I Put Nvidia’s RTX 50-Series Laptop GPU to the Test. Here’s What I Found

As has often been true with DLSS, performance comes at a price in visual quality. Put simply, the more fake frames you add, especially to much lower frame rates, the more the image quality degrades. Frame generation works as promised, and when you stare at just the numbers, it’s impressive. If you are after those higher frame rate numbers, adding new frames to the game improves smoothness for sure, though maybe not to the degree you might expect. Generated frames don’t feel the same as native ones. The numbers get bigger as promised, but the more extra frames you add, the more input lag is inserted into the equation.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the most noteworthy example right now, hyped up for its all-in ray tracing features and native implementation of multi-frame generation. I tested the game on the Blade 16’s native 2,560 x 1,600-pixel resolution in the Ray Tracing Overdrive mode, tweaking the multi-frame generation as I went. In 2X multi-frame generation mode under the Quality setting, the RTX 5090 averaged 82 frames per second (fps). That jumped up to 115 fps in the 3X mode, making better use of the 240-Hz screen refresh rate on the Razer Blade 16.

You can get even more juice from frame generation by changing DLSS to the Performance setting. In the past, I would have never recommended such a thing. But with DLSS 4, there have been huge improvements to image quality with the new Transformer model. It’s exposed as a toggle in Cyberpunk 2077 (unlike in other games), so you can compare screenshots side by side to see the difference. Shadows are more realistic, text looks sharper, and there are fewer AI artifacts and oversharpening.

Don’t get me wrong—the changes overall are still subtle. If you’re familiar with DLSS, you know that even in its new iterations, image quality can suffer, especially if you venture outside of Quality mode. Let your eyes wander toward the edges of the frame or to objects in the distance, and you’ll see garbled text, warped edges, and low-resolution textures. It’s not perfect, but the Transformer model polishes most of these errors.

The Wider Picture

That’s just one game. I also tested Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, Star Wars Outlaws, Black Myth: Wukong, and Marvel Rivals. Except for Wukong, these games also had native implementations of DLSS 4, but remain some of the select few.

Photograph: Luke Larsen