- Nvidia has provided some new benchmarks for RTX 5000 graphics cards
- Two of them do not involve DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation.
- However, the generation-over-generation increases shown here are modest, but we should still not get carried away
Nvidia has released more gaming tests for its next-generation Blackwell GPUs and we’ve gotten a couple of results that don’t use DLSS 4 and its Multi Frame Generation (MFG) feature.
The problem with game benchmarks using MFG (which is a huge improvement over Nvidia’s original frame generation, inserting more artificial frames to increase the frames per second count) is that they are not a fair comparison of apples to apples with RTX 4000 graphics cards that use DLSS 3 frame generation (the latter cannot use DLSS 4 MFG, as it is exclusive to RTX 5000). And that’s the case for most of the benchmarks issued so far.
PC gamers are therefore eager to see generational comparisons that do not use DLSS 4, avoiding this distortion of results, and we have two games where this has happened in this new benchmark, reported by ComputerBase (via VideoCardz), namely Forbidden West Horizon and Resident Evil 4.
Resident Evil 4 doesn’t use DLSS at all, but has ray tracing enabled, and Horizon Forbidden West gives us an idea of cross-gen performance rasterized (no ray tracing), but with DLSS enabled (frameless). (although this is crucial, so MFG is removed from the equation).
Going by the bars in the bar chart provided (estimating their relative lengths, as Nvidia doesn’t provide concrete figures) it appears that the RTX 5090 is about a third (33%) faster than the RTX 4090 in these two games. However, there is a much smaller jump of about 15% with the RTX 5080 versus the RTX 4080.
With the RTX 5070 and its 5070 Ti sibling, we’re seeing a jump of over 20% compared to their respective predecessors, again in those two games alone.
Analysis: Fake stills protest in part
“See. Nvidia’s new graphics cards are a huge scam – without ‘fake frames’ they will be garbage!
Fake frames mean frame generation, and this is the kind of scathing commentary that’s popping up well after this reveal (and actually before, to be fair). But we do have to keep in mind that these are only a couple of games, in certain specific configurations.
Still, I concede the general point. On the one hand, Nvidia will obviously want to show off DLSS 4 and MFG, as it’s a big step forward (well, in theory at this point for all of us outside of Team Green) for their GPUs. But on the other hand, it doesn’t feel very good that most of the benchmarks shown so far use MFG and, as noted, are not fair or direct comparisons to RTX 4000 graphics cards. These benchmarks show gains of at least 30-40% (in previous streams), or a doubling of frame rate (as seen here with some games, and actually a 2.9x gain with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle). Of course, this isn’t what you’ll see outside of games that support DLSS 4 with MFG.
Gamers would like to see a wider range of benchmarks, including pure raster performance without any DLSS, something we haven’t seen at all, with Resident Evil 4 being the only game to not have DLSS enabled in testing. Nvidia, it’s ray-tracked performance.
Nvidia’s job is, at the preview stage, to generate hype for its graphics cards, obviously, but the tilt towards that goal seems too skewed for gamers (and me, I might add) in the way they’ve been shown the RTX 5000 GPUs. until now.
Still, Horizon Forbidden West and Resident Evil 4’s shakier-looking cross-gen performance should not be used as a springboard to a conclusion similar to the (false) frame-falling rant I introduced this section with; unfair and going too far in the other direction
That said, to some extent, expect less of a generational rise with Blackwell compared to Lovelace (RTX 4000), outside of the software plus AI tricks (neural texture compression) and the new MFG trump card. After all, the RTX 5000 is manufactured using the same process as the RTX 4000 (TSMC 4N, although it’s an upgraded version, 4NP, for Blackwell), so there’s no process disruption to facilitate major generational gains there; that side of the equation depends purely on architectural improvements.
Before we get too bogged down in the details here, one thing is pretty clear: we need to wait for reviews before we get anything close to a complete picture of the RTX 5000’s performance. Which, of course, is always the case.
Still, there remains an inescapable feeling that Nvidia is hiding something with a strong MFG bent in the lead-up to this generation’s launch – a lesson for Team Green to be more even-handed with its marketing efforts next time, perhaps . And of course, we still don’t know how MFG will develop in its execution and fluidity for those PC games that use the shiny new technology.
There are still many unknowns, although all these questions will be answered soon. In theory, the RTX 5090 review will arrive next week, if the rumors turn out to be correct.
