DLSS 5 was supposed to be the next big thing, but it gave me one more reason to skip the RTX 50-series

When Nvidia announced DLSS 5 earlier this year, I thought this might finally be the feature that would make me regret not upgrading to the RTX 5090 sooner when prices were reasonable. I was already pretty happy with my RTX 4090, so paying $2,000+ for a GPU that improved my frame rates by nearly 30% always felt like a tough pill to swallow. But Nvidia's decision to call a neural rendering feature that has nothing to do with upscaling "DLSS 5" made it seem like a much bigger deal, especially with how it transformed lighting, skin texture, and other surface details in its demos.