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In recent times, Nvidia has emerged as a frontrunner in the AI race, which has certainly left some fans concerned over the priorities of the leading GPU manufacturer. While many have questioned whether Team Green has stopped pushing the boundaries in raw graphical performance, there is no question that the company has certainly been flexing its AI muscles.
I personally drive an RTX 3080 Ti-powered PC and have been on the fence regarding upgrading to the RTX 50 series. So when Nvidia reached out with an opportunity to check out the latest and greatest from Team Green, including the entire lineup of Blackwell GPUs, I had my foot out the door.
Following a quick flight to Delhi, I checked out not just the GPUs but also the gaming laptops featuring the RTX 50 series GPUs.
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NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX "Future of AI" showcase held in New Delhi was hosted by John Gillooly, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, APAC South, and Jeff Yen, Director of Technical Marketing, APAC, at Nvidia. The showcase featured live demonstrations and technical deep dives into the Blackwell series GPUs and different AI tools that game developers will be implementing into future titles.
The AI journey of Nvidia on GeForce RTX with DLSS
I still remember watching the Nvidia showcase on my PC back in 2018, where Jensen Huang introduced the first RTX series GPU, the RTX 2080. Of course, ray tracing was the hot new thing, with examples in games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Battlefield V — but what many overlooked, including admittedly me, was DLSS.
To put it briefly, without delving into the technical details, the game is initially rendered at a lower resolution, which then DLSS upscales using AI to deliver a higher resolution output in real time. In its most recent version, DLSS 4 generates multiple frames, essentially quadrupling the output FPS.
While this has created a discourse amongst players over "fake frame", the truth is that DLSS helps achieve better performances in games, especially in lower-end GPUs trying to run demanding titles. While you won't feel much difference in your game going from 120 to 480 FPS on an RTX 5090, you can definitely notice the frames going from 30 to 120 on an RTX 5050.
In the demo displayed by Nvidia, I tried out a few games with graphics and ray-tracing cranked up to the maximum. Due to DLSS 4, these games were not only playable but ran at a high framerate, even on a relatively weaker GPU in some of the thinnest laptops out there. While AI-generated frames will certainly not replace natively rendered frames, they remain indistinguishable, especially in the middle of the session, where you wouldn't always be pixel peaking.
Aside from DLSS, Nvidia has a few other familiar AI-powered demos on the floor, namely Reflex, which aims to compensate for any latency caused by DLSS and Broadcast, which is the perfect tool for streamers.
The AI future of Nvidia with Neural Rendering
If DLSS was the foundation of AI for Nvidia, the future certainly seems to be Neural Rendering. While I certainly can't elucidate this concept as well as John, it is simply a game rendering pipeline that utilizes multiple neural tools such as RTX Neural Shaders, RTX Neural Faces, and RTX Mega Geometry to render a photorealistic gameplay in real time.
To understand Neural Rendering better, check out the official developer blog here.
To experience this, I got to try out the Zorah tech-demo, which utilizes all of Neural Rendering pipelines; it looked amazing. Of course, the demo was running on an RTX 5090, but I couldn't help but wonder when we will get games looking as good as this.
With the entire lineup of RTX 50 series now released alongside laptops of the Blackwell generation, many have questioned where this series lands in the grand scale of graphics cards. Looking at the raw performance numbers will show a marginal improvement over last generation, which speaks to a refinement rather than a generational leap. However, that doesn't tell the whole story.
Features like DLSS have become essential to modern video games, and having them in games immediately increases the value of the GPU. Moreover, the majority of gamers do not upgrade every generation, opting to skip one or two, which makes the RTX 50 series even more enticing coming from an RTX 20 series or, like me, an RTX 30 series.
