DLSS 4’s announcement may have convinced me to switch from AMD to Nvidia for the next generation of GPUs, and I doubt I’m the only one

If there’s one thing I’ve never quite understood about the PC hardware community, it’s the tribalism evident when it comes to GPU choices. I’ve never much cared for being team red, team green, or team blue for that matter. Give me the best bang for my buck, and a fraction of my poorly-managed finances are yours.

Which is why I currently run an RX 7800 XT in the PCIe slot of my main PC. It wasn’t the chiplet-based design that won me over, nor the desire to stick one to the big green man and buy the underdog choice. Simply put, I wanted great 1440p performance on a limited budget—and as a result I opted for an XFX version of AMD’s mid-range card.

My other option was the RTX 4070, a card I’ve often used for performance comparisons and agree is also a fine choice for a reasonably-priced GPU. The RX 7800 XT was a bit cheaper though, and a bit faster in raw raster performance at 1440p, so I plumped for that with my personal cash instead.

Cut to just over a year and a half later, and I’m sat in my Vegas hotel room at CES 2025, watching the Nvidia RTX 50-series announcement along with many of the rest of you (my hardware overlord, Dave James, bravely dealt with the immense queues to see it in person). The lights go up, Jen-Hsun appears in an even shinier leather jacket, and the card rollouts begin. And it’s time for me to make an admission: I scoffed a little when the RTX 5070 was revealed with claims of “4090 performance” for $549.

That’ll be with a lot of upscaling help, I thought. A bit of a contentious claim, and something to potentially write up as an opinion piece later. Fake frames, man, and all that. Raw raster still counts for something, and DLSS can’t really be used as a salve for all ills.

As we later found out, I wasn’t entirely wrong. But then I saw the DLSS 4 demo, with all its immensely pretty ray-traced shenanigans. And the staggering frame rate boosts of Multi Frame Generation. Not to mention the claimed image quality improvements, the Neural Texturing, and all sorts of other enticing AI-based doohickeys.

Of course, it was just a demo trailer. Impossible to really judge until I saw it running in front of me for myself. But if there’s one thing that’s bugged me during my time with the RX 7800 XT, it’s that I’ve been locked into using lesser upscaling tech, like FSR and XeSS.

DLSS has been better, is better, than either of those competing solutions for some time. Miles better.

I felt a twinge. It was the same twinge I’ve felt every time I’ve seen DLSS in motion for the past couple of years, the same slight regret I’ve felt whenever I’ve enabled FSR or Fluid Motion Frames on my home machine to boost the framerate in a struggling game.

FSR and XeSS work fine. But DLSS works brilliantly. And now, with all these transformer-based improvements? Nothing suggests to me that has changed. In fact, Nvidia seems to be so far ahead, the competition looks to be floundering in its wake.

There are still those among us who consider AI upscaling and frame generation to be cheating, to some degree. It’ll always introduce some sort of artifacting or latency, they argue, and it’s never quite as good as raw raster. I like my coffee black and my meat raw, those sorts of people.

For a long time, I was one of them. But now I think it’s time to admit that, far from being a frame-boosting lesser option, a panacea for performance-related woes, it’s now an integral part of PC gaming. Hell, gaming in general. Complaining about it at this point feels a little like King Canute shouting at the tide. Get those AI kids off my lawn, and all that.

And in this brave new world of upscaling being more of a requirement than an option, Nvidia really does seem to be holding all the cards. Yes, FSR 3.1 isn’t bad at Quality settings, but as my upscaler comparison testing shows, it’s still not a patch on DLSS when it comes to image quality—especially when you push it down to Balanced or even, goodness forbid, Performance levels.

AMD says FSR 4 is coming, and it’s now machine-learning based. That’s probably why you’ll need either an RX 9070 or RX 9070 XT to run it, as those cards presumably have some hardware on board equivalent to Nvidia’s Tensor cores. Perhaps it can deliver similar framerate gains and image quality, but something in me doubts it. Nvidia has leant so heavily on the AI button for so long, I honestly can’t see AMD catching up in a single swoop.

AI-based upscaling and frame generation performance now matters more than ever. Raw raster performance? Still so, but lesser. And a $549 card that can take advantage of all the DLSS 4 benefits, to the point where it can spit out hundreds of AI-generated frames at a similar rate to the RTX 4090? Yeah, that’s a darn tempting package if those claims prove out—and one that AMD seems destined to struggle to beat.

We don’t really know yet what the red team will be bringing to the table. We (and every other major outlet) received a slide presentation announcing the new cards, yet no mention was made of any of them at the briefing itself. We know they’ll be mid-range equivalents, we know they’ll make use of FSR 4, and we know what the cooler designs look like. Virtually everything else is still conjecture.

But unless FSR 4 pulls off the same frame-generating magic trick as DLSS 4—and the pricing is ultra-competitive—these new offerings look set to be a hard sell for any gamer in the face of Nvidia’s claims. Even for me, sitting over here, willing AMD to provide some meaningful competition.

There’s still a lot yet that might change my mind. For example, in Dave’s RTX 5080 testing, he found that Multi Frame Generation struggles with latency when really pushed. Force the RTX 5080 down to 25 fps raw performance levels and the added latency becomes noticeable, which doesn’t bode well for the much-less-powerful RTX 5070 being pushed into similar territory.

We’ll find out just what that’s like in person when our test sample arrives. The same applies to the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT for that matter, as all is currently quiet on that front—other than suggestions they’ll be here in March. But again, unless the price is phenomenally cheaper than the Nvidia equivalent (or AMD pulls an upscaling rabbit out of a hat), it really does seem like the RTX 50-series stands a good chance of dominating this generation.

For what it’s worth, I hope that’s not the case. I hope FSR 4 is great, the RX 9070-series is impressive, the prices are low, and this article can be shoved back in my face. Competition is a good thing, and one company completely dominating all the others benefits no-one.

As things currently stand, though, when it comes to my own cash, the RTX 5070 looks like the most likely candidate for my next GPU purchase. Well, after I’ve convinced my partner I need a new graphics card and we don’t need to be saving for a house quite as hard as we currently are.

Ah, damn it. I’m going to be stuck with the RX 7800 XT and old-school FSR forever, aren’t I?