There are now several mods enabling DLSS 5 on older Nvidia GPUs, along with even AMD's RDNA 4 cards. Similarly, Nvidia's multi-frame gen has also been ported to prior generations. It can get a bit confusing to keep track of all these developments, and that's where "DLSS Unlocked" comes in. It's a new mod from ShyVox that combines OptiScaler_DLSSNR with DLSS Enabler to bring DLSS 5 and DLSS MFG to all RTX GPUs: Turning, Ampere, and Ada.

DLSS Unlocked serves as a sort of all-in-one package for owners of RTX 20-, RTX 30-, and RTX 40-series looking to enjoy the latest Nvidia goodies on both Windows and Linux. It takes two separate mods developed by other community members and organizes them into one seamless, unified release. You download the executable from GitHub or Nexus Mods and just select the root directory of the game you want to try it on.

As for the requirements, the game must use the DirectX 12 API and already support both DLSS upscaling and frame generation natively. You need to provide your own patched DLSS 5 DLL as well, for legal reasons. The two mods comprising DLSS Unlocked also have their own peculiarities. OptiScaler_DLSSNR is simple; it just uses OptiScaler to add neural rendering on top, but DLSS Enabler works in a more complicated manner.

On RTX 20- and RTX 30-series GPUs, you'll be using AMD's FSR 3.1 to interpolate all of the frames instead of using Nvidia's pipeline. On RTX 40-series, the second frame is generated through DLSS-G (regular frame-gen), but the rest of the frames are handled by FSR 3.1 to get you up to 6X MFG. That handoff is itself possible thanks to another mod called DLSSG to FSR3. See how this web of tweaks can get a bit confusing?

You also need to keep in mind that this is a different approach compared to DLSS 5 Swapper, which enables DLSS 5 inside any game through ReShade (using RenoDX). For DLSS Unlocked, the game must already support DLSS 2/3 upscaling for it to be patched into DLSS 5 and unlock MFG. That's how OptiScaler_DLSSNR works, which DLSS Unlocked relies on.

None of these mods should be used with multiplayer games because the anti-cheat software can detect them as threats and potentially ban you. Ultimately, when you have DLSS Unlocked installed, a DLSS-compatible game should now have DLSS 5 neural rendering while having its frames interpolated up to 4x. You definitely need that, considering DLSS 5 comes with a massive compute cost that can purportedly even melt RTX 5090s.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series (codenamed Blackwell) graphics cards continue to rank among the best graphics cards available today. As a result, these highly sought-after Blackwell graphics cards have become prime targets for criminals seeking to scam unsuspecting buyers. Although scams involving hollow graphics cards are not new, their growing frequency and spread are cause for concern. The latest reports from Germany have revealed at least two buyers who fell prey to the same scam, reportedly from the same seller.

Hollow or phantom graphics cards may not be colloquial terms you hear every day. They basically refer to graphics cards that lack the silicon and memory chips. Criminals remove these components and sell non-functional graphics cards to their prey. Logically, you have no way of knowing these components are not present until you disassemble the graphics card, something that the average consumer does not do. Swindlers have run similar scams with fake memory modules without integrated circuits, or SSDs with microSD cards inside.

The first report, as recounted by respected hardware enthusiast Roman “der8auer” Hartung, uncovers a poor victim who bought a second-hand Palit GeForce RTX 5090 GameRock OC for around $2,090 (1,800 euros). The seller’s asking price was suspicious since a brand-new one starts at around $5,805 (4,999 euros) in Germany. Even for a used one, the dramatic price difference indicates a potential scam.

Many of these scams happen through online transactions. So the buyer went so far as to meet the seller in person, hoping a face-to-face interaction would ensure the graphics card was legit. It did not make a difference, though, because the buyer did not have a system to test the graphics card on the spot. In the end, it was a matter of taking the seller's word for it, and that turned out horribly.

A second report has emerged from a member of the Hardwareluxx forums, who reportedly fell victim to the same deceptive seller. Tragically, this individual ended up paying close to $2,613 (2,250 euros) for the phantom graphics card.

In both cases, the scammer put on a friendly facade and provided what seemed like legitimate paperwork to bolster the buyers' trust. For the first victim, the seller shared an invoice showing the purchase of two graphics cards, claiming to sell one because they no longer needed it. Similarly, in the second case, the scammer furnished an invoice to convince the buyer of the transaction’s legitimacy.

The use of realistic invoices is a growing trend among fraudsters. The first buyer uncovered that the serial number printed on the graphics card itself did not match the serial number listed on the packaging. The second buyer discovered that the serial numbers on the invoice and the packaging matched, but the seller deliberately scratched off the serial number on the graphics card.

The AI gold rush will not be over anytime soon, so we do not expect graphics card pricing to improve. This gives scammers more motivation to prey on buyers' desire for a graphics card and lure them in with prices that seem too good to be true. The two incidents serve as a cautionary tale for anyone trying to procure a graphics card, especially from second-hand sources.

Not that long ago, we reported that Nvidia was dusting off the blueprints for the RTX 3060, in its 12 GB form. At the time, we'd spotted it in stores for about $339.99, but just like with ever-climbing memory, hard drive, and SSD prices, two months passed is an eternity. The same cards are now selling for $489 new, and one particular specimen is the SRhonyra RTX 3060 12 GB Low Profile card, for $495.59.

• SRhonyra RTX 3060 12 GB Low Profile card - $495.59

This card and its price may raise more than a few eyebrows, but there are reasons why it exists. First off, it's a one-slot model, making it easy to put many of them to work in the same machine with relatively little concern for airflow. They have no power inputs and rely on 70 W delivered by the PCIe slot alone, eschewing the need for a high-end PSU and lots of cables. Third, the low-profile form factor makes it possible to place them in potent puny personal computers.

Attentive readers might surmise that one (or more) of these would be good candidates for an entry-level local LLM rig. That's precisely how SRhonyra is pitching the card, calling it "capable of local AI" and "running 7B [to] 13B LLMs." A standard-dimensioned, fully powered RTX 3060 is capable of drawing a maximum of 175 W, so it's fair to assume the performance of the diminutive variant will sit below that of its full-sized brethren, given it ought to only draw 70 W of juice from the PCIe slot.

Even then, it's likely that people interested in these cards are looking to use them either as secondary GPUs, or use more than one in the same box to be able to virtually pool their VRAM and use larger models than you'd otherwise be able to. The low power draw also means they're a simple, thoughtless drop-in to an existing system, whereas larger, more power-hungry cards require careful consideration with physical spacing (or lack thereof), power supply sizing, and ever-annoying cables.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering technology has taken the PC gaming world by storm since its recent leak and then official rollout in recent days. In what might be one of the most impressive technical applications and mods of the feature yet, one developer has showcased DLSS 5 running on a second GPU to share the processing load, rendering the game on the first GPU before applying Neural rendering at the end of the frame, thus boosting the performance of neural-rendered frames.

Marcelo Guibout shared the demonstration online, with videos showing the process running on a cinematic video from The Blood of Dawnwalker, as well as Cyberpunk 2077. Guibout was quick to clarify that the videos are technical showcases, not benchmarks. However, they did share some performance figures. More exciting still, you can download the project from GitHub and try it for yourself. However, the technique does require a second display and doubles the display latency.

The above demonstration features a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5 setup with two Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPUs, with both cards using PCIe 5.0 x8, and a display attached to each card. The ReShade add-on, dubbed MGPU Bridge, reads each finished frame before applying Nvidia's Neural rendering. "Neural rendering happens at the end of the frame: it takes a finished frame and hands a finished frame back," they explain. "That is what makes it possible to pick it up and run it somewhere else. The add-on creates its own D3D12 device on your second GPU, sends each finished frame across to it, runs DLSS-NR there, and displays the result on that card's own monitor — so nothing has to come back. The render GPU does no neural work at all and runs cooler for the same reason."

In the TBOD demo at 1080p, they shared the following performance numbers:

Guibout clarified that DLSS super-resolution is running in every column of the test, with the rows showing each mode tested. The game rendered at the same internal resolution in all three columns, with the first column giving figures with DLSS 5's neural rendering switched off, representing the ceiling for performance. As you can see, running DLSS 5 on the second card in this dual-GPU setup drastically increases performance in every mode.

"The frame rates are not the finding. The slope is: what you gain by going from DLAA down to Ultra Performance, and how much of that available gain each arm keeps," Guibout explains. "Neural post-processing saturates whatever device it runs on, and it always runs at output resolution. Its cost barely falls as you drop the DLSS mode, while the render work collapses. On the render card it therefore eats a larger and larger share of every frame, and upscaling stops paying for itself: you keep about a third of what the machine actually had to give. Move it to the second card and you keep 86% of it."

Other benefits include temperature reductions on the rendering card, with the first GPU running 21 degrees cooler without the neural load.

Guibout is cautious to note this isn't a return to Nvidia's SLI technology, which would split the workload of frame rendering between two GPUs. They also noted plainly this is not Nvidia's vision for DLSS 5 and lacks the native integration of official DLSS 5 support.

You can see the original demo for TBOD below:

As commenters online have noted, the method seems more akin to using Nvidia's dedicated PhysX cards, with plenty of potential for gamers who have the capacity to run a dual GPU setup. The second demo features a Ryzen 5 5600 on a DDR4 system, so top-of-the-line hardware isn't required to make it happen.

The RTX 5090 is no stranger to controversy thanks to the incendiary nature of its 16-pin connector. When you add something as taxing as DLSS 5, which comes with a heavy increase in power draw, to an already dangerous mix, you're just cooking up a recipe for disaster. And it seems like this recipe has likely claimed its first victim. HardOCP forum member Erek claimed their RTX 5090 fell prey to the woes of the 16-pin connector yesterday, as it melted while testing DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27.

The irony is not lost on us that NBA 2K27 is the only game that officially supports DLSS 5 right now — everything else is modded — yet it still reportedly killed the user's MSI RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC, which carries a 575W TDP. However, during testing, erek reported his GPU going past 600W, with GPU-Z showing it hovering above 610W consistently, not just as a spike. Before this, the card only consumed around 450W while gaming, implying that DLSS 5 added more than 150W to the power draw.

While the 16-pin connector is capable of carrying up to 600W of power, the PCIe x16 slot the card is plugged into also provides 75W on its own. So, the connector wasn't necessarily drawing over 600W alone. Tragedy struck right after as Erek's RTX 5090 started exhibiting signs of instability and eventually stopped working entirely. The owner smelled something burning and, sure enough, found the 16-pin connector pulling an age-old classic: melting.

The plastic on the connector had melted enough to bond with the cable, making it very difficult to separate the two. Once they did come undone, the damage was clearly visible, with at least five pins on the 16-pin cable scorched; one pin's housing had completely melted away. This was a yellow-tipped cable, too, meant to ensure it was plugged all the way in. Despite the fact that we only got a blurry picture of the connector on the GPU, the little yellow dot of melted plastic almost comically stands out amidst a sea of black and grey.

We can't confirm whether DLSS 5 was actually responsible for burning Erek's card. After all, an RTX 5090 meeting its maker is a monthly tradition at this point, and the cause is usually tied to a loose fit between the connector and the cable. However, our own testing does align with how the enthusiast came up with their DLSS 5 hypothesis. We saw the MSI Lightning Z variant of the 5090, which has 2x 16-pin connectors and a 1,000W XOC BIOS, pull 800W in Control with DLSS 5 enabled. Without DLSS 5, the same GPU pulled just 691W.

That wasn't even the most egregious difference; in Hogwarts Legacy, we went from 480W without DLSS 5 to a whopping 720W with it enabled. That's a 50% increase in power draw for just one feature. The same game made the Founder's Edition of the 5090 pull 417W without the neural rendering tech involved, and 547W with it toggled on. So even in the standard version of the GPU with a single 16-pin connector, there's a 31% jump in power consumption because of DLSS 5.

Considering Erek's 5090 model lands somewhere between those two, and given his own testing showing a severe power budget imbalance, it's not unreasonable to assume DLSS 5 was the culprit. Had the user's GPU been acting weird before they tried the new feature, we might be having a different conversation. But it's clear that Nvidia has a lot of work to do before DLSS 5 makes its way onto the RTX 40-series down the line. Performance improvements aside, the safety concerns stemming from poor efficiency also need to be addressed.

Nvidia launched the GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB) in early 2021 as an affordable mainstream gaming GPU with a 170W TDP, before re-releasing two months ago to offer relief during the ongoing component crisis. Throughout this time, not one person thought that the 3060 consumed too much power... except someone in China who decided to make a 75W version of the card. This blower-style variant has no 6- or 8-pin power connectors and runs entirely off the PCIe slot it'll be connected to, resulting in some expectedly underwhelming performance.

The RTX 3060 takes very well to undervolting and, therefore, can already be taken all the way down to just 100W at the cost of modestly reduced performance. A single PCIe x16 slot can provide up to 75W of power, so forcing a 3060 down to that number requires a shunt mod. This practice is usually associated with unlocking power limits on a GPU to chase overclocking feats where you decrease resistance, but in this case, you'd be increasing it.

This is a single-slot, low-profile card with a blower-style cooler about the size of a modern smartphone. You get just 1x HDMI and 1x DisplayPort in terms of connectivity. There is no fin stack present either, the PCB lacks a backplate, and the shroud is a thin metal sheet responsible for all the heat dissipation with a rudimentary heatsink in the middle.

A teardown of the GPU on BiliBili shows it's under-equipped from the inside, too. The memory chips have no thermal pads or paste on them. Instead, the metal shroud just touches the core directly to keep the entire thing cool. Remember that there's just one fan at the far end to blow hot air; there is no intake or proper airflow with positive pressure. So far, everything about this card, except its compact size, is looking subpar.

Once we get to testing, any skepticism is validated as the 75W RTX 3060 GPU is barely able to edge past 900 MHz, despite being rated for 1,770 MHz boost clocks. This results in a Time Spy score of just 4,821 points whereas a regular RTX 3060 easily scores upwards of 9,000 points in the same benchmark. Even older budget GPUs like AMD's iconic RX 580 and Nvidia's equally-popular GTX 1060 score more.

During the Time Spy run, the GPU hotspot also went past 90 degrees Celsius, proving that the cooler is barely performing if it's struggling to tame even a 75W card. Clearly, this GPU was suffering from severe thermal throttling on top of already having its power budget more than halved. One could make an argument that it's still an Ampere GPU, so it could make sense in low-power, compact systems. But there are now mini PCs with similarly performing or far more potent integrated graphics in 2026.

PAX West is underway at the Seattle Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, and Nvidia is offering a selection of its Founder's Edition GPUs at MSRP. Nvidia has RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 models available while supplies last, along with packs of GeForce Trading Cards Series 1. Jacob Freeman, GeForce Evangelist at Nvidia, shared the announcement on X, telling interested gamers to "come find me" if they want a GPU.

Nvidia's Verified Priority Access (VPA) is a lottery program for Founder's Edition cards that the company launched in 2022 for RTX 40-series GPUs. It returned in 2025 for RTX 50-series GPUs, and although you can still sign up for the program online, Nvidia has seemingly shifted to offering MSRP GPUs during live events. Last month, the company did something similar at QuakeCon in Austin, Texas.

Over the past month, we've seen a sharp rise in the price of Nvidia's highest-end graphics cards in our GPU price tracker, with the $1,999 RTX 5090 now regularly listed for above $5,000. The RTX 5090 has been a particular flashpoint due to its plentiful 32GB of GDDR7 memory, making it ideal not only for flagship gaming performance but also (relatively) low-cost local AI inference.

Earlier this month, however, we saw increases as large as 39% in median list price for RTX 50-series GPUs, following a series of reports about regional price increases outside of the U.S. The increases hit the middle of Nvidia's Blackwell stack the hardest, with the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB jumping by 29% and RTX 5070 jumping by 36%.

The RTX 5090 has continued to rise in price, even after the hike we saw early last month. At the time, the median price was $4,699.99, but now, you'll spend at least $5,000 on a GPU online. Deals, if you can call them that, are available on the RTX 5090 if you have a Micro Center nearby, with models going down as low as $4,200.

This week, Nvidia launched DLSS 5 for RTX 50-series GPUs in NBA 2K27, following a leaked DLL that allowed modders to get Neural Rendering operational in just about any game. Within days, the community got DLSS 5 operational on RTX 40-series GPUs, as well as older RTX 30-series GPUs, though performance was unplayable on the latter. Nvidia says it plans to bring DLSS 5 support to RTX 40-series GPUs at a later date.

Although Nvidia doesn't have a booth at PAX West 2026, many of its partners do, including Starforge Systems, Razer, and Lenovo. Freeman says he'll be posting updates on X on where and when attendees can find him.

DLSS 5 officially debuted inside NBA 2K27 yesterday with more games to follow down the line, along with RTX 40-series support planned for the future. However, if you don't own a GPU from either of those families, the modding community has once again stepped up to offer a workaround. Developer danielblnc has figured out a way to make DLSS 5 work on AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs (RX 9000 series). As long as you're playing a DirectX 12 game with FSR support, "DLSS-NR-on-AMD" can inject DLSS 5 inside it.

The project is closed-source, so we don't know exactly how it works but we can make a few educated guesses. The mod is likely using a dynamic wrapper to intercept NGX API calls and fool the DLSS 5 DLL into loading on an AMD GPU. Once loaded, it extracts the AI model and Tensor data inside that DLL and converts those calculations into math AMD's matrix accelerators can understand via the HIP RT backend (rather than translating CUDA).

It then hooks into the game's FSR pipeline to run that frame data through the neural model and produce the same quality results you would get on an actual RTX 50-series GPU, just without any of the Tensor cores. DLSS-NR-on-AMD doesn't work on any game requiring anti-cheat. Even in single-player titles the performance is not great, especially since the RX 9070 XT is the top-end RDNA 4 GPU available.

Initially, Cyberpunk 2077 was running at 28 FPS at 1080p on the 9070 XT with DLSS 5 on, but a patch has been released that improves the frame rate by 12% to a stable 30 FPS. Another update has added a 2% boost but that's likely negligible. Performance reports from users online are a bit less optimistic. The ultimate goal is to get performance similar to an RTX 5070 Ti, which is not far-fetched since both GPUs are matched in raster and very close in ray tracing.

If you want to try it yourself, just head on over to the GitHub page and grab the latest release (it's an executable). Inside, you won't find the DLSS 5 DLL; you have to provide a "legally-obtained" copy yourself, as the repo points out. Currently, only NBA 2K27 natively supports DLSS 5 and that's where the DLL was originally leaked from. Anyways, once you have it, move the DLL and the executable inside the game's bin folder. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish installation.

Open the game, select FSR 3 or 4 from the in-game graphics settings, and press the End key to bring up the custom menu. This menu allows you to adjust individual parameters like structure and tone, similar to how the ReShade mod works in other games. You see the changes in real-time and it looks just as "good" as the non-intercepted DLSS 5. Don't expect any miracles because DLSS 5 is already very compute heavy and you're adding extra overhead by running it on non-compatible hardware.

Sure, both the RTX 50-series and the RX 9000 series support FP8 formats but DLSS 5 is meant to run on Tensor cores; not AMD's dual-issue AI accelerators. However, since the RTX 40-series also has Tensor cores and native FP8 support, Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 5 will eventually make its way onto last-gen silicon as well. As for DLSS-NR-on-AMD, users have been able to get it running on RX 7000 series, but performance is once again abysmal because of the lack of FP8 support.

The GitHub repo does mention RDNA 3 support being explored but there are no plans for it at the moment. There is a lot of work to be done just to get the RX 9070 XT performance on the level of the 5070 Ti first. Ultimately, the ambition of the modding community never fails to impress because this is the slowest DLSS 5 on RDNA 4 will ever be. Nvidia's efforts to optimize DLSS 5 on its own hardware will, inadvertently, improve this mod as well as time goes on.

After a heavily scrutinized announcement earlier this year and a very revealing past few days, DLSS 5 has finally, officially launched inside NBA 2K27. A sports game is a bit of an unusual choice to showcase what is seemingly the next big leap in real-time rendering, but it's the only game DLSS 5 works with for now. Fortunately, you don't need an RTX 50-series GPU to enjoy it, as Nvidia has confirmed that the tech is coming to previous-gen RTX 40-series hardware as well, though we don't know exactly when.

Nvidia has worked closely with developer Visual Concepts to leverage DLSS 5 as an aid rather than the foundation of NBA 2K27. The game still uses scanned 3D models of all the players to form the base geometry. Then, DLSS 5 combines training data and engine data to infer things like lighting and shadows, upgrading the scene to look more photorealistic. Such engine-level implementation allows devs to fine-tune the end result as per their creative intent instead of just applying a global AI filter over everything.

DLSS 5 will come to other titles soon, but for now it's limited to NBA 2K27, and even then, it's extremely taxing. Nvidia's own marketing shows DLSS 5 netting 370 FPS at 4K with an RTX 5090, compared to 240 FPS with DLSS turned off. What it doesn't highlight as clearly is that the 370 FPS number comes from 6x MFG — five fake frames being interpolated for every real frame. That means the game is actually running at ~61 FPS; turning on DLSS 5 tanked performance by four times compared to native. Not to mention, it's being upscaled from 1080p to 4K, too.

If you don't happen to own the latest-and-greatest in Blackwell silicon, and you also don't want to pay for the Ultimate tier of GeForce Now (RTX 5080), there's still some good news for you. After initially locking DLSS 5 to only the RTX 50-series, Nvidia has confirmed it'll bring the 3D-guided neural rendering tech to RTX 40-series GPUs soon. "Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series," said Ben Berraondo, head of PR at the company.

It's likely that modders opening the floodgates for patched DLLs convinced, or perhaps forced, Nvidia to reconsider its initial stance. It's no secret that DLSS 5 has a merciless compute cost, so making it work on older Ada GPUs would only result in negative PR for an already divisive product. But once modders showed it's possible — not just on the 40-series, but also on the 30- and even 20-series — the ball was in Nvidia's court and, to its credit, the game hasn't stopped. It'll be interesting to see the performance, considering the RTX 40-series only has up to 2x MFG.

For now, the focus is entirely on optimizing DLSS 5 for RTX 50-series, and that improvement will, in turn, help the future release on RTX 40-series, too. As more and more games implement the tech, the dataset behind it will mature, and DLSS 5 might one day grow to distinguish itself from AI slop for its critics. At the moment, don't expect granular control like we've seen through ReShade, as that's entirely a community effort. DLSS 5 will simply be an on/off toggle in most titles since the devs would've already tweaked the individual parameters themselves.

Sales of discrete graphics processors for consumer PCs were up both sequentially and year-over-year in the second quarter despite soaring prices caused by component shortages, according to a newly released report by Jon Peddie Research. Although PC CPU shipments dropped in Q2 2026 year-over-year amid seasonality and shortages, sales of standalone graphics processors for consumer computers were up 12.2% sequentially and 14.1% YoY, the best market dynamics in some time.

Sales of graphics processing units for consumer PCs — which include integrated and standalone GPUs for desktops and laptops — totaled 75.5 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 10.4% quarter-over-quarter and 1.1% year-over-year, primarily driven by notebooks. This happened as the consumer CPU market contracted by 1.1% YoY amid a massive sequential drop in desktop CPU shipments and a significant rise in mobile CPUs shipments. Desktop GPU shipments declined by 4% quarter-over-quarter, while notebook GPU shipments surged by 16.8%, JPR claims.

But despite declining desktop PC unit shipments and modest growth in notebooks, unit shipments of discrete GPUs increased by 12.2% sequentially and 14.1% year-over-year in Q2 2026, according to JPR data. Jon Peddie Research does not publish absolute numbers of standalone graphics processors shipped in the second quarter, but our estimate is that around 20 million discrete GPUs were sold by AMD, Intel, and Nvidia in Q2, based on attach rates and Nvidia's market share and dynamics.

The results indicate that demand for PCs with discrete graphics remained remarkably resilient despite soaring component prices and slowing demand for desktop PCs. However, JPR's shipment data does not reveal whether the increase was primarily driven by gamers buying graphics cards, stronger demand for gaming notebooks, or other factors.

"The second quarter is typically down compared to the previous quarter," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "This quarter, discrete GPUs increased by 12.2%, even while a global memory crisis sent component prices soaring, driven by a mix of supply-side positioning, artificial demand shocks, and localized market dynamics."

Jon Peddie Research has yet to publish its complete desktop AIB report, which is expected later this month and will include market shares for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia; yet it is safe to say that the latter has maintained its undisputed leadership.

As for the overall consumer PC GPU market, Intel retained its leadership with a 56% market share as it increased shipments of consumer CPUs in Q2 2026. Nvidia came second with 23%, which is not bad at all considering that it only ships discrete GPUs. AMD came third with 21% share, up significantly from 14% in the same quarter a year ago, as it managed to gain seven percentage points of the consumer GPU market YoY amid growing sales of its consumer CPUs.

It's been a wild few days for gamers, as a version of the DLSS 5 model leaked with NBA2K27 and promptly got modded into every game under the sun. After initial builds that relied on ReShade to make the model work, the community has since wrapped up DLSS 5 into an Optiscaler package that makes adding it to most games nearly painless. With that development, we wanted to get a sense of how the tech performs ahead of its official release.

We're not going to weigh in on the aesthetic or philosophical implications of applying DLSS 5 to a particular title here. That ground has been extremely well trodden already, and if you haven't been stuck under a rock this past week or so, you've likely seen what DLSS 5 can do for yourself.

We're more interested in getting an idea of the performance cost of getting DLSS 5 running, along with the power requirements it incurs. Whether you love or hate this model's effect on a game's appearance, you can weigh your feelings against the performance cost involved in getting there.

Before we get to the numbers, some caveats: the Optiscaler DLSS 5 injection method may not represent the behavior of this model when developers integrate it through Nvidia's Streamline framework. Streamline may offer less overhead and better performance than what we saw here.

But Nvidia's technical paper on DLSS 5 says that the model takes 8 ms to execute on a 4K frame, and that's essentially identical to the performance metrics that we saw from Optiscaler when it's running. So it seems unlikely that the official version will be far off the performance we measured if it's implemented in these titles using the proper channels.

For these limited tests, we chose to focus on the RTX 5090 Founders Edition's behavior under DLSS 5 to explore the largest performance drop one might expect from this community implementation of the tech.

Out of curiosity, we also grabbed MSI's RTX 5090 Lightning Z from the TH arsenal. This RTX 5090 has a unique two-12V-2x6 connector power setup and a 1000W power limit available through its Extreme vBIOS. Given the apparent arithmetic intensity of DLSS 5, we wanted to see whether running it would consume any of the extra available power headroom from that card's twin-plug design.

For our small sample of games, we used the following basic settings: a 4K output resolution target fed by DLSS Performance upscaling (i.e., a 1920x1080 input) without frame generation, as well as maximum raster and ray-tracing quality settings (or path tracing, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077) and DLSS Ray Reconstruction where it was available.

We didn't use Multi Frame Generation in these tests. We want to cleanly represent the performance baseline you can expect from DLSS 5 given the above constraints.

Cyberpunk 2077 performance

We started our performance explorations with Cyberpunk 2077. Optiscaler was an easy install for this game, and we confirmed that neural rendering was making the expected difference in facial detail and lighting realism when we activated it.

In exchange for those enhancements, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition takes a 42% hit from DLSS 5. Although the Lightning Z takes a slightly smaller 39% hit, its baseline performance is higher than the Founders Edition, so the MSI card maintains a 60 FPS average and much higher 1% lows than the single-connector card. That difference in smoothness is evident.

Part of that difference in performance comes down to power. As we noted, the RTX 5090 Lightning Z has a much larger 1000W power limit to play with, and it puts that headroom to use here.

The jump in power consumption from DLSS 5 on the Lightning Z is eye-popping: 580 W to 723 W, or a 25% increase. The RTX 5090 Founders Edition only goes from 482 W to 551 W, which means that it's practically power-limited.

Hogwarts Legacy performance

Unlike Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy doesn't implement path tracing, but its extensive RT effects are still impressive. Importantly for our purposes, it's easy to get Optiscaler into this title.

Hogwarts exhibits the largest performance drop of these three games on the RTX 5090 FE, at 49%. The Lightning Z card drops just 42%, though, and its higher baseline performance makes for a smoother experience.

The Lightning Z once again illustrates just how much power DLSS 5 can pull if it's available, even in this "lighter" RT title. Without DLSS 5, the MSI card draws 480 W on average. With neural rendering enabled, it pulls 720 W, or a whopping 50% more power.

Control performance

Finally, we tried the game that started the community DLSS 5 wave last week: 2019's Control. This early RT title still poses a stiff challenge for modern hardware if you crank its RT settings to the absolute max, as we did here.

The RTX 5090 Founders Edition takes another 42% hit to performance under these conditions, and the Lightning Z also drops 42%. But the higher power limits of the MSI card let it deliver 20% higher average frame rates and much higher 1% lows than the Founders Edition, and that's a smoothness boost you can really feel.

That extra performance does come at the expense of significantly higher power draw. The Lightning Z is already pulling a shocking 691 W without DLSS 5, but enable neural rendering, and it jumps to 802 W. The Founders Edition just runs into its 575 W power limit again.

Bottom Line

At least in our experience with the community-made mod packages available so far, DLSS 5 has a large performance cost, similar to what we saw with ray tracing before the wide availability of DLSS: in the range of 39% to 49%, according to our small sample of results so far.

Official versions of DLSS 5 may perform better, but we won't know for sure until later this week. In any event, our observations of the behavior of the tech as implemented by the community match up with Nvidia's published guidance so far.

We don't expect vastly different or better performance from first-party implementations, although a developer's official DLSS 5 recipe could certainly look better in a given title than the current free-for-all with sliders that were never meant to be exposed to end users. We'll have to see what happens as developers take the time to tune DLSS 5 for their games as the tech makes its way into more titles through official channels.

Officially, DLSS 5 only supports RTX 50-series graphics cards, and if you're interested in running it with RT or PT, our results show that you're likely going to need to enable the full stack of Nvidia software tech available from Blackwell: DLSS Performance or Ultra Performance to achieve solid baseline frame rates, plus Multi Frame Generation for acceptable output fluidity.

Some have suggested that you don't need to run RT or PT alongside DLSS 5, but that doesn't make any sense at all given our experience thus far. Applying DLSS 5 to purely rasterized input does make it look better than it otherwise would, but it makes the higher-quality input of RT or PT titles look even better still. You definitely don't want to give up those advanced rendering techniques just because DLSS 5 exists.

But those software factors aren't the biggest hurdle that might affect DLSS 5's delivered performance, at least at the extremes. We were surprised to find that the RTX 5090 Founders Edition design is probably holding back the performance of DLSS 5 on that card, even with its 575W TGP. The Founders Edition was consistently at or near its power limit in our tests with neural rendering enabled, which tracks with the demonstrated evidence that, like other image generation models, DLSS 5 is extremely demanding of the Tensor Cores that power its underlying diffusion model.

The exotic MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z and its 1000W power limit show that when it's stacked on top of ray tracing or path tracing, DLSS 5 can and will happily slurp down hundreds more watts than the Founders Edition—or any other RTX 5090 with a single power connector—is built to provide.

And when you pair that fact with its large performance cost on today's hardware, it's clear that DLSS 5 is a multi-generational technology built to take full advantage of graphics cards that don't exist yet, whether they're RTX 50 Super-series products with higher power limits or future GeForce products built with more advanced Tensor Cores on a newer silicon process node.

Even as it stands, the results we've seen from DLSS 5 so far in both official demos and in its rapid proliferation through community mods suggest that neural rendering techniques like this will mark a new epoch of photorealistic fidelity for real-time graphics and new generations of hardware that are better suited to running demanding AI models like this in real time.

It's an exciting new frontier out there, even if things feel a bit like the Wild West for DLSS 5 right now. Hold on to your hats.

If, like mine, your gaming rig spends most of its life doing nothing these days, a pair of startups would be willing to pay you something close to minimum wage for its downtime. Abu Dhabi-based Far Labs and Austin-based Evolving Edge are building marketplaces to farm AI inference out to idle consumer hardware, according to an IEEE Spectrum report.

Far Labs plans to launch its Far AI platform in the coming weeks, claiming latency of 100 ms or less, while Evolving Edge is running an open beta. "Imagine Uber or Airbnb, but for AI inference computing tasks," Ilman Shazhaev, founder and CEO of Far Labs, told the outlet. Both companies are targeting smaller open-source models rather than frontier-scale workloads, and they’re joining established players, including the Utah-based Salad platform, which lists more than 60,000 daily active consumer GPUs on its network.

Far Labs’ proprietary scheduler splits a model into pieces spread across multiple machines, and an orchestrator and a load balancer then reassemble the partial outputs into a response. Evolving Edge distributes jobs with Ray, the open-source framework used inside conventional data centers.

Letting a stranger’s workload onto a personal machine obviously comes with some risks for hosts, such as malicious code ending up on the device or the person on the other end gaining access to local files. The two firms’ solution to this is isolation, with inference running as a sandboxed workload with encrypted communication and hard limits on GPU, CPU, memory, storage, and network access. Customers get no direct access to the host machine, and Evolving Edge has open-sourced its node software so hosts can audit what runs on their hardware.

Salad sells consumer-GPU compute to customers for prices starting at $0.02 per hour, and the card’s owner only sees a slice of that… pie after the platform takes its cut. We examined Salad in 2021, back when its network mined Ethereum, estimating that the company had generated roughly $3.6 million from users' PCs while distributing $500,000 in rewards, which works out to about 14 cents on the dollar for the people supplying the silicon.

Electricity costs then chew through whatever's left. An RTX 4090 draws 350W to 450W under sustained load, roughly $40 to $50 a month at $0.15 per kWh if the card runs around the clock, so a rig earning less than that is effectively paying for the privilege of having a job. However, IEEE Spectrum's report doesn't include payout rates for either new platform.

Both founders make the point that distributed networks ride out failures that otherwise cripple centralized clouds. John Federico, founder and CEO of Evolving Edge, cited the AWS outage last October that left Internet-connected smart beds stuck in their upright positions, and told IEEE Spectrum his network could lose 100 of 250,000 nodes “and it wouldn’t matter.”

All that aside, distributed AI compute has a credibility problem to overcome. A research preprint from June claimed that Pearl, a blockchain marketed as converting cryptocurrency mining into AI work, ran the equivalent of 320,000 RTX 3090-class GPUs on random matrix math while producing no useful AI computation. Far Labs and Evolving Edge route real customer inference jobs rather than token rewards, which puts them a step ahead of that model, but their cost and latency figures are unsubstantiated claims until, and if, the networks operate at scale.

Following its announcement earlier this year, and just days after the DLL leaked inside NBA2K27, Nvidia has today confirmed that its controversial DLSS 5 will launch on September 3. Starting at 9 pm PT, the aforementioned NBA title will support DLSS 5 for all RTX 50 Series GPUs, laptops, and GeForce NOW. The company also shared its first in-house benchmarks of DLSS 5, which is expected to impact GPU performance.

As a series not primarily renowned for its graphical fidelity, NBA2K27 marks a fairly strange launch title for the tech, but Nvidia says that it has closely partnered with Visual Concepts and 2K to achieve "a new level of authentic sports experience for its players." The technology, which Nvidia officially dubs as 3D-guided Neural Rendering," will reportedly show players the natural passing of light through players' ears, light catching hair, and the natural lighting of skin "all while preserving the facial geometry scanned from real-world athletes."

DLSS 5 is not without controversy. As we explained during our first look at DLSS 5 back in March, DLSS 5's AI model "is trained to infer how certain complex features of game scenes like characters, skin, hair, and environmental lighting “should” look in the real world given certain inputs from the game engine (including, but not limited to, the color buffer and motion vectors) in combination with an input frame." While deep integration with a game's engine and assets should make it more consistent and predictable than run-of-the-mill generative AI imagery, that promise hasn't stopped some critics from raising severe objections to its premise since its initial reveal.

CEO Jensen Huang described DLSS 5 as "the GPT moment for graphics — blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

Its launch in NBA2K27 will mark the first time the technology debuts in a playable title, marking our first "fair" assessment of its capabilities.

DLSS 5 is very resource-intensive, with early testing and indications hinting at quite severe drops in frame rate when using the tech. As expected, Nvidia has confirmed DLSS 5 will only work with RTX 50-series GPUs and mobile GPUs, as well as through GeForce Now. Other older generation cards are left out in the cold for now. Along with the announcement, Nvidia has shared its first in-house benchmarks of DLSS 5 RTX Desktop performance.

While these are difficult to contextualize (they only show one game) and should be taken with the usual grain of salt for marketing material, they are interesting in one clear sense. Nvidia has pointedly only shared 4K results for its RTX 5090 and 5080, possibly hinting at the company's expectations of diminished results on anything less powerful, though cards lower in the stack do appear below 4K resolutions.

The recent DLL leak has led to some modders porting it to older RTX 40-series cards, or even older Ampere or Turing GPUs, with predictably varying results.

It's hard to believe Nvidia first announced the RTX 5090 at last year's CES for just $1,999. Even keeping in mind the fact that MSRP is often just a guideline, prices have still surged astronomically thanks to the AI rush. A brand-new RTX 5090 now costs $5,000 in North America, and more across other parts of the world. That's a 2.5x increase in less than two years, and the same fate follows the rest of the RTX 50-series family as well.

Currently, the cheapest RTX 5090 in the States is the Zotac Solid OC listed for $4,999 at Newegg. It does come with a $60 game and a $145 power supply, but you're still paying $5,000 for a card that cost less than half as much ($2,250) exactly one year ago. A more desirable variant such as the ROG Astral 4X OC is now going for $6,000 while it could be had for $3,360 from various retailers last year. An almost 2x jump in the span of twelve months, and a 3x jump compared to MSRP, though this is a novelty model.

Taking a look at European pricing, the most affordable RTX 5090 in Germany is the MSI Gaming Trio OC variant at 4,850 Euros, or ~$5,620. According to Geizhals, this card was listed for 2,249 Euros ($2,600) a year ago, so more than twice as expensive. Hell, it was 800 Euros ($927) cheaper just last month! The ROG Astral 4X OC model is selling for 5,300 Euros ($6,143) right now while it cost 2,870 Euros ($3,326) the same time last year — once again, almost twice as much.

Other desirable RTX 50-series GPUs such as the RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and the RTX 5060 have all seen price hikes, too. After the 5090, it's the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB that has suffered the most with a 77% increase in price ($761 currently) compared to MSRP ($429). The RTX 5080 is 55% more expensive ($1,549 currently) than its MSRP ($999), while both the RTX 5060 ($299 to $448 currently) and RTX 5070 Ti ($749 to $1,119 currently) are now listed for about 50% more than what they launched at.

The least affected card throughout this fiasco is Nvidia's base model: the RTX 5050. But even then, it has seen a 20% price hike, going from a $249 MSRP to $299 current availability. The RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, which people usually write off for its 16GB cousin, is still 32% more expensive now at $500; it launched at $380. Across the entire Blackwell family, the average price increase is about 60% or 1.6x higher compared to MSRP.

Like SSDs and RAM, GPU prices are being squeezed by dwindling supply of vital components that are being diverted to enterprise customers, fuelling massive AI buildouts. RAM prices have increased by 500% in the last 12 months, and SSDs aren't much better. The overall price crunch is making DIY PC building increasingly less viable.

Nvidia's current-gen Blackwell family includes some of the best graphics cards on the market with exceptional performance, but pushing silicon to its limit can always unlock more power. This is where enthusiast software, such as mVolt+, comes in, allowing users to overclock their GPUs beyond what's usually permissible. Unfortunately, it seems like a new driver update has shut down mVolt+ across all RTX 50-series cards.

Unlike mainstream GPU utilities like MSI Afterburner, mVolt+ bypasses standard driver restrictions and gives you more granular control over a few hardware blocks. The app can tweak separate power targets for the core and memory channels. It can also provide access to voltage and clock offsets for Core, XBAR, SYS, and VRAM. You can manually tune the power across the interconnect and video encoders, for instance, instead of relying on a global slider.

As such, users have been able to nudge their hardware into territory usually only charted by relying on a specialized VBIOS or physically modding the PCB. Last week, an Asus ROG Astra RTX 5080 reached 680W using mVolt+ despite even the official OC BIOS only permitting a 450W TDP. Someone with an RTX 5090 saw their GPU draw 650-700W of power while gaming, compared to 450W it used to suck up previously.

Even though the performance gains were marginal in real-world usage, mVolt+ was still a useful tool for overclocking. It allowed enthusiasts to chart on 3DMark's worldwide rankings just through software, so the fact it has suddenly stopped working is quite disappointing. The latest driver, version 615.56, seems to be blocking the app from making changes, hard crashing anytime you try to adjust the core power limit.

It's unclear if this is an intentional move from Nvidia, or just a compatibility issue that's preventing mVolt+ from properly working on the latest drivers. Some users on the Overclock.net RTX 5090 thread say their GPUs are still able to accept power limit modifications through Hydra 2.3B Pro — another extreme overclocking utility. That suggests mVolt+ wasn't explicitly blocked, and that its creator b00nz can push an update to patch this driver conflict soon.

Nvidia's upcoming DLSS 5 neural rendering tech leaked earlier this week through a pre-release version of the DLL inside NBA 2K27 (which is in early access). The community quickly got it working on RTX 50-series GPUs, some of the best graphics cards, but modders later patched the DLL to work on RTX 40-series GPUs, too. Now, thanks to rapid development in the RenoDX Discord server, the DLL has once again been patched to work on RTX 30-series GPUs.

Scouring through the server, the general sentiment is mixed. DLSS 5 works on Ampere cards, but performance tanks in almost every case. Any time a user shows decent framerates, it comes at the cost of base visual fidelity. To use DLSS 5 to make the game look more realistic, you need to turn the in-game settings all the way down. It's a balancing act to avoid the point of diminishing returns.

The net result is a more photorealistic image that looks noticeably different (better?) than native rendering. However, it introduces an insane latency penalty where most of the frame pacing is now formed exclusively by neural rendering. In worst-case scenarios, your frametimes can multiply by ten compared to before. If all of this still sounds enticing, then let's talk about the results.

One user got Grand Theft Auto V running at around 20-30 FPS on an RTX 3080 Ti at 1440p. Another user played Dying Light 2 at roughly 40 FPS on an RTX 3080 but noted that the image was very noisy. Hogwarts Legacy was running at 30 FPS on an RTX 3090; Mortal Shell 2 at 34 FPS on RTX 3080 Ti, but with shimmering; Ready or Not at 30 FPS on RTX 3080; Neverness to Everness at 29-30 FPS on RTX 3080; and even NBA 2K27 on a mobile RTX 3070 at 25 FPS with DLAA at 1080.

On the other hand, many users reported being stuck in single-digit FPS territory across a variety of games. You'd expect bad performance from RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 users, but the worst we saw was 2 FPS for Hogwarts Legacy on RTX 3070. One person on X enjoyed Deep Rock Galactic with DLSS 5 at 4 FPS on their RTX 3080, down from 130+ FPS without it. Back on Discord, one user ran Cyberpunk 2077 at 7 FPS on an RTX 3080 Ti.

The most interesting result we saw was beautifully emblematic of this entire predicament. A user reached up to 41 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS 5. But to get there, they had to drop the resolution to 720p and use the ultra performance preset for upscaling. As mentioned earlier, you sacrifice base fidelity in order to gain the neural fidelity, if that's your cup of tea.

People seemed so impressed by DLSS 5 that several were ready to sell their Ampere cards for Blackwell GPUs for their servers. The jump from RTX 30-series to RTX 50-series is substantial, but the biggest improvements were made in the AI department. It's a fascinating case study to see people vehemently reject AI at first, then pivot to make purchasing decisions explicitly based on the most AI features possible afterward.

Nvidia still hasn't officially announced when DLSS 5 is dropping or what GPUs it will support. DLSS 4.5, the latest iteration of the tech, supports RTX GPUs all the way back to the RTX 20-series. However, it's not rocket science to deduce that the RTX 50-series will be the first to receive DLSS 5, because it's the only family that can natively read certain FP8 libraries that DLSS 5 depends on.

Ever since the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 launched (and the RTX 4090 before it), reports of the card burning down have been commonplace in the community. The culprit behind the GPU's incendiary nature is the 16-pin power connector that's notorious for being unreliable... so what if we got rid of it in the first place? That's what Brazilian YouTuber TecLab did in their latest experiment — stripping an RTX 5090 down and powering it through wires directly soldered to the PCB.

The GPU used for this test was a very high-end Galax HOF OC LAB XOC variant of the RTX 5090D. Unlike standard RTX 5090s that come with a single 16-pin connector for their 575W TDPs, this bad boy is equipped with twice the firepower (literally) since you can use up to 2,000W OC BIOSes on it. That already sounds like a bad idea, but TecLab went further and removed the heatsink and fans entirely to liquid-cool the core.

The modders took two sets of wires and soldered them right above either power connector on the PCB, linking them to the connectors' traces. They used two adapters to intercept standard 16-pin power cables coming from a PSU and convert them into bare wires that could be soldered easily. From the looks of it, the poor soldering job was only going to put these guys in more danger, but it somehow worked.

The card booted and ran just fine, even benchmarking pretty well. Remember, there was no cooler on the GPU. Instead, it was being tamed by two 120mm fans loosely zip-tied to the PCB and an industrial liquid chiller running ice-cold water across the core. We didn't get any temps, but the card was running at around 600W based on the ~50A reading from the power meter clamped to the 12V rail.

TecLab explained that they'd grown tired of the constant complaints about 16-pin power connectors on RTX 5090s causing problems. They sarcastically presented this "solution" as an answer to people who whine too much about their expensive cards melting, taking matters into their own hands to show Nvidia "how it's done." Even though the experiment was a success, it's safe to say that this is not safe; do not try this at home, kids.

Regardless of the practicality here, the fact that hastily soldering wires to a 900W GPU is potentially more reliable than Nvidia's factory-developed solution is simply absurd. We've seen so many external monitoring tools purpose-built for saving these 16-pin cards that each new solution just begs the question as to why they haven't been recalled yet. Then again, if you're buying a $5,000 GPU, we suppose a WireView is chump change at that point.

Tom's Hardware has verified that modders have managed to get DLSS 5 up and running on RTX 4000 series graphics cards, following the leaked release of the DLSS 5 nvngx_dlssnr.dll yesterday, which saw modders flock to integrate it into other titles outside of Remedy Entertainment's Control.

Yesterday, modders managed to get Nvidia's DLSS 5 running inside Control, and now in other titles. The early access version of NBA 2K27 contained a new file enabling the Neural Rendering technique, and has since been ported to other games.

The RenoDX Discord server has been the center of action for all of the development of getting this early version of Neural Rendering to function on other pieces of software. The modification leverages both ReShade and RenoDX to essentially activate the additional files.

While it's clearly an early look at the technology, one limitation of the current binary available has been that it only works with RTX 5000 Series Blackwell GPUs. This is even though the AI model contained within the DLL runs on FP8, which can be read and executed on previous-gen Ada Lovelace hardware. The reason behind the incompatibility (as TechPowerUp explained) is that certain CUDA binaries can only be read by Blackwell GPUs.

However, intrepid RTX Remix modder "Uncle Burrito" has since patched the DLL file to get things working on Ada Lovelace hardware. "All I had to do was look into it to see what binaries it's actually using. Find the ones that aren't compatible with Ada, and then patch in fresh ones myself," the modder told Tom's Hardware. They continued to share that, since the nvngx_dlssnr.dll for NBA 2K27 was likely an early development build, Ada-equivalent binaries had likely not been built for it.

Tom's Hardware has verified that Uncle Burrito's patch works when using an Nvidia RTX 4080, and that multiple versions of such a patch are in the works from other developers within the RenoDX Discord server.

Currently, official DLSS 5 support on non-Blackwell hardware remains a question mark, though after seeing the work that modders have done to get things up and running on previous-generation hardware, Nvidia may choose to release it for previous-generation GPUs. Support for Ampere GPUs and older may pose a significant challenge, however, as the hardware does not have native FP8 support.

DLSS 5 has apparently leaked, originating from inside a new game. This week, Renan Maniero discovered that NBA 2K27, which has entered early access, contains a new Nvidia library called nvngx_dlssnr.dll. The file, named Nvidia DLSSNR, appears to be associated with Nvidia’s DLSS 5 neural rendering technology, suggesting that NBA 2K27 will be among the first games to support it. Developers were quickly able to get DLSS 5 running in Control.

DLSS 5 is Nvidia’s upcoming neural rendering technology, first introduced in March of this year, which received a mixed reception from the gaming community. Nvidia announced that the technology would launch this fall, meaning its release is now fast approaching.

One of the developers behind RenoDX, a popular toolset for modding games, has been working to get DLSS 5 running in an actual game using the aforementioned DLSS 5 library. The developer successfully got the technology working in Control and applied it to the game's character models.

You can expand the tweet above to see DLSS 5 in action, with seven sliders controlling parameters such as style, intensity, tone, and structure strength.

According to the developer on the RenoDX Discord server, DLSS 5 currently runs only on Blackwell GPUs. On an RTX 5070 Ti at 4K, enabling the technology reportedly reduced performance from 71 FPS to 35 FPS. However, the developer did not specify the DLSS 5 settings or the internal rendering resolution used for the test, so it is not yet clear how representative this performance impact is.

It is important to remember that this is an early implementation of DLSS 5 injected into a game by modders. Therefore, it should not be taken as confirmation that Blackwell GPUs will be the only hardware supported at launch, nor should the performance shown here be considered representative of the final release.

That said, the performance impact is not entirely unexpected. When Nvidia first demonstrated DLSS 5 in March, the demo was running on two RTX 5090s. Since then, the model has been distilled into a smaller and more efficient version capable of running on a single GPU, according to Nvidia’s presentation at SIGGRAPH 2026. Nvidia may still have additional optimizations to implement ahead of the official launch, but we still expect DLSS 5 to be demanding to run in practice.

In terms of image quality, a user provided a couple of comparisons in the RenoDX Discord server we linked to previously.

In Nvidia’s initial reveal in March, many of the comparison shots demonstrated substantial improvements to effects such as subsurface scattering, contact shadows, light transmission through hair and foliage, and overall lighting. However, there were occasional instances where the neural rendering model deviated significantly from the intended artistic direction. At SIGGRAPH 2026, this no longer appeared to be an issue. The same appears to be true in the Control screenshots, where improved shadows and light transmission through the characters’ hair and skin make the scenes appear more photorealistic without altering the underlying geometry or the game's overall look.

DLSS 5 is set to launch soon, and while what we have seen today is only an early glimpse of the technology, it has certainly left us intrigued. Even in this early implementation, the improvements in lighting, shadows, and material rendering are impressive, particularly given that they can enhance a scene's visual fidelity without altering its underlying geometry or artistic style. Of course, the real test will come with the official release, where we will get a better idea of its image quality, performance requirements, and hardware compatibility. For now, however, DLSS 5 is shaping up to be a fascinating addition to Nvidia’s suite of neural rendering technologies.

Nvidia ostensibly brought back the RTX 3060 12GB in late June to help gamers cope with the ongoing component crisis. Since most of the world's memory is being routed to expensive AI chips, the RTX 3060 12GB offered gamers a 12GB VRAM pool for what was supposed to be a reasonable price... if only the price remained steady. As of today, this five-year-old GPU now costs almost $500 across the world, which is just as much as the RTX 5060.

MSI's Ventus 2X OC variant of the RTX 3060 12GB launched at just $300 on its online store and $340 on Newegg. It's now listed for $480 in both places. That's a 60% increase in less than two months, compared to its lowest price. Similarly, Asus' Dual V2 OC variant was released with a $330 MSRP, which quickly rose to $360 on Newegg, and the same card is now sitting at $500, constituting a 52% price hike from launch.

The cheapest RTX 3060 12GB right now, the Gigabyte Windforce OC Rev 2.0 model, currently costs $460, up 35% from the $340 it arrived at in late June. The same GPU is listed for 417 GBP on Amazon UK, which converts to $566. In Europe, the cheapest variant is once again Asus' Dual V2 OC, costing 386 EUR on Amazon Germany, or roughly $450; price aggregator Geizhals says it was just 330 EUR a month ago.

In comparison, the RTX 5060, which is two generations newer, can be easily had for around $450 from a bunch of different vendors. That GPU is not only significantly faster but also more efficient, while carrying the latest features such as DLSS multi-frame gen support. In our GPU hierarchy, the 5060 is actually just as powerful as the RTX 3070 at 1080p and 1440p, and it carries the same amount of VRAM, 8GB.

That VRAM capacity is the only thing going for the 3060 12GB at this point, and even with extra memory to utilize, the GPU isn't really capable enough to deliver better performance in games. Plus, you can find better deals on the used market, or even renewed offers from big retailers, so the re-launched RTX 3060 12GB just doesn't make sense from any angle right now, despite its still-decent 1080p chops.

The 3060 is cheaper to produce for Nvidia, thanks to its slower GDDR6 memory compared to the GDDR7 you get on the 5060. It's fabricated on the older, less in-demand 8nm node from Samsung, compared to TSMC's N5, which should also help with yield. But none of those manufacturing leniencies seem to be trickling down to the customer. Even the RTX 5050, which can be had for $300, is faster than the revived RTX 3060 12GB.

Intel shared more details of its Crescent Island AI accelerator, powered by the Xe3P architecture, at the Hot Chips symposium this week. Unlike Nvidia's Rubin and AMD's MI455X GPUs, which are high-power, exclusively liquid-cooled chips with massive pools of HBM4 memory that provide maximum performance across both AI training and inference workloads, Crescent Island is designed to fit into a lower-power, inference-first niche in the AI accelerator market.

As a refresher, Crescent Island is a 350W air-cooled PCIe card that uses up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X memory, meaning it can be deployed in traditional servers without exotic power and cooling requirements. We've already learned about some of Crescent Island's DNA from past disclosures, but Intel went deeper into the chip's architectural details at Hot Chips.

Crescent Island is built up from four Xe3P slices, each containing eight Xe Cores, for a total of 32. Each Xe Core has eight Xe Vector Engines and eight XMX matrix accelerators, for a total of 256 of each resource.

The Xe3 graphics architecture, as seen on Intel's Panther Lake processors, already modified the capacity and flexibility of the GPU cache hierarchy to improve utilization and decrease performance-sapping register spills, and Xe3P further refines that hierarchy.

The Xe3P Xe Core has twice the amount of general register file space for working data versus Battlemage. Each Xe Core now has 1MB of general-purpose register file space, up from 512KB on Battlemage and Xe2. In addition, Xe3P offers 512KB of L1 cache or shared local memory per Xe Core, a structure that started out at 256KB on Battlemage and grew by approximately 1.33x on Panther Lake's Xe3 GPU. The chip also has 32MB of shared L2 cache. These expanded caches are meant to serve the chip's larger matrix accelerators on its AI compute-focused mission.

Xe3P boasts a larger systolic depth in its XMX engines than past Xe GPU designs. Xe3P's XMX systolic engines are a 16-deep design, meaning they can process matrices in much larger chunks than the four-deep systolic design of Xe2 and Xe3. Nvidia doesn't discuss the architecture of its Tensor Cores in anywhere near this level of detail, but as an AI inference-focused part, the fact that Xe3P can theoretically work on more elements at once during general matrix-multiply operations is an important capability boost for Crescent Island's inference ambitions.

Intel is also prioritizing a broad range of data types with this chip, from FP4 formats with microscaling support (aka MXFP4) all the way to what it describes as full-rate double-precision (via 64 FP64 FMA units per Xe Core). FP64 isn't widely used in AI workloads, but Intel says that the inclusion of full-rate processing for that data type makes Crescent Island useful as a converged high-performance computing and AI chip.

Each Xe Core also supports sigmoid and tanh transcendental functions, which are important to a variety of operations during AI inference, especially the softmax function. AMD and Nvidia have prioritized the performance of these functions in their recent architectures as well, so the fact that Xe3P offers support for them is key for its AI-first initiatives.

While Crescent Island does have a media codec block featuring four encoders and decoders to help serve up video to multimodal AI models, gamers hoping for a glimpse of future Arc cards won’t find it with this product, as graphics-specific functionality like RT cores has been omitted from this chip to preserve die area for compute functionality.

As a data-center-focused part, Crescent Island offers a full suite of reliability, availability, and serviceability features, including ECC and parity protection across the die and a range of memory reliability features.

As for the specific applications that Crescent Island will target, Intel highlights the rise of mixture-of-experts models paired with speculative decoding as a new class of workload that Crescent Island can serve well.

Speculative decoding strategies vary, but in general, they use a fast, lightweight mechanism to create drafts of future tokens that the main model can then be used to accept or reject, potentially improving decode performance. Not every draft token generated this way will be approved, but much like speculative execution in CPUs, it helps produce useful work from compute resources that would otherwise be left idle.

As model serving recipes pursue more aggressive drafting mechanisms, more compute is required to generate those draft tokens. At a high level, that understanding changes the common perception of decode as being a mostly memory-bandwidth-bound operation.

As an LPDDR5X-powered chip, Crescent Island won't have the eye-popping bandwidth of HBM-backed accelerators at its disposal for maximum performance with traditional autoregressive decode, so any help it can get from these speculative methods will be helpful.

Overall, Intel claims that Crescent Island is built to offer high FLOPS per watt and that it's optimized for compute-bound workloads like prefill (aka prompt processing and KV cache construction). Intel's emphasis on those areas of AI performance, as well as heterogeneous deployments, suggests that this chip could have a niche alongside HBM-backed accelerators whose resources are best used for decode operations.

Intel and its partner SambaNova could both stand to benefit from such an arrangement, as that company's SN50 inference accelerators are explicitly built to benefit from disaggregated prefill processing powered by GPUs. SN50 racks and Crescent Island are both meant to serve as lower-power, air-cooled systems that customers can deploy in existing data centers without dramatic upgrades to power or cooling infrastructure, so there is broad synergy in the shape of those products.

Intel still isn't discussing just how many theoretical compute FLOPS to expect from Crescent Island, nor is it disclosing memory bandwidth figures. But the architectural decisions it's shared so far — getting lots of data close to the compute engines of the chip and processing more of it at once in a relatively narrow power envelope — seem sound in a world where the company is still trying to reset its AI ambitions after a string of high-profile product failures and cancellations.

Intel has promised Crescent Island for a second-half 2026 time frame, and the clock is ticking on that launch window, so we’re eager to learn more about the chip’s final specifications, as well as customer and partner wins, when that launch does occur.

Shopping for PC parts continues to be a nightmare, with skyrocketing RAM, SSD, and GPU prices paired with unpredictable availability. However, a lucky shopper managed to score a flagship GPU for far less than its original launch price. According to Reddit user u/sparkyscotty55, their local Walmart store was selling a PNY-branded Nvidia RTX 5080 for just $702.56, down from its listed selling price of $1,249. Not only does this deal result in a discount of $546.44, but its final price is also much lower than Nvidia’s suggested $999 retail price for the RTX 5080.

A quick price check reveals that this particular PNY RTX 5080 OC graphics card is currently listed at over $1,500 on Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy. This makes the Walmart clearance price even more impressive, with the shopper essentially paying less than half of what the GPU currently costs at major retailers. The shopper also confirmed that they inspected the box to verify that the GPU inside was indeed the correct model and appeared to be in good condition.

The PNY GeForce RTX 5080 OC is a factory-overclocked version of Nvidia's reference RTX 5080 that targets 4K gaming and content-creation workloads. The RTX 5080 packs 10,752 CUDA cores, 16GB of GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit bus, and up to 960 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Its fifth-generation Tensor cores and fourth-generation RT cores enable features such as AI acceleration, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and Nvidia's DLSS 4 technology, including Multi Frame Generation. The GPU is listed to push the boost clock to 2.73 GHz, up from Nvidia's reference 2.62 GHz, while retaining the 360W power rating. It also uses a substantial cooling system with three 100mm silent fans and a dense heatsink, along with a triple-slot design.

Walmart's clearance aisles have produced rare but similar GPU bargains in the past. For instance, back in February another shopper managed to grab the same RTX 5080 model at just $562.49. During that period, it was one of the few RTX 5080 models sold at Nvidia’s suggested MSRP of $999, thus resulting in an impressive discount of $430 for the lucky customer. Another Walmart clearance find involved an RTX 5060 Ti, with a customer picking up an MSI RTX 5060 Ti Ventus 2X 8GB at just $80. Since the card had launched with an MSRP of $379, the shopper managed to end up saving nearly $300. The deal was particularly interesting as the buyer was reportedly upgrading from a much older GTX 1060, resulting in a massive generational leap at a negligible price.

While such deals occasionally result in an incredible bargain, there is always an element of risk, especially when it involves expensive PC hardware. Such items could be customer returns with opened boxes, or items that have been marked down because of damaged packaging or missing accessories. There are also some cases where heavily discounted PC components are returned units that are either damaged, swapped, or do not include the hardware originally sold with it, which makes checking the contents before completing the purchase particularly important.

TrashBench is back with another project that might seem deranged at first, but it actually ended up working out pretty well. Taking a grinder to the stock cooler of an Nvidia GTX 1070, he attached a fully-fledged CPU cooler with RGB fans to see if that'd cool the die better than what came from the factory. Not only did it work for the 1070, but also the 1060 and the illustrious 1080 Ti. The modification resulted in higher FPS, higher clock speeds, lower temperatures, and even lower power consumption.

The sacrificial lamb for this project was the Asus Strix variant of a GTX 1070 that TrashBench actually mistook for a 1060 at first (since they both share the exact same cooler). The modder separated the cooler assembly from the shroud and proceeded to cut out a part of the finstack with an angle grinder. The goal was to expose the back of the metal plate touching the GPU core on the other side, so that a CPU cooler could be mounted there.

He attached the cooler to a 1060 with a 120mm fan zip-tied on, and despite missing a few fins, the temperature somehow dropped from 46°C to 45°C under load. TrashBench then drilled holes into the exposed metal plate and screwed a single-tower CPU cooler directly into it. The result was a graphics card 9°C cooler than before and with slightly better clocks.

Moving on to the dual-tower cooler required a few more grinding modifications to the baseplate of the card. Once attached, the temperature dropped further by only one degree even though two fans were now dissipating the heat from those extra fins. Still, he overclocked the 1060 in this condition, and it netted 9% higher FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider compared to the stock cooler, while being 6°C cooler.

It was now time for the 1070 — the dual-tower CPU cooler ran a whole 20°C cooler than the stock configuration. It consumed 15W less and clocked higher during the test, which prompted TrashBench to push for a 2,200 MHz OC. Unfortunately, it wasn't stable at that; boosting to 2,177 MHz was the limit. That still resulted in almost 200 MHz higher clocks compared to stock and 7% more FPS in-game. The GTX 1070 was a raging success, especially impressive when you consider that the 1060 didn't elicit a large temperature differential.

Keep in mind that the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 have identical coolers from the factory. The 1060 has a 120W TDP while the 1070 has a 150W TDP, so the same modded cooler can work wonders on either card. The GTX 1080 Ti up next is a huge leap at 250W, and it has a much beefier heatsink to keep up with that. Instead of just testing the card with that, TrashBench transplanted a stock 1060 cooler to make the comparison between all cards as fair as possible. The 1060 cooler on the 1080 Ti was already 8°C hotter under load.

Against this configuration, the dual-tower cooler ended up achieving the same clocks for 30W less, or about a 12% reduction in power consumption. The first run saw the stock 1060 cooler peg the card's hotspot at 72°C while the dual-tower cooler sat at just 42°C — that's 30°C cooler! In the second run, the difference was down to 23°C, which is still mighty impressive. Even after an overclock to 2,152 MHz, the modded cooler ran 19°C cooler than stock despite actually consuming more power this time.

Overall, the results speak for themselves, and this isn't even the first time TrashBench has done something like this. He's previously strapped a CPU cooler on a GTX 960, though with a lot more grace, and bolted a server AIO on an RTX 3080. As for this experiment, as long as you're rocking an open test bench and have too much time on your hands, then this wouldn't be the strangest TrashBench project to replicate.

In a bizarre quality control issue, a gamer discovered protective film on the VRM thermal pads of their Gigabyte RTX 3070 Gaming OC graphics card. As per a Reddit post by u/buczi94, the GPU was purchased brand new and had never been disassembled or sent for any sort of repairs. After using the GPU for almost five years, the owner of the GPU started noticing high temperatures on the VRMs. They also faced frequent black screens during higher loads, waking the PC from sleep, and cold boots.

The Redditor claims that they upgraded their motherboard BIOS and GPU firmware and drivers, alongside disabling several settings including custom PBO curve, XMP, and Resizable Bar. Unfortunately, none of these measures helped alleviate the problems. They further performed some benchmark tests using Furmark and OCCT, where the GPU temperatures would reach as high as 80°C with the GPU hotspot at 105°C. While these numbers were not alarming, they also found that the cooling fans would randomly ramp up to their highest speed, despite setting a custom fan curve in MSI Afterburner and limiting the fans to 90%.

Fed up with the situation, the owner of the graphics card eventually took the decision to disassemble the GPU for cleaning and repasting, upon which they found protective films on the VRM thermal pads. They claim that peeling off the protective film and repasting the core resulted in a sizable reduction of 15°C on the GPU and 30°C on the GPU hotspot. Additionally, after three hours of stability tests on Furmark and OCCT, no errors were recorded.

The GPU owner also provided an update on the black-screen issues following the fix. While the problem initially occurred once every month or two, it became an everyday concern just a few days before the thermal pad films were discovered, specifically after waking the PC from sleep, during cold boots, or under heavy loads. After the fix, the owner claims that they experienced just one black screen during a cold boot, although they acknowledged that it was too early to determine whether the problem had been fully resolved.

Removing the protective film from the VRM thermal pads fixed the overheating problem. However, the damage caused by years of excessive heat cannot be undone. The owner alleged that since the VRMs were running much hotter for a long period, they have potentially affected several components on the graphics card, including the MOSFETs, as well as the capacitors around the VRM. The owner believes the excessive heat may have also caused the PCB to repeatedly expand and contract over the years, which can put stress on the board and potentially contribute to tiny cracks in solder joints. While they suspect this could be the reason behind the black screen issue, it is just a theory and can only be confirmed through proper testing.

As the flaw occurred at the production and assembly level, the GPU owner contacted Gigabyte’s support team to report the issue and asked for a replacement. However, instead of addressing the alleged manufacturing defect, Gigabyte’s support staff advised the owner to test their GPU in another system. They also informed the GPU owner that since the card was out of warranty, they should contact the retailer or pay a local repair shop to fix the issue.

It is unclear whether the protective film caused any damage to the VRMs, which ultimately resulted in the GPU's black-screen problems as claimed by the owner. However, the case raises questions about how a factory assembly error could go unnoticed for years and whether manufacturers should address such defects even after the standard warranty has expired.

ByteDance and Tencent have each taken delivery of roughly 10,000 Nvidia H200 accelerators in recent weeks, the Financial Times has reported, citing two people with knowledge of the matter, a development that would mark the first meaningful movement of the chips into mainland China since President Trump approved their export last December.

Beijing wants most of each company's U.S.-licensed allowance, which the FT puts at up to 100,000 units apiece, kept off the mainland, with regulators directing buyers toward Hong Kong instead. Nvidia is reportedly holding around 500,000 H200s built largely for Chinese customers. Trump cleared H200 exports to approved Chinese customers last December, in exchange for a 25% cut of every sale to the U.S. Treasury, and Washington had licensed roughly 10 firms, including Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and JD.com, by May.

However, Beijing never let orders flow: every purchase requires case-by-case approval from the National Development and Reform Commission, and the resulting blockade left Jensen Huang telling investors that Nvidia's China market share had fallen from 95% to zero. As recently as mid-July, a U.S. trade official told a congressional hearing that only a very small quantity of chips had shipped against the licenses. Lenovo and other Nvidia partners told Chinese customers last week that they could resume orders for H200-based AI servers, per the FT, though each purchase still needs separate NDRC sign-off.

And just because chips are moving doesn’t mean the infrastructure is there to support them. The H200 draws up to 700W, with a fully loaded eight-GPU HGX H200 server pulling roughly 10 kW. At that rate, a single company's 100,000-unit allowance works out to about 12,500 servers and 125 MW of IT load, and Nvidia's reported 500,000-unit stockpile translates to roughly 625 MW.

Hong Kong's entire installed base runs to 47 data centers totaling about 581 MW, per Hong Kong Free Press, and the city's average PUE of 1.62 pushes actual grid draw well above the IT figure. "It's a dilemma," a person familiar with the situation told the FT, with companies unable to find anywhere in the territory to deploy the chips. The Northern Metropolis data center cluster meant to fix the shortfall, awarded to Range Intelligent Computing in March, isn't slated to come online until 2029.

Chinese labs increasingly run inference on domestic accelerators but are still thought to train frontier models on Nvidia hardware, and DeepSeek's failed attempts to train its R2 model on Huawei Ascend chips show why.

The 10,000-unit deliveries amount to roughly 2.5% of the 400,000-plus H200s that ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent were collectively approved to buy in January, but the NDRC still gates every order, and steering the bulk of licensed volumes to a territory that can't house them keeps the mainland market captive for domestic chipmakers.

Computer enthusiast 1usmus has developed a new update for their Hydra overclocking application that introduces VRAM overclocking and power limit control for some of the best graphics cards on the market, Nvidia's RTX 50-series. The new update, 2.3B, adds support for a maximum memory offset of +3000MHz for memory overclocking and a static power limit adjustment that peaks at 125% regardless of which RTX 50-series model is used.

The new update allows RTX 50-series graphics card owners to overclock their GPU’s GDDR7 memory up to 36 Gbps. 1usmus showed off their personal Asus ROG Astral LC RTX 5090 OC overclocked to 36 Gbps on the memory to confirm that the application works as advertised. Hydra’s aforementioned limits are reportedly aimed at this first release specifically to keep users safe. But 1usmus hinted that future iterations of the app could have higher limits, noting that the RTX Pro 6000 has experimental support for the “complete feature set” of the program.

Beyond VRAM and power limit adjustments, Hydra version 2.3B also features direct XBAR offset control and support for second-generation “Rail Offsets.” The voltage frequency curve has also been changed and is now unrestricted compared to prior versions.

Compared to mainstream overclocking tools, Hydra supports more in-depth overclocking features that are geared for extreme overclocking. This is particularly true of the XBAR offset control, which is a method of overclocking an Nvidia GPU’s interconnect, helping improve performance beyond just GPU core and memory overclocking, similar to overclocking the Infinity Fabric on AMD CPUs. For pure core and memory overclocking, Hydra’s latest update matches what existing overclocking tools can achieve, such as MSI Afterburner, for now.

For the uninitiated, Hydra is a tool 1usmus released several years ago to better tune Ryzen CPUs. Since then, the app has evolved from just being an advanced AMD overclocking utility to also featuring overclocking support for Nvidia GPUs, overclocking support for Radeon GPUs, DRAM overclocking, and memory stability testing.

Now that the best graphics cards are worth a fortune for both gamers and AI enthusiasts, modders have resorted to hacking Nvidia’s older Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) series, originally released five years ago, as a way to overcome the ongoing memory shortage and ludicrous prices. CMP Unlocker, a completely software-based solution, has restored the previously locked-away memory on the CMP 170HX, boosting its memory capacity by up to 8X — from just 8GB to a massive 64GB, and from 10GB to 40GB.

To truly understand how the hack works, you need to dissect the CMP 170HX. The CMP 170HX is the flagship SKU in Nvidia's CMP series and leverages the GA100 (Ampere) silicon. It is the same 7nm die that powers the more expensive A100 accelerator. Unlike other Nvidia silicon with separate soldered memory chips, the GA100 itself is a monolithic chip with on-package memory. That means the total amount of memory is physically present on all GA100 silicon, so it comes down to how many memory stacks are active.

The GA100 silicon features a total of six HBM2e memory stacks. Depending on the SKU Nvidia is aiming for, it could have five or six memory stacks enabled. The chipmaker carves the CMP 170HX from defective or binned GA100 silicon that did not meet the stringent quality requirements for the enterprise-grade A100. Nvidia officially sold the CMP 170HX in 8GB and 10GB variants. All the chipmaker did was disable the additional memory through firmware, along with other limitations, such as nerfing compute performance and PCIe interface speeds.

Nvidia's approach is somewhat reminiscent of the old AMD Phenom II and Athlon II days, where some models shipped with disabled cores that could sometimes be unlocked through BIOS tweaks. Similarly, the CMP 170HX 8GB and 10GB models can potentially be unlocked to access their full memory capacity of 64GB and 80GB, respectively, though only 40GB is confirmed to be working from user feedback. As detailed in "A Canary in the Crypto Mine: Defeating Stack Protection in a GPU Secure Coprocessor," Jon Pry's research paper provides the technical blueprint for bypassing Nvidia’s Falcon security microprocessor, which tools like CMP Unlocked are based on.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this exploit is that it is entirely software-based and requires no physical modifications to the CMP 170HX. It sounds like a joke, but you are literally downloading more memory for your graphics card. It’s important to note, however, that the amount of memory you can successfully unlock and maintain stability will vary. The issue is that there is no way to know whether the locked-away memory is fully functional because Nvidia did so for product segmentation, or whether the chipmaker deactivated it due to physical defects. It's a similar situation to another repurposed crypto device, AMD's BC-250, that we recently tested.

Beyond unlocking the hidden memory, the software exploit can also restore processing power to the CMP 170HX’s Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), which increases its computational performance. Another notable benefit is the upgrade to a faster PCIe interface speed. The CMP 170HX can now operate at PCIe 2.0 x4 speeds, a significant upgrade from its original restriction to PCIe 1.0 x4. There is still untapped performance, though. Nvidia implemented hard restrictions on the CMP 170HX’s connectivity by limiting the accelerator to just four PCIe lanes and physically omitting 12 capacitors from the PCB. If you solder the missing capacitors to the PCB, it could unlock full PCIe x16 bandwidth and enable the accelerator's maximum throughput, though we haven't seen that in action.

The CMP 170HX launched with a hefty price tag of $4,300 at the height of the cryptocurrency mining boom. Nowadays, they used to sell for around $250 on eBay. However, when word of the exploit got out, they immediately jumped to over $1,000, a 4X increase in market value. Nvidia’s A100, offered in 40GB and 80GB PCIe variants, starts at around $3,500 and $11,500, respectively. The CMP 170HX is attractive for AI users because it costs a fraction of the A100 but can offer the same memory capacity, though the silicon lottery is not always generous. Regardless, Nvidia’s Ampere architecture is now two generations old. Even with added memory capacity, it cannot match the raw computational performance or efficiency of Hopper or Blackwell.

The component crisis continues to wreak havoc across the computer industry, and its latest victim is Intel's top-tier workstation GPU, the Arc Pro B70. The Battlemage card launched with an MSRP of $949 earlier this year and has been regularly available for $1,000... up until now. The Arc Pro B70 has been hit with a 30% price increase in the States, a 26% increase in Europe, and a whopping 48% increase in Korea this month.

In the US, the ASRock Creator variant of the card is currently listed on Newegg and Amazon for $1,299. Price trackers confirm it was available for $999 just last month and received the hike at the beginning of August. Going from $999 to $1,299 constitutes a 30% increase practically overnight. Another retailer, B&H, actually has the Arc Pro B70 listed for an insane $1,779, but that's the reference design from Intel.

Beyond North America, Europe has seen a similar hike despite the GPU already being overpriced there. In Germany, the Arc Pro B70 has been available for roughly 1,200 Euros, or almost $1,400, across different vendors since June. Geizhals' price tracking now shows the average price of the card at around 1,500 Euros instead, which works out to $1,735. That's a 26% increase between the two recorded prices.

Moving to South Korea, the price hike is the most egregious with a 46% jump from late July to today — less than one month. Danawa, a price aggregator in the region shows the Arc Pro B70 cost 1,889,980 KRW, or $1,334, on 21 July. It rose from that to 2,798,980 KRW, or $1,975, by 16 August. This was less of a sudden hike since the graph below shows an incremental curve over the past few weeks, but it's still absurd. Intel's official pricing is actually listed even higher, at 2,817,000 KRW ($1,988), before discounts.

The Arc Pro B70 comes with 32GB of GDDR6 ECC VRAM, making it extremely desirable for AI workloads, in particular, inference. It also happens to be Intel's top-end Battlemage GPU since the company did not launch any gaming-focused flagship this generation. Any card performant in machine-learning tasks is worth its weight in gold today, as proven by constant, silent price hikes that don't seem to be stopping anytime soon.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is somewhat of a legend in the modding community when it comes to VRAM upgrades. The card's strange 11GB memory config lends itself very well to repair jobs that double its memory pool to 22GB. We've seen it happen in China and the UAE before, and now, a Japanese vendor offering the same services has been spotted. The shop charges 45,000 Yen, or $282, for adding 11GB of memory to your existing RTX 2080 Ti, which comes out to about $25 per gigabyte.

The shop has a very uninspired name that roughly translates to "AI to GPU Expert," since they take regular gaming cards and transform them into AI workhorses with a lot of VRAM. They operate out of Saitama Prefecture and have a store on Mercari where you can find a bunch of different modded GPUs listed for rather reasonable prices.

The cheapest pre-modded RTX 2080 Ti we could find was an MSI Venus 2X model for $428. Just a few days ago, we saw blower-style 22GB RTX 2080 Ti SKUs listed for $500 on eBay from a Hong Kong seller. It's hard to get your hands on memory for a fair price these days, but it seems like this vendor has a very generous plug based on their prices.

They even posted about recently receiving a large shipment of 2GB GDDR6 modules made by Samsung, all intended for upgrading RTX 2080 Ti cards. The batch included 200 modules, so 400GB of extra VRAM that should be enough to upgrade 36 different RTX 2080 Ti cards to 22GB. Just an hour later, they had already upgraded the first card:

Replying to a comment, the shop clarified it charges 45,000 Yen for this service, which works out to $282.48 — that's $25.68 per GB of extra VRAM, or $12.84 per GB for the entire 22GB pool. All things considered, not a bad price at all. You can very easily find stock RTX 2080 Ti cards for less than $250 on the secondhand market, so the total cost of a 22GB card would work out to a little over $500.

At that point, it's better to buy one of the pre-modded units, but if you already have a 2080 Ti and wanted a boost in AI performance, you have the option. The extra VRAM won't really help in games because the cut-down TU102 silicon inside the 2080 Ti is not powerful enough to benefit from 22GB of VRAM. Even in demanding, ray-traced titles, you won't saturate the memory pool, and the GPU itself will become the bottleneck.

Keep in mind that your memory bandwidth is still locked to 616 GB/s after the upgrade, so anything that relies on speed will not see a noticeable improvement. On the other hand, more memory will greatly help AI models in both the training and inference stages. An RTX 2080 Ti is almost as powerful as an RTX A4000 in these workloads, but that has less VRAM and costs more. But if money is no object, perhaps a 44GB RTX 2080 Ti is more enticing to you.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and necessity is the mother of invention. Such was the impetus behind events that transpired in an esports hotel in China where two thieves secretly swapped GPUs in their rented rooms, and no one found out until days later. They were only caught after management found signs of tampering with the PC case after they'd already checked out, which eventually led to their arrest.

Esports or gaming hotels are commonplace in some Asian countries. Think of them as fancy, isolated gaming zones where you can go and spend time with a nice PC right in your room. As such, these bandits deliberately picked rooms with expensive RTX 5080 and 5070 rigs that could offer the most return on the secondhand market. They would check into rooms posing as unassuming gamers, just like any other customer.

Once inside, they would open up the PC case, take out the high-end GPU, put a lower-end GPU like the RTX 3060 in there, and close the PC back up. Since the GPU variants matched, they looked similar enough from the outside that management would never suspect anything. The systems also ran just fine, and there were no complaints from later customers, so there was no reason to inspect them up close.

What gave these thieves away was an unexpected power outage on July 18. While they were in the middle of their nefarious activities, the lights went out, so they called the front desk to ask for a new room. After shifting, an electrician noticed pry marks on the PC cases in their old room. When management opened them up and saw two RTX 3060s instead of two RTX 5080s in there, they realized that they'd been robbed.

Just two days later, the local police caught the suspects in the Guangbutun computer district after tracing them through hotel registration details. Investigation revealed that they would book hotels with the best systems and loot their GPUs to sell for half their value for a quick return.

A new RTX 5080 will run you around $1,400 today while an RTX 3060 goes for roughly $400. That means the thieves sold a 5080 for around $700 — anyone would pounce on that deal. The suspects even admitted to already having pulled this off four different times before. The total loss reported from their GPU-swapping spree was 80,000 Yuan, or almost $12,000. That's a lot more than the last time we looked at esports-hoping bandits who stole $2,000 worth of RAM in a similar heist in Shihezi City last month, but about the same amount as the amateur burglary in Korea earlier this year.

Nvidia has once again silently raised the price of its RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell on its US Marketplace website to $16,000. The card was previously listed for $13,250, which itself was a price hike earlier this year since it actually launched at $8,565. Workstation GPUs of this caliber don't really have an MSRP since no one's buying them at retail, but we saw pre-orders for this GPU as low as $7,673 back in March 2025.

• RTX Pro 6000 at Newegg: $13,998 (Old Price)

That's when the card was first announced, and it went on sale a month later, in April 2025, where initial listings had it up for $8,435 for bulk orders and $8,565 for single-unit purchases. This means the June 2026 change from $8,435 to $13,250 was already a 57% price increase, and now, from $13,250 to $16,000, we're seeing a roughly 20% hike. In total, from March 2025 to August 2026, the RTX Pro 6000 became almost 90% more expensive.

If you count the pre-order prices that were momentarily below $8,000 — we're seeing this card sell for more than twice what it debuted at. Keep in mind that we're talking about the boxed Workstation Edition, which is basically like the Founder's Edition for these professional cards, because otherwise it's also available in a 300W Max-Q variant with a blower-style cooler, and a server edition with passive cooling for rack mounts.

These price hikes were not officially confirmed by Nvidia at any point during 2025 and 2026. With the ongoing component crisis continuing to worsen memory prices, these changes are not a surprise, especially when you consider the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell has 96GB of GDDR7 VRAM.

Still, a nearly $7,500 increase from March 2025 listings to now is a sizeable jump. For what it's worth, we found the same SKU listed on Newegg for $13,998, so $2,000 less than Nvidia's official store and basically the same price as before. Perhaps this listing will rise to $16,000 the moment current inventory runs out, and prices always vary between retailers. Case in point, B&H has the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell up for $15,499 right now.

CoreWeave signed a contract for Nvidia A100 GPUs that runs into 2029, nine years after the Ampere-based SKU debuted, CEO Mike Intrator disclosed on the company's second-quarter earnings call on Monday. The company reported $2.58 billion in quarterly revenue, up 112% year over year, and a $104 billion revenue backlog that excludes more than $25 billion in new commitments booked since July. In remarks made during the earnings call, Intrator said, “pricing for prior generation SKUs is at or above where it was years ago.”

Michael Burry accused hyperscalers in November of understating depreciation by $176 billion between 2026 and 2028 by stretching GPU useful-life assumptions to five or six years against a chip cadence that now delivers a new Nvidia architecture roughly every year. Concerns that accelerating GPU obsolescence could unravel AI financing predate his estimate, and an unnamed Google architect put datacenter GPU service life at one to three years back in 2024.

Intrator told CNBC at the time that a batch of H100s coming off an expired contract was immediately rebooked at 95% of the original price, and Nvidia CFO Colette Kress countered Burry directly, saying A100s sold six years ago still run at full utilization. The 2029 deal stretches that record further, putting contracted revenue on 2020 silicon beyond even the six-year depreciation schedules defended by hyperscalers.

An air-cooled Nvidia DGX A100 system draws 6.5kW at maximum load and fits comfortably in legacy data center halls designed for roughly 20kW per rack. Nvidia's current GB200 and GB300 NVL72 racks draw 120kW to 140kW and require direct-to-chip liquid cooling, roughly six times what those older facilities can feed and cool. Blackwell therefore can't move into the halls where Ampere is currently deployed without a rebuild of power delivery and cooling infrastructure.

That mismatch is helping to keep A100 fleets in service regardless of how gracefully or not silicon itself ages. The energized, air-cooled capacity holding them has no higher-value use, and renting nine-year-old GPUs is a better alternative to leaving it in the dark.

CoreWeave's contracted power grew to 3.7 GW in Q2 and stood at 4.2 GW as of Monday, against just 1.5 GW online, so customer commitments already cover nearly triple the capacity the company can deliver. CFO Nitin Agrawal added on the call that capacity coming up for renewal represents a very limited share of CoreWeave's fleet, with older-generation ASPs at or above levels from a year ago.

A Redditor has successfully connected a very powerful eGPU to the Steam Machine. Large_Customer_3840 briefly explains how they managed to add a potent AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT to Valve’s compact modern gaming desktop by fitting an M.2 to OCuLink adapter in the machine. That was cable-connected to an Aoostar EG01, which hosted the hulking triple-fan desktop graphics card. However, there remained some wrangling to do due to Steam Machine hardware limitations.

The idea outlined above sounds like a quick and simple hack to add a more powerful GPU to the Steam Machine, but there are a few limitations of the Valve hardware that need addressing. Firstly, this compact computer has just one M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe slot, which is used by the SSD that Valve supplies with the machine. Valve reckons folks can augment this storage using the microSD slot, just like Steam Deck gamers are accustomed to doing.

So, after fitting an OCuLink to M.2 adapter, Large_Customer_3840 had to find somewhere for the boot drive to live. The answer was simply to shove the boot drive into a USB-C to NVMe caddy and boot from that. Valve’s Steam Machine has a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) port on the back which supports DP-Alt and Power Delivery. This is the fastest USB port it has, so it was used for the operating system.

A second snag with the M.2 to OCuLink adapter setup here is that there will need to be a case mod done so the cable can be threaded through the rear of the chassis. Large_Customer_3840 hasn’t made such a mod yet, and they are happy to have the system running open for now.

But many eGPU solutions like this, using the Aoostar EG01 in this instance, are inherently messy anyway. This older Aoostar eGPU dock has no enclosure, making it little more than a platform with a PCIe slot and supporting circuitry to host a desktop GPU, exposed, on your desk. Moreover, the EG01 doesn’t have a built-in PSU, unlike some models, so you also have a typically ugly PC power supply in view, too.

Looking beyond the aesthetic mess, the Redditor was pleased that “When I turned it on the 9070xt became the primary monitor and worked straight away. There was no hassle no selecting of graphic adapters.” The extra shot of performance delivered by one of the best graphics cards for PCs in 2026 was also welcomed. Apparently the OCuLink-connected Radeon RX 9070 XT eGPU ran Crimson Desert at over 100 frames per second using the High preset. It would have been interesting to know how the Steam Machine’s built-in discrete GPU handled the game at the same settings… As the Steam Machine basically runs a GPU similar to the Radeon RX 7600 – you can see our extensive Graphics Card Hierarchy data to see the expected difference between the RX 7600 and RX 9070 XT in various gaming scenarios. Online testing for Crimson Desert at the High preset yields frame rates of around 50 FPS, making the eGPU addition a sizeable performance buff.

Many AMD mini PCs come with USB4 ports nowadays, so it is a shame that the Steam Machine’s USB connectivity plateaus at USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) via a single USB-C on the rear. USB4, or better, is a more convenient hot-pluggable eGPU port opening up lots of other docking options for compact system users. It may offer worse bandwidth than OCuLink, but most folks find it an acceptable compromise. I’ve used both and was slightly annoyed by both, vowing not to be tempted into the eGPU world again until mainstream USB4 v2/Thunderbolt 5 solutions have arrived at affordable levels.

News of regional price increases for Nvidia graphics cards has been rolling in over the past little while, and those hikes have now arrived in the United States. We nearly spit out our coffee this morning while checking Newegg prices for Blackwell products. After months of painful but still relatively reasonable e-tail prices versus skyrocketing RAM and SSD costs, popular Blackwell GPUs are now eye-wateringly expensive. And those increases appear to be rolling out across other e-tailers, too.

As part of our ongoing research for the best graphics cards, we track the prices of every e-tail listing we can find for consumer graphics cards and calculate the median price of those products. We specifically track this figure as we feel it represents the price of a given graphics card model that you're most likely to find in stock, not stripped-down models that might be produced in limited volume to hit an artificially low MSRP.

With that, the theoretically entry-level RTX 5060 is now $469.99 at the midpoint of current prices, which is now two rungs up the MSRP ladder compared to its $299.99 launch MSRP. Just a couple of months ago, 5060s were selling for a median $369.99, or just below the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB’s $379.99 launch MSRP. Now, the cheapest GDDR7 Blackwell card costs more than the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB’s $429.99 launch price.

RTX 5060 Ti 8GB cards used to be among the least marked-up Blackwell parts thanks to the fact that their performance and VRAM capacity was out of line with their high $379.99 launch MSRP, but they’re now headed up the escalator like their stablemates. The median 5060 Ti 8GB now costs $529.99, which is about 13-15% more expensive than a couple of months ago.

The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB now commands an astounding $799.99 median price, a jaw-dropping 38% more expensive than the $579.99 midpoint we last calculated. The 5060 Ti 16GB was already far too expensive to recommend for gaming at that price, and the new markup suggests that it’ll only be of interest to local AI explorers trying to get the most VRAM they can on a Blackwell card for under $1000. Pour one out for what used to be the best entry-level enthusiast GPU we recommended.

The RTX 5070 was another one of the last gaming holdouts near its MSRP thanks to strong competition from the RX 9070 16GB, but the midpoint of prices for 5070s has now leaped an incredible 29% over our last survey, to about $850-$900. Even comparing lows to lows, prices for the cheapest 5070s have jumped about 20%. That takes this card entirely out of the midrange running and positions it closer to the much faster RTX 5070 Ti, which also has 16GB of VRAM to play with.

The hikes appear to have hit the middle of the Blackwell lineup the hardest, as the midpoint of RTX 5070 Ti prices is the same as it was during our last check-in. RTX 5080s haven’t gotten substantially more expensive than they have been, either, as prices for those cards have always been highly elevated compared to their $999 MSRP. And the RTX 5050’s price has barely moved today, either, hovering near the $300 it’s maintained since around the beginning of the year.

These increases haven’t been matched by hikes on the AMD side—yet. Heavy emphasis on yet. We’re only seeing single-digit percentage increases in RDNA 4 card prices compared to our last survey, although Radeon RX 9000-series cards appear to be affected by the silicon supply crunch in other ways.

The assortment of available RX 9070 16GB cards is perhaps a bit smaller than it’s been in the past, while the cut-down RX 9070 GRE is available in abundance around its $549 MSRP, suggesting that card has taken over the true midrange role the plain 9070 could never quite manage at the same MSRP.

We felt that the GRE’s price was high at launch, but AMD likely has a better crystal ball for silicon supply chain trends than we do, as the GRE now offers incredible bang for the buck compared to the RTX 5070’s new sticker.

The RX 9060 XT 8GB isn’t completely dead yet, but only one XFX 8GB model remains readily available at e-tail for $399. The RX 9060 XT 16GB’s median price has slightly risen to $474.99, and the RX 9070 XT now sits 5% higher than our last check-in at a median of $799.99.

All told, these Blackwell price hikes are another body blow for a DIY PC component market that’s already reeling from sky-high RAM and NAND prices. Graphics cards had until recently been one of the less hiked-up component categories in a DIY PC’s bill of materials compared to the pre-AI times, but that period of relative solace is well and truly over if you want access to Nvidia’s hardware and software stack.

If you’re a PC gamer, there’s no good news here. We’ll have to see whether there’s a similar price spike waiting in the wings for Radeon cards in the coming days, or whether this is the sad, sorry new normal.

Nvidia is reportedly testing variations of its upcoming Rubin Ultra accelerator with less memory due to concerns it won't be able to source enough HBM. Some versions include just 192 GB of memory and use HBM4 instead of HBM4E, as originally announced, according to The Information. The report confirms an earlier comment from firm SemiAnalysis about a potential Rubin Ultra memory downgrade.

We first saw Rubin Ultra in the flesh earlier this year at GTC, where Nvidia showed off a compute tray housing four compute chiplets alongside 1 TB of HBM4E memory. The accelerator is part of Nvidia's Kyber NVL144 design, which is set to roll out in 2027. SemiAnaylsis reported that the rack was delayed to 2028. "Our roadmap is intact," said Nvidia to Tom's Hardware in response, though the company made no clarification on if the delay was real or not. We've reached out to Nvidia regarding this latest report.

According to The Information, Nvidia is testing versions of Rubin Ultra with 192 GB or 256 GB of memory, as well as versions that use fewer than the 16 announced memory stacks. Perhaps most importantly, Nvidia is reportedly testing with HBM4, not HBM4E as originally announced. Along with the traditional improvements we see in each new HBM generation, HBM4E is unique in that it offers a customizable base logic die. Last year, Micron announced a partnership with TSMC to manufacture the base die and allow customers to tweak the logic die based on their needs.

The complexity of HBM4E has reportedly caused a strain on supply, with memory manufacturers unable to keep pace with Rubin Ultra's rollout. At least three lower-memory designs have been tested by Nvidia, according to the report, though we don't have a full picture of details on those prototypes. The report claims testing with HBM4, as well as 192 GB and 256 GB configurations, though it makes no mention of the number of compute dies, nor the memory type for each tested capacity.

The number of dies is important. In June, reports circulated that Nvidia cancelled its quad-die Rubin Ultra design due to manufacturing complexities. Although Nvidia has yet to comment, reports at the time suggested Nvidia would move ahead with a dual-GPU Rubin Ultra. In such a case, less memory would make more sense. Even with a dual-die Rubin Ultra, the quoted capacities are lower than expected. Each base Rubin GPU currently ships with 288 GB of HBM4.

It's clear Nvidia is trying to get ahead with memory in a world where agreements have been signed multiple years into the future. Nvidia has several of its own agreements. In June, the company announced a partnership with SK hynix to develop next-generation memory technology, which includes HBM, but also LPDDR5X and DDR5. In July, Nvidia expanded that partnership with a $500 billion strategic relationship that includes a long-term memory supply agreement with SK.

Although Nvidia is considering lower-memory configurations, one Nvidia customer told The Information that per-GPU memory isn't a top concern, valuing the relationship with Nvidia over the long term.

Memory shortages are touching nearly every design currently on the market, though enterprise systems packing HBM are particularly vulnerable. Last week, Digitimes reported that Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have sold through their HBM capacity through 2027. Last month, SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung said 2027 will be the "worst year" for the memory shortage, with supply constraints lasting through 2030.

The AI-driven memory apocalypse has made computer parts so expensive that the average buyer has stopped building PCs. Multiple research firms have already said that, but we’re now seeing it in action in the market. Uniko’s Hardware shared on X four crazy combos of RTX 5090 GPUs being sold on the Taiwanese e-commerce platform PChome24h.

Some of the GPUs that come with a lot of "freebies" include the Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090, Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 Master, MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC, and a Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5090 AI Box external graphics card. These items are priced in NTD, but we’ll list them below, including their retail prices in dollars (NTD 32.25 = USD $1 exchange rate) and the included items.

As we can see, even though GPU prices are quite inflated, many of them come with enough freebies that you can start building one high-end system and three to five entry-level gaming rigs. They’re still priced relatively high compared to Amazon or Newegg in the U.S., though, but we have to keep in mind that Taiwan is a different market, so there will likely be variations in prices plus VAT.

While this might be an amusing piece of trivia for some people, it’s actually evidence of a disturbing trend in the PC building industry. Multiple research firms have been saying that the market will contract by double digits this year, with the entry-level PC market being hit the hardest, and that it’s not expected to bounce back until 2029. These combos are just evidence of that, at least in Taiwan.

That’s because sellers often put slow-moving products in a combo to help get their inventory moving. Given the number of motherboards, entry-to-mid-range GPUs, and other components included in these combos, it’s safe to say that these items aren’t selling and retailers are doing all these crazy deals just to free up capital.

As the AI-driven memory crisis has pushed up the prices of memory and graphics cards, many have already paused or delayed their purchases and upgrades. Only those with deep pockets who can afford to spend thousands of dollars on parts and combos like these are still buying PC parts.

We tested gaming performance with both NVMe and SATA SSDs across 11 games to determine if upgrading to a faster drive is worth it. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been a staple of PC gaming for years, but their importance grew significantly with the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in 2020. Both consoles feature high-speed NVMe SSDs and storage architectures designed to fully leverage their capabilities, enabling faster asset streaming and reducing traditional storage bottlenecks.

As a result, game developers have increasingly developed their titles for SSDs, with many modern games now listing them as a minimum system requirement. But how exactly do games use SSDs during gameplay, and does upgrading to a faster SSD actually improve gaming performance? In this article, we'll examine SSD activity in modern games and determine whether higher storage speeds translate into a better gaming experience. Given the surge in SSD prices, will a slower drive deliver comparable gaming performance to high-end alternatives?

Load Times

Load Times

While this article focuses primarily on SSD activity and performance during gameplay, loading times remain one of the most significant advantages of solid-state storage. It's well known that games can take several minutes to load from an HDD, whereas modern SSDs typically reduce load times to just a few seconds.

The gap between SSDs is much smaller. In some titles, PCIe NVMe drives can load games several times faster than SATA SSDs, but in many cases, the difference is relatively small. Naturally, different generations of PCIe SSDs have even smaller differences, with flagship drives often delivering only marginal improvements to loading times despite their substantially higher sequential throughput.

Disk I/O Operations in Games

Disk I/O Operations in Games

Before examining the performance results, it's important to understand the types of disk I/O operations that games typically generate. Two key metrics are block size and queue depth. The block size of an I/O operation defines the size of the chunk of data a game will read at one time, while queue depth is the number of pending I/O requests that a storage device has queued at any one time.

During gameplay, the vast majority of storage activity consists of random read operations as game assets are streamed from storage into memory. Sequential reads are less common, and write activity is generally minimal.

Microsoft provides several storage optimization recommendations for developers in its DirectStorage documentation. Although these guidelines are intended for DirectStorage-enabled titles, many of the underlying principles apply to games in general, even if they do not use DirectStorage. Among Microsoft's recommendations are the use of block sizes of at least 32k and sufficiently high queue depths to maximize storage throughput.

Modern games typically employ 32k or 64k random I/O requests. However, despite Microsoft's recommendations, most games continue to operate at relatively low queue depths.

Performance Comparison

Performance Comparison

Now we will examine SSD activity and compare performance across different SSD generations. The games included in our testing were selected because they either exhibited higher storage bandwidth than usual, had greater peak or average SSD utilization, had support for DirectStorage, or because they are popular titles that many gamers would be interested in seeing analyzed from a storage-performance perspective.

To place as much stress as possible on each SSD, all testing was conducted with 16GB of system memory. Using a smaller memory capacity reduces the amount of game data that can be held in RAM, forcing games to rely more heavily on the SSD than they would in a 64GB configuration. It also better reflects the configurations found in many mainstream gaming PCs. That said, we observed little difference in SSD activity when comparing 16GB and 64GB memory configurations.

When interpreting the SSD activity data below, it is important to understand that 100% utilization does not necessarily mean an SSD is reaching its maximum rated bandwidth. For example, a PCIe 4.0 SSD reporting 100% utilization is unlikely to be delivering its full 7.5 GB/s of sequential read throughput. In gaming workloads, SSDs can become fully utilized while transferring data at significantly lower bandwidths.

This is because the speeds advertised by SSD manufacturers are based on sequential read performance, whereas games primarily rely on random reads. While random-read throughput can approach sequential-read speeds under certain conditions, doing so requires sufficiently large block sizes and high queue depths. Although modern games often use relatively large block sizes, they typically do not use the high queue depths needed to fully saturate an SSD's theoretical bandwidth.

We have also chosen not to test any traditional hard drive disks. There are many documented examples of modern games performing poorly, taking an unbearably long time to load, or having visual issues when installing the game on an HDD. There are some games where this may not be an issue, but we still do not recommend playing modern games on an HDD.

The testing was conducted in gameplay. No built-in benchmarks were used. We found that SSD activity increases with higher settings, so that is where we focused our testing. We set each game to its absolute maximum settings.

We used HWiNFO to measure SSD activity and set it to the lowest polling rate possible to capture activity accurately without incurring overhead.

Test system

• MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Vanguard SOC
• Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 6000 MHz CL30
• Crucial T700 Gen5 SSD
• Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G Gen4 SSD
• Adata XPG SX8200 Pro Gen3 SSD
• Samsung 870 EVO SATA III SSD
• Asus ROG Strix B850-F Gaming WiFi
• Corsair Nautilus 360 RS AIO Cooler
• MSI MPG Ai1600TS PCIe 5 PSU
• HAGS enabled
• Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.8737)
• Nvidia driver 610.62

Forspoken

Forspoken

Forspoken was the first game to support DirectStorage on PC. DirectStorage is a feature that aims to allow games to make full use of high-speed storage devices while reducing the CPU overhead associated with making reads from disk.

Looking at the table below, you can see that it does exhibit a fairly high peak and average bandwidth. In fact, it’s the highest average bandwidth we have seen in any game we have tested. Average utilization is also quite high, and the game hits 100% SSD utilization frequently.

How does this translate to performance?

While there is no difference in performance between the PCIe NVMe SSDs, you can see that having a PCIe SSD can give you a large boost in the 1% lows compared to a SATA SSD. We see a 39% increase in 1% lows at 4K, a 51% increase at 1440p, and a 22% increase at 1080p.

The higher peak and average bandwidth used by the PCIe drives resulted in higher 1% lows in this game, which makes for a smoother gameplay experience.

Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 makes extensive use of modern rendering technologies, including path tracing, mesh shaders, and RTX Mega Geometry. In a recent interview, Remedy explained that the game operates with a fixed memory budget, continuously streaming the assets required for the current scene from the SSD while evicting assets that are no longer needed. This approach keeps memory usage under control despite the game's highly detailed textures and geometry, making Alan Wake 2 one of the most storage-intensive titles available today.

The SSD activity increases with resolution in this game. We see an average of over 200 MB/s on each drive at 4K, which is rare for a game. We also see a whopping 5.1 GB/s of peak bandwidth on a PCIe 5.0 SSD at 4K.

How does this impact performance?

Unlike Forspoken, we do not see any difference in performance here for any of the drives tested.

Although the faster SSDs reach higher peak bandwidth, these peaks are only brief bursts rather than sustained transfers. In other words, the game is not continuously streaming multiple gigabytes of data every second. Instead, it transfers smaller amounts of data over very short intervals, resulting in high instantaneous bandwidth readings. As a result, the average bandwidth is the more meaningful metric, and it remains relatively similar across all of the SSDs we tested.

The average utilization on the SATA SSD can reach over 80% at 4K, but it is not enough to degrade its performance in comparison to the PCIe drives.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

The disk bandwidth through this sequence is actually lower than the previous two games. This makes sense, as the game uses GPU decompression, which increases the effective bandwidth flowing through the PCIe bus beyond what CPU decompression would. However, this increase in effective bandwidth is not reflected in the data that is being read from disk.

When reading the performance charts below, it is important to note that PCIe SSDs reduce portal transition times by roughly 2-3 seconds compared to SATA SSDs. On SATA drives, Ratchet therefore spends more time within each portal sequence. As a result, average performance and 1% lows can generally be slightly higher on SATA SSDs, since there is less active rendering during these extended transition periods. However, there is one exception.

While the SATA SSD has an advantage at 1440p and 1080p due to the extended time spent inside of each portal, the 1% lows take a hit at 4K. The SATA drive does not handle the first portal transition in the sequence particularly well at 4K, and so the PCIe drives have about a 38% advantage in 1% lows.

This portal sequence is the most storage-intensive part of the game. In normal gameplay, the game uses significantly less bandwidth, and so there is no difference in performance at all between the SATA SSD and the PCIe SSDs.

Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man 2 was the second game to use GPU decompression of assets on PC. This is the third DirectStorage title we have tested so far.

Since the game uses GPU decompression, the effective bandwidth after decompression will be considerably higher than what we see here, but none of the SSDs we tested are being stressed in this game.

Performance is virtually identical on all drives in this game.

Starfield

Starfield

Starfield is an open world game that constantly reads data from disk. It also frequently hits 100% disk utilization as you traverse the world.

In previous games, 100% SSD utilization was accompanied by much higher peak bandwidth. Here, the lower peak bandwidth suggests the game uses a very low queue depth for its read operations. As you move through the open world, it continuously streams data from the SSD in frequent, small transfers, keeping average bandwidth very low.

Once again, we see no improvement in performance going from the SATA SSD to any of the faster PCIe NVME SSDs.

DOOM: The Dark Ages

DOOM: The Dark Ages

DOOM: The Dark Ages was the first game to list an NVMe SSD as a requirement. Not only is it listed as such on the PC system requirements, but Bethesda has a support page that reiterates that installing the game on an NVMe SSD is required.

The developers at idSoftware mentioned that the game uses a proprietary ultra-fast continuous sector streaming tech that virtually eliminates load times between levels.

The drives we tested are hardly being stressed in DOOM: The Dark Ages.

Given the disk utilization figures, it comes as no surprise that all of the tested drives deliver identical gameplay performance.

Although this article focuses on in-game performance rather than loading times, we also found little difference in load times when using a SATA SSD. Loading screens were not noticeably longer, and we observed no visual artifacts or streaming issues while playing on the slower drive.

Based on our testing, it is unclear why Bethesda lists an NVMe SSD as a requirement. A SATA SSD provided an indistinguishable gameplay experience, with no measurable performance drawbacks or observable streaming issues.

Dead Space Remake

Dead Space Remake

Dead Space Remake made headlines when it launched with abhorrent performance and stuttering issues. But how much of that was due to streaming from slower storage? Does a faster SSD help performance?

Although average disk utilization and bandwidth are relatively low, the game frequently reaches 100% utilization. Yet even during these periods, peak bandwidth remains well below what PCIe SSDs can achieve under high-queue-depth random workloads. This indicates the game is issuing read requests at a very low queue depth, leaving much of the SSD's available performance untapped. Additionally, the difference in average bandwidth between the SSDs is minimal.

All drives provide the same performance. There is nothing to be gained from a faster SSD in this title.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077

We included Cyberpunk 2077 in our testing because the game features a large and seamless open world, and it is one of the most popular games ever released.

The average bandwidth is by far the lowest we have seen in the games tested so far. This is not entirely surprising. Although the game was released in the same year as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, development began well before those consoles were released. As a cross-generation title, it also needed to run on the previous generation of consoles, which relied on mechanical hard drives. As a result, the game's streaming system was designed to perform well on significantly slower storage devices.

There is no noticeable difference in performance across the drives tested.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered modernizes the look of the original game with improved visuals. Built on Unreal Engine 5, it utilizes Nanite virtualized geometry, Lumen global illumination, and virtual shadow maps. This is an open-world game, and our first UE5 title is tested in this article.