Can Nvidia’s RTX 5070 really deliver RTX 4090 performance for $549?

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a bold claim onstage at CES earlier this week when he was introducing the next-generation RTX 50-series GPUs. “The RTX 5070, 4090 performance at $549,” said Huang. It’s a claim that’s been echoed on YouTube, TikTok, and social media networks and has generated a debate over the RTX 50 series and DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation.

So, can a $549 RTX 5070 really deliver the same level of performance as a $1,5999 RTX 4090? The answer is yes and no, and it all comes down to a “fake frames” argument about DLSS Frame Generation that might not even be a big problem for a lot of PC gamers.

Nvidia’s big RTX 5070 claim is all based on its latest generation of DLSS. “Impossible without artificial intelligence,” admits Huang after promising that the RTX 5070 can deliver RTX 4090 levels of performance. DLSS 4 has a new Multi Frame Generation technique that can generate up to three additional frames per every traditionally rendered frame.

Some PC gamers have long argued that this technique, which Nvidia introduced originally with DLSS 3, is simply “fake frames” and not reflective of the true rasterization performance of GPUs that we’ve been used to for decades.

“Using neural rendering and DLSS 4 we can reach performance levels [on an RTX 5070] that were only possible with an RTX 4090,” explains Lars Weinand, a senior technical product manager at Nvidia, in a briefing with The Verge. “This does not mean that the RTX 5070 can beat an RTX 4090 in every single way and in every single configuration.”

When Nvidia says performance levels, it means frame rates: how many still images it can send to your screen that add up to a moving image — rather than whether that moving image looks the same quality. Nvidia has already shown what DLSS 4 is capable of in games like Cyberpunk 2077, boosting frame rates from DLSS 3.5 at 142fps to 243fps — a big leap from the 27fps without DLSS enabled.

“In games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Alan Wake 2, you can match performance numbers [on an RTX 5070] using DLSS 4 compared to an RTX 4090 using only DLSS 3.5 Frame Generation,” says Weinand. “This is what the claim is based on, you see performance levels that were only before possible with an RTX 4090, but of course, that doesn’t mean that in every single configuration and graphics setting that you might pick that you will have the similar performance.”

As expected, you’re simply not going to see RTX 4090 levels of pure rasterization performance on an RTX 5070. It’s really all down to seeing a difference in games that support DLSS 4. As a result, Nvidia’s claim has reignited the “fake frames” debate. This all started when Nvidia first announced DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which works by using an algorithm to insert an additional frame after two successive images in order to smooth out movement in games and increase frame rates.

In DLSS 3, Nvidia generates a new image using Frame Generation every time a new image is rendered, allowing the GPU to use its full power to render regular frames and DLSS to utilize dedicated Tensor cores to boost frame rates and image quality.

With DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation, Nvidia is now able to generate up to three additional frames per every traditionally rendered frame. That means frame rates can be up to 8x more than traditional rendering. Nvidia has also switched to a new transformer model for DLSS 4, which it says will make its frame generation model 40 percent faster and use 30 percent less VRAM. 

There’s still a lot to learn about DLSS 4, but during a Q&A session at CES, Huang said that DLSS 4 “predicts the future” rather than “interpolating the past.” That means the extra two frames that are generated by DLSS 4 won’t add a huge amount of latency to the experience.

Digital Foundry found that DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation has smoother frame times despite adding two additional frames compared to the existing Frame Generation. It also found that there is around an additional 6ms for the Multi Frame Generation on the RTX 5080, on top of the existing Frame Generation found on the RTX 40 series.

“The latency is very small that we’re adding with Multi Frame Generation,” says Weinand. “With the GPU pacing that we’re doing, we make sure that frames are being displayed at a very even pace.”

Input latency, or the way a game feels, is very important in many games, and the results of DLSS 4 will depend on your input frame rate. DLSS 4 doesn’t appear to solve the issue of a 27fps game still feeling like 27fps, even if Multi Frame Generation can more than 8x the frame rate to 243fps. That’s been one of the main drawbacks of DLSS Frame Generation so far — that although a game can look visually smoother thanks to the additional frames, it still feels slower than if it were actually rendering at high frame rates. A lot of people might not even notice the input latency, but if you’re familiar with the feeling of dropping from 240fps to 60fps or even 30fps, then you probably will.

I think the “fake frames” debate really only matters when these technologies are impacting latency and image quality or the game still feels slow despite the extra generated frames. More games are starting to get full ray-tracing support to make them look dramatically different, but it’s difficult to play them without DLSS Frame Generation on even the best GPUs. There’s a tradeoff here where people might not mind “fake frames” if they’re getting far better visuals.

So much of modern gaming is already “fake,” and it has been for years. Rendering itself is all about the tricks, shortcuts, and optimizations that developers use to produce something that looks like reality. DLSS 4 gives developers yet another tool to achieve image quality, lighting effects, or gameplay that we wouldn’t have thought was possible until recently.

For years, we’ve been playing games on consoles that aren’t at native resolution, with developers using a variety of different rendering techniques to dynamically adjust resolution, image quality, and more. Nvidia is making it clear with DLSS 4 that the future of PC gaming will involve AI-powered rendering techniques, and it’s something both Sony and AMD are leaning into with a PlayStation partnership and AMD’s latest FSR 4 upscaling. Some PC gamers might not like “fake frames,” but it’s clear they’re very much here to stay.