A 2,000 video card for consumers shouldn't exist. The GeForce RTX 5090, like the 1,599 RTX 4090 before it, is more a flex by NVIDIA than anything truly meaningful for most gamers. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said as much when he revealed the GPU at CES 2025, assuming that it'll be for hardcore players who have 10,000 rigs. Personally, I don't know anyone who actually fits that bill, not unless you count parasocial relationships with streamers. But we all know why NVIDIA is hyping up the unattainable RTX 5090: It lets the company show off benchmarks that AMD can't touch, once again cementing itself as the supreme leader of the high-end video card market.

Due to their ability to get playable frame rates out of even relatively weak and old graphics cards, upscaling techniques such as AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution ("FSR") and Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling ("DLSS") are currently the talk of the town among gamers and developers alike. But where exactly are the similarities and differences? We have taken a look at the topic of upscaling using the latest AMD FSR 3.x and Nvidia DLSS 3.x offshoots as examples and explain them in detail below. AMD FSR 3.x goes back to AMD FSR 2.x, while Nvidia DLSS 3.x goes back to the first generation at its core. The first generation of AMD's FSR, on the other hand, was still a so-called "spatial upscaling," which had to manage entirely without a temporal component.

Ahead of dropping the paid Phantom Liberty expansion next week, CD Projekt Red will release a major update for Cyberpunk 2077 on September 21. The patch will overhaul a lot of the game's systems, switch up the skill trees and make other sweeping changes. There should be a significant visual upgrade for many PC players as well. As of Thursday, Cyberpunk 2077 will be the first game to support DLSS 3.5, the latest version of NVIDIA's upscaling tech. DLSS 3.5 has a feature called Ray Reconstruction, which uses AI to upgrade the ray-traced elements of a game.

Last year, NVIDIA unveiled DLSS 3 with frame interpolation, which used its AI-driven rendering accelerator to add extra frames to games. Now at Gamescom it's introducing DLSS 3.5, which adds Ray Reconstruction, a new feature that will use the company's neural network to improve the quality of ray traced images. It'll be available for all RTX GPUs--unlike DLSS 3's frame interpolation, which only works with RTX 40-series cards. NVIDIA says Ray Reconstruction will replace "hand-tuned denoisers with an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays." That's similar to NVIDIA's original pitch for DLSS -- making low-res textures look better thanks to AI -- and it could potentially lead to better ray tracing performance as well.