It covers the breadth of problems pretty well, but I feel compelled to point out that there are a few times where things are misrepresented in this post e.g.:

Newegg selling the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 for $3,359 (MSRP: $1,999)

eBay Germany offering the same ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 for €3,349,95 (MSRP: €2,229)

The MSRP for a 5090 is $2k, but the MSRP for the 5090 Astral -- a top-end card being used for overclocking world records -- is $2.8k. I couldn't quickly find the European MSRP but my money's on it being more than 2.2k euro.

If you’re a creator, CUDA and NVENC are pretty much indispensable, or editing and exporting videos in Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve will take you a lot longer[3]. Same for live streaming, as using NVENC in OBS offloads video rendering to the GPU for smooth frame rates while streaming high-quality video.

NVENC isn't much of a moat right now, as both Intel and AMD's encoders are roughly comparable in quality these days (including in Intel's iGPUs!). There are cases where NVENC might do something specific better (like 4:2:2 support for prosumer/professional use cases) or have better software support in a specific program, but for common use cases like streaming/recording gameplay the alternatives should be roughly equivalent for most users.

as recently as May 2025 and I wasn’t surprised to find even RTX 40 series are still very much overpriced

Production apparently stopped on these for several months leading up to the 50-series launch; it seems unreasonable to harshly judge the pricing of a product that hasn't had new stock for an extended period of time (of course, you can then judge either the decision to stop production or the still-elevated pricing of the 50 series).

DLSS is, and always was, snake oil

I personally find this take crazy given that DLSS2+ / FSR4+, when quality-biased, average visual quality comparable to native for most users in most situations and that was with DLSS2 in 2023, not even DLSS3 let alone DLSS4 (which is markedly better on average). I don't really care how a frame is generated if it looks good enough (and doesn't come with other notable downsides like latency). This almost feels like complaining about screen space reflections being "fake" reflections. Like yeah, it's fake, but if the average player experience is consistently better with it than without it then what does it matter?

Increasingly complex manufacturing nodes are becoming increasingly expensive as all fuck. If it's more cost-efficient to use some of that die area for specialized cores that can do high-quality upscaling instead of natively rendering everything with all the die space then that's fine by me. I don't think blaming DLSS (and its equivalents like FSR and XeSS) as "snake oil" is the right takeaway. If the options are (1) spend $X on a card that outputs 60 FPS natively or (2) spend $X on a card that outputs upscaled 80 FPS at quality good enough that I can't tell it's not native, then sign me the fuck up for option #2. For people less fussy about static image quality and more invested in smoothness, they can be perfectly happy with 100 FPS but marginally worse image quality. Not everyone is as sweaty about static image quality as some of us in the enthusiast crowd are.

There's some fair points here about RT (though I find exclusively using path tracing for performance RT performance testing a little disingenuous given the performance gap), but if RT performance is the main complaint then why is the sub-heading "DLSS is, and always was, snake oil"?

obligatory: disagreeing with some of the author's points is not the same as saying "Nvidia is great"

Once the 9070 dropped all arguments for Nvidia stopped being worthy of consideration outside of very niche/fringe needs.

they pay because AMD (or any other for that matter) has no product to compete with a 5080 or 5090

Have a 2070s. Been thinking for a while now my next card will be AMD. I hope they get back into the high end cards again

Got my 9070XT at retail (well retail + VAT but thats retail for my country) and my entire PC costs less than a 5090.

they pay because AMD (or any other for that matter) has no product to compete with a 5080 or 5090

Folks, ask yourselves, what game is out there that REALLY needs a 5090? If you have the money to piss away, by all means, it's your money. But let's face it, games have plateaued and VR isn't all that great.

Nvidia's market is not you anymore. It's the massive corporations and research firms for useless AI projects or number crunching. They have more money than all gamers combined. Maybe time to go outside; me included.

Cyberpunk 2077 with the VR mod is the only one I can think of. Because it’s not natively built for VR you have to render the world separately for each eye leading to a halving of the overall frame rate. And with 90 fps as the bare minimum for many people in VR you really don’t have a choice but to use the 5090.

Yeah it’s literally only one game/mod, but that would be my use case if I could afford it.

Unfortunately, this partnership with OpenAI means they've sided with evil and I won't spend a cent on their products anymore.

Folks, ask yourselves, what game is out there that REALLY needs a 5090? If you have the money to piss away, by all means, it's your money. But let's face it, games have plateaued and VR isn't all that great.

Nvidia's market is not you anymore. It's the massive corporations and research firms for useless AI projects or number crunching. They have more money than all gamers combined. Maybe time to go outside; me included.

I have overclocked my AMD 7900XTX as far as it will go on air alone.

Undervolted every step on the frequency curve, cranked up the power, 100% fan duty cycles.

At it's absolute best, it's competitive or trades blows with the 4090D, and is 6% slower than the RTX 4090 Founder's Edition (the slowest of the stock 4090 lineup).

The fastest AMD card is equivalent to a 4080 Super, and the next gen hasn't shown anything new.

AMD needs a 5090-killer. Dual socket or whatever monstrosity which pulls 800W, but it needs to slap that greenbo with at least a 20-50% lead in frame rates across all titles, including raytraced. Then we'll see some serious price cuts and competition.

I don’t really care how a frame is generated if it looks good enough (and doesn’t come with other notable downsides like latency). This almost feels like complaining about screen space reflections being “fake” reflections. Like yeah, it’s fake, but if the average player experience is consistently better with it than without it then what does it matter?

But it does come with increased latency. It also disrupts the artistic vision of games. With MFG you're seeing more fake frames than real frames. It's deceptive and like snake oil in that Nvidia isn't distinguishing between fake frames and real frames. I forget what the exact comparison is, but when they say "The RTX 5040 has the same performance as the RTX 4090" but that's with 3 fake frames for every real frame, that's incredibly deceptive.

I think DLSS (and FSR and so on) are great value propositions but they become a problem when developers use them as a crutch. At the very least your game should not need them at all to run on high end hardware on max settings. With them then being options for people on lower end hardware to either lower settings or combine higher settings with upscaling. When they become mandatory they stop being a value proposition since the benefit stops being a benefit and starts just being neccesary for baseline performance.

Yeah I got a 9070 + 9800x3d for around $1100 all-in. Couldn’t be happier with the performance. Expedition 33 running max settings at 3440x1440 and 80-90fps

The best part is, for me, ray tracing looks great. When I'm standing there and slowly looking around.

When I'm running and gunning and shits exploding, I don't think the human eye is even capable of comprehending the difference between raster and ray tracing at that point.

First, DLSS is supported on Linux.

Second, DLSS is kinda bullshit. The article goes into details that are fairly accurate.

Lastly, AMD is at parity with Nvidia with features. You can see my other comments, but AMD's goal isn't selling cards for gamers. Especially ones that require an entire dedicated PSU to power them.