92% of Nvidia users turn on DLSS... if they've been lucky enough to bag an RTX 50-series card at launch AND have the Nvidia App installed

The past few weeks have been pretty huge for PC gaming hardware releases, and seemingly for some rather dubious claims from Nvidia about their successes. We've seen the launch of two new lines of GPU with AMD's RX 9070 family and Nvidia's more mid-range RTX 50-series. With limited availability across the board, cards on both sides have been selling out within 10 minutes. There's a lot of gamers out there willing to pay high prices, or even enter competitions, just for the chance to buy a new graphics card.

In a pre-GDC briefing, Nvidia was quick to remind journalists of the current situation. Among detailing the new RTX software, the green team showed off a few slides that caught the eye of a few, mostly thanks to their less than stellar stat-based claims.

The first stat is one we've bashed our heads against before. It claims a massive success with the RTX 50-series shipping more than double that of the RTX 40-series in as many weeks since launch. These stats are in dire need of contextualising, as Dave quite rightly (and not just because he's my boss... this time) points out. There were four of the new Blackwell cards released in that time frame as opposed to only two (or really only one RTX 4090) for the RTX 40-series, and people also actually had stock back then.

Furthermore, the use of the term shipped here is important to note. Shipped doesn't mean sold. Instead it means how many cards Nvidia moved from its warehouses to a retailers. When there are only so many cards to ship, these numbers are going to bottleneck pretty severely, and this could just be what these launches look like now. It's important to remember a graph can justify almost anything with the right wording and scale.

On that note, another interesting slide stated 90% of users are turning on RTX features, and 92% of these are specifically using DLSS, Nvidia's upscaling tech. The fine print on this slide gives us the headsup that these figures only apply to users who both have the Nvidia app installed and are running an extremely rare RTX 50-series card.

Honestly, I'd be pretty surprised if these numbers were any lower, if you were lucky enough to nab a card you may as well be using all the features, especially as the new generation of cards were essentially sold upon the exclusive benefits of DLSS.

To be fair, those numbers have risen since the RTX 40-series days, though, when just 79% of gamers turned DLSS on with their new Ada GPUs back in April 2023. So those stats are saying something at least.

Even if the headline stat of "Over 90% turnon RTX features" does have a ton of caveats attached.

Machine learning based upscaling tech like DLSS or Multi Frame Generation, or AMD's new FSR4, are proving to be huge to get more performance out of your videogames. It's nice to see AI implemented correctly for tasks like this or, y'know, speeding up the evolution of enzymes to eat plastic. Basically for anything other than making weird gen-AI art. This is the kind of thing AI is going to be great for, and these technologies are already proving it.

AMD and Sony's collaborative work on FSR 4 is already impressing, and Nvidia's supercomputer is constantly at work improving DLSS. We should see both implementations only get better and with the right modding tools you can even swap between them.