SOFT LAUNCH

Nvidia's 5-SERIES launch placed AI benefits above native rendering. Why?

- Phil Iwaniuk

After all those months of waiting, of slightly mistranslated speculative reports and questionable photos of graphics cards in unnamed factory floors, the 5-series family had gone public. Hooray! And in several cases, the speculation was bang on: Nvidia's new flagship gaming card, the RTX 5090, cost a shade under £2,000, featured 32GB of memory as many pre-launch reports suggested, and would you believe it, it offered a significant performance advantage over the RTX 4090.

At least, that was the inference behind all the bar charts and the split-screen videos Nvidia released to accompany the 5090's launch at CES. But upon slightly closer inspection, the quadrupled performance in games like Alan Wake 2 and the longstanding benchmark for neon signs reflecting in puddles that is Cyberpunk 2077 are the result not of native rendering performance, but of AI-generated frames.

And that caused a collective furrowing of brows and grinding of teeth in certain corners of the community. Understandably so: these are expensive graphics cards Nvidia's bringing to market. We're paying for hardware, but being convinced of that hardware's virtues by the performance of software. The software in question is the new Multi-Frame Generation mode, only available on 5-series cards. As its name cunningly implies, you get three AI- generated frames with this tech for every one that 4-series cards are capable of. Hence all those bar charts with quadrupled framerates.