NVIDIA has officially announced its new 50 Series GPU lineup at this year’s CES, with the RTX 5090 unveiled as the next king of gaming. In fact, during Jensen’s speech last week, he made it clear that the performance uplift of the RTX 5090 over its predecessor would be huge – backed up by several slides showcasing over 2X performance gains.

While numbers surrounding generational performance are certainly eye-catching, there are a couple of signs that suggest things may not be as rosy as they seem – especially when comparing GPUs in games that don’t feature the brand’s latest DLSS 4 technology.

RTX 5090 performance uplift stunted in Far Cry 6

During Jensen’s keynote, he highlighted the impressive performance uplift of the RTX 5090 over its predecessor when using the newly announced DLSS 4 – the brand’s latest Multi Frame Generation technology. However, what he didn’t highlight, was the relatively underwhelming performance uplift when comparing games that don’t use DLSS 4 – enter Far Cry 6.

As you can see from the graph above, the biggest performance gains (outside of Generative AI (Flux.dev)) are found in games that use DLSS 4 in MFG 4X mode. MFG refers to Nvidia’s new Multi Frame Generation technology, which offers up to “three additional frames per traditionally rendered frame” compared to the one additional AI-generated frame offered on the existing 40 series cards.

When you look at the two outliers, Far Cry 6 and A Plague Tale: Requiem – games that only support DLSS 3 (or not at all in the case of FC6) – the performance comparison isn’t quite as impressive. It isn’t completely clear what the performance difference between the two GPUs is in Far Cry 6, because the graph is vague in terms of values. That being said, it’s clear that certain games will not offer double the performance of NVIDIA’s previous flagship – not even close.

For games like Far Cry 6 and A Plague Tale: Requiem, it looks like performance will be closer to 1.25x-1.5x, depending on how you want to read the charts. According to exact numbers posted on Reddit, the two games get a 27.5% and 43.2% performance uplift, respectively, so our first-glance estimation is within this range.

While still impressive, it may make you think twice before heading to eBay to try and get some money for your RTX 4090. It’s also worth noting that, while DLSS 4 will visually make your gameplay look smoother, responsiveness is still determined by the actual rendered frames from the GPU. That means, if you’re running 200 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 with upscaling and frame gen, your game will look smooth, but it may not feel as responsive as if were getting 200 FPS natively.

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Charlie Noon

Charlie is the Affiliate manager for PC Guide. He has a vast understanding of most PC hardware and consumer essentials, using his knowledge to provide the best products and the biggest deals.