RTX 50 series performance depends too much on Dlss

[Kaamos_Llama]

but for most of that time the performance wasn't reliant on games supporting features and was more a result of the cards hardware being better.

Sort of, there was PhysX, Hairworks, Gsync, Gameworks, maybe more I've forgotten. They really leaned into tesselation when they were better at that in their sponsored games, the whole Crysis 2 benchmark thing with the tesselated water that made AMD look bad in charts. AMD have made their versions of those things available to all, not out of goodwill but because they had to. Nvidia have been trying to make stuff exclusive to their hardware for a long time, this is just a continuation of that.

Not saying its good, it does suck to lock away features from other manufacturers, its just nothing new from them.

Apart from hardware limitations, I also wonder how much of the decision to use software to increase frame rate is more about maximizing profits? I would expect that having to supply every card they sell with improved hardware/architecture isn't as cheap as a software solution, particularly with today's market conditions.

I guess I could see that they are spending resources on designing Tensor cores and AI or whatever when they could be trying to improve CUDA without leveraging that. But the reason Nvidia is now one of the most valuable companies in the world isnt a lot to do with gaming so we would be dreaming if we thought it would really be a priority in that way.

VRAM IC's cost quite a bit but as far as I understand it once the chip is designed the cost is basically the price of the silicon wafer and whatever the fab charges to make it. VRMs and other PCB parts are all kind of peripheral and would have to be made anyway so wouldnt be significantly more or less like for like I dont think.

AMD and Intel are still behind by quite a way even if we dont talk about DLSS so its not like theyre slacking relative to the competition even without RT and DLSS. Maybe if either of those companies came up with something special things would change, hard to say.