html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" Nvidia just revealed its range of RTX 50-series GPUsat CES 2025, and made some big performance claims. The company says that the flagship RTX 5090 is twice as fast as last gens RTX 4090, and its not alone. Across all of the benchmarks Nvidia shared, from the RTX 5090 down to the RTX 5070, Nvidia says the new GPUs are twice as fast as their last-gen counterparts.We normally dont see that kind of generational uplift. Did Nvidia put some sort of magical GPU dust into its new graphics cards? If you look closely at the benchmarks, it becomes clear that, yes, Nvidia did exactly that. And that magical GPU dust is called DLSS 4.NvidiaYou can see what I mean from the chart above. In the footnotes, Nvidia notes that it used DLSS 3 for the RTX 4090 and DLSS 4 for the RTX 5090. DLSS 4 supports multi-frame generation in short, it can generate multiple frames in between each real frame. Nvidia is providing more than twice the performance of the RTX 4090 with the new RTX 5090, but that largely comes on the back of multi-frame generation in DLSS 4.Recommended VideosThat becomes clear when you look atFar Cry 6andA Plague Tale: Requiem. The comparative numbers in these games are much less impressive, with Nvidia showing somewhere around a 1.5x improvement in performance.A Plague Tale: Requiemonly supports DLSS 3, so the RTX 5090 doesnt have the multi-frame generation advantage. AndFar Cry 6doesnt support DLSS at all, and its the weakest of the games Nvidia showed off.NvidiaThis is true across all of the benchmarks. You can see the results for the RTX 5070 above, which is expected to arrive in February. During Nvidias presentation, CEO Jensen Huang boldly declared that the $550 RTX 5070 delivers performance on par with the RTX 4090, but again, that claim comes largely on the back of multi-frame generation in DLSS 4.Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming Theres a problem with multi-frame generation, and thats latency. As is already the case with DLSS 3, youre essentially playing on a delay with frame generation. Its a slight delay, but the graphics card has to render two frames in order to perform the frame interpolation to generate the frames in between. This isnt a problem at high frame rates, but DLSS 3 runs into issues if youre running at a low base frame rate.RelatedThat issue becomes exaggerated when generating multiple frames, which is something I saw when looking at Lossless Scaling, which supports 4x frame generation like DLSS 4. You may be able to go from 30 frames per second (fps) to 120 fps with DLSS 4, but youll still get the responsiveness of 30 fps.Now, I havent used DLSS 4 no one outside of Nvidia has. Based on previous DLSS updates, Im sure it will be much better than what Lossless Scaling is able to deliver, especially with the new Reflex 2 latency reduction feature running at full clip. And in fairness to Nvidia, its still showing a solid generational uplift in games likeFar Cry 6anda Plague Tale Requiem.Its just not twice the performance of the previous generation.It shouldnt be long until I have Nvidias new GPUs in hand and Im able to test them myself and see how well DLSS 4 actually holds up. Regardless, its clear that the claims of twice the performance as the previous generation dont tell the full story about Nvidias new graphics cards.Editors Recommendations