate frames dynamically, so if you only need 3 frames generated per real frame rendered to hit your FPS target, you won't waste power generating 4 or 5 frames.

Upgrading just doesn't matter like it used to

Moore's law is dead, and the generational increases in raw performance between GPUs isn't what it used to be. However, the same isn't true for improvements to DLSS.

DLSS has improved in leaps and bounds since its original release, and NVIDIA has continued to support the latest versions of DLSS even on the RTX 20-series cards. That means that even those relatively old cards can take advantage of tech that allows you to fine tune the balance between performance and quality at your discretion.

Even the 20-series cards can see 20% to 30% improvements in FPS when using DLSS 4 on a demanding game like Cyberpunk 2077; new cards, like the 40- and 50-series, will see even bigger improvements. DLSS 4.5 is more demanding than DLSS 4, but it arguably produces better image quality at identical frame rates when you put it head-to-head against DLSS 4.0.

All of this points to one thing: upgrading isn't quite as important as it used to be. By pressing a button on a screen, you can increase your FPS by 20% to 30%—sometimes more. That is the kind of leap in performance you used to only get when you put out hundreds of dollars for a brand-new GPU. Even in situations where you don't get an uplift in performance, you can get better quality.

If you have a 40 or 50 series GPU, frame generation only makes it even more appealing to stay put. A game that would have been unpleasant to play on an RTX 5070 can have buttery smooth frame rates by enabling one setting.

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Eventually, the latest DLSS features will be incompatible with the first GPUs to support them. However, NVIDIA has shown they're willing to make the latest features available to everyone they can.

Even if your 3070 Ti can't use frame gen, you'll be able to count on DLSS 4 for the foreseeable future to improve your performance. If you're using a 5070 Ti today, maybe that card won't support whatever DLSS or frame gen feature is released in the year 2030, but it'll always have the current frame gen technologies, which can double your apparent FPS in some situations.

Until NVIDIA releases a feature that is a paradigm shift rather than just a generational improvement, I'm perfectly content to use the card I have.