Nvidia's RTX 4090 4x performance claims aren't holding up on current games

pcgamer.com:

Nvidia dropped some pretty hefty news on us recently with the official launch announcement for its upcoming RTX 40 series of cards. The next gen heavyweight RTX 4090 cards are launching in October(opens in new tab), with two RTX 4080 variants also ready to go in November(opens in new tab). These big cards come with some pretty huge promises to match, like massively improved FPS when it comes to competitive shooters(opens in new tab).

Of course, given all this news comes from Nvidia itself, it's to be taken with a heavy dose of scepticism. While we're definitely impressed with things like the new modding tools to add ray tracing to basically all games(opens in new tab), and excited for those ray tracing processing improvements,(opens in new tab) it's always good to keep expectations grounded. Especially around marketing speak.

One of the big claims Nvidia has made up for its new line of cards is an up to 4x performance increase thanks mainly to the improvements on Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS technology. The new DLSS 3 is boasting a whopping 4x frame rate increase(opens in new tab) for the new cards, which sounds like a huge improvement. And to be fair, it may well be, but Nvidia's own graph detailing the performance gains tells a different story.

The up to 4x performance claim at the top of the graph falls away a bit when you look at the games listed. To the left we have the category for today's games and none are getting anywhere near that performance boost. The best of the lot is Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, which is only getting slightly over the 2x relative performance marker with a 4090 card. It could just be about optimisation, but it seems clear you won't be seeing those huge gains on games you