Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, which is a company that specializes in Computer Graphics, just revealed their next-generation Graphics Cards at Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a tech trade show held every year. Many in the technology and gaming space look forward to this event every year with hopes to see ground-breaking technology from the giants, Nvidia and AMD.  AMD is another Graphics oriented company. The tech show has received mixed opinions from fans this year, here’s why.

Nvidia boasted a new Graphics Card that has the same amount of processing power as last year’s heavy-hitter at a fraction of the price. This Graphics Card is the RTX 5070, the successor to the RTX 4090. That sounds great, right?  Unfortunately, there are a few strings attached. The card has only 16GB of VRAM. Without getting into crazy technical detail, all this means is that there is a bottleneck in the card, meaning the weakest link holds down potential performance.

But there’s another, bigger issue with Nvidia’s reveal–the misleading performance statistics from Nvidia. During the show at CES, companies such as Nvidia will always show how much better their new product is compared to the old ones. According to Jensen Huang at CES, their new most powerful Graphics Card, the RTX 5090, has “twice the performance of a 4090.” Huang explains that it is “impossible without artificial intelligence.” Huang does not go into specifics about performance, but Nvidia’s website does, which has a video showcasing what the RTX 5090 can do, called a benchmark. The benchmark displays framerate, or FPS, a metric which measures performance (higher FPS is better). In the video, there are two benchmarks, one displaying the RTX 5090 with AI, and the other without AI. The AI is meant to make the FPS higher. According to Nvidia, with AI, the FPS is ~240, without AI it’s ~28, which is an incredible improvement. However, Nvidia also has the same benchmarks, but for the last generation RTX 4090. According to Nvidia, with AI, the FPS is ~95, without AI it’s ~20. Without AI, the RTX 5090 is only a 40% improvement from the RTX 4090, which is the main point of controversy for the new cards. AI FPS improvements are still not perfect, which is why many people do not feel comfortable with the AI Nvidia is pushing.

It is important to know what this AI technology is, Nvidia calls it “DLSS” (Deep Learning Super Sampling) which is meant to improve performance in video games. The latest DLSS is DLSS 4, and its prime improvement is “Multi Frame Generation”, basically a way to generate new frames with AI to increase FPS, with “up to three generated frames per rendered frame”, according to Nvidia. The concern from many is that these generated frames will be inaccurate to what’s actually going on in the game, and for certain games (like competitive & precision) that can be a huge problem. Of course, people are not forced to use the AI technology, just heavily encouraged by the large FPS boost given by it.