Nvidia has released what could be seen as a surprising statistic as it gears up for its GeForce RTX 5000-series launch. The company has claimed that more than 80% of RTX graphics card owners use Nvidia DLSS when playing games.
DLSS is Nvidia’s standout software, exclusive to its RTX best graphics card options. It’s a technology that has impressed with its ability to increase frame rates through the use of AI upscaling and frame generation but it has also had its detractors. As such, a claim that so many RTX card owners do use the tech would seem to justify the company’s big push towards AI-enhanced game rendering techniques. However, the devil could be in the details of this claim.
This DLSS data comes straight from an Nvidia presentation that shows the general uptake of DLSS among games and gamers. It includes statistical claims, including that 15 of the top 20 games of 2024 (it doesn’t say which top 20, but here’s our top 10 PC games of 2024) support DLSS, 3 billion hours of DLSS-enabled games have been played, and 540+ DLSS games and apps now being available (notably a drop in the ocean of how many PC games have been released in that time). Meanwhile, that headline 80% figure specifically reads “>80% of RTX players activate DLSS.”
Taken at face value, this is an impressively high engagement rate. However, there could be several ways to interpret this data. If the statistic merely has to have a gamer launch one game with DLSS once, it could be massively overstating the regular use of the tech. If, on the other hand, it’s a survey of how many gamers said they regularly do use DLSS, it could be seen as more representative. We’ve reached out to Nvidia for clarification, and to ask how the data was gathered.
The overall potential controversy here is that Nvidia has been pushing gamers towards AI-enhanced rendering for several years now, starting with the upscaling of DLSS 1 and DLSS 2 Super Resolution, followed by the frame generation of DLSS 3, the ray reconstruction of DLSS 3.5 and now the multi frame generation of DLSS 4. All these technologies have been shown to work surprisingly effectively, but how well they work and their impact on image quality and game performance hasn’t been consistent.
For instance, DLSS upscaling and frame generation can both introduce image artifacts, such as ghostly trails to moving objects, flickering parts of images, and a general softness to the image, as compared to running a game at native resolution. You get a far higher frame rate to compensate for these issues, but some gamers simply can’t get on with the look of these modes and it’s why we often don’t recommend them for use in competitive shooters, or other fast-paced games where the high rate of motion can really mess with how well DLSS works.
On the plus side, the new transformer model in DLSS 4 looks set to address several of these issues, and it looks good from what we’ve seen so far. What’s more, DLSS 4 upscaling will be a free upgrade for all RTX GPUs.
The other factor is game performance and specifically latency when using frame generation. While overall frame rates can be boosted by inserting AI-generated frames in between conventional rendered ones, the resultant higher frame rate doesn’t feel the same as it would if it were rendered normally. That’s because the game is only sampling user input for every other frame (with single-frame generation) or only every four frames (with multi-frame generation). With conventional rendering, user input is sampled every frame for a much snappier, more accurate feel.
Some users notice and really don’t like these issues whereas many users don’t notice the difference. If Nvidia’s statistic is to be taken at face value, the naysayers would appear to be in the minority, but if it’s playing fast and loose with user data, it could be an unfair representation of where the majority of gamers land on this issue.
Nonetheless, entire communities on Reddit have been created to push back against software such as DLSS. Some users see DLSS – and other upscaling and frame generation options, such as AMD’s FSR – as a crutch to keep what they see as “unoptimized” games from running poorly on systems. One user on this subreddit said that Nvidia shouldn’t “skimp” on hardware, “forcing them to use DLSS” due to lack of power on the cards.
Meanwhile, we can look to Nvidia’s claim that the 5070 performs similarly to the RTX 4090 to see just how extreme some of the claims from Nvidia around the efficacy of DLSS have become.
Another point against the representative reality of Nvidia’s statistic is that DLSS can sometimes be enabled by default in games, with perhaps even the vast majority of users never aware it’s even turned on. That could be seen as endorsement of its efficacy, but equally the argument could be made that those users would choose not to use it, were they shown the result with the feature turned off.
As Nvidia rolls out of CES 2025 and the RTX 5090 release date draws near, we’ll find our where the Nvidia RTX 5000 series GPUs end up on our best graphics card guide in the very near future.