9 incredible NVIDIA technologies that will (apparently) shape the future of gaming – ranked

NVIDIA

What will gaming look like in ten years? Thanks to NVIDIA’s Future of Gaming Showcase, we’ve got a pretty good idea.

It’s about quadrupling your frame rate without buying any expensive hardware upgrades, streaming the latest games in 4K over the cloud, and chatting to AI-powered NPCs about their haircuts.

Here’s everything I tested at NVIDIA’s showcase in London, and how game-changing it could be.

DLSS 3.5

Toggling on DLSS 3 in Starfield literally doubles my frame rate from 60 to 120. A few years ago you’d need to shell out for a new graphics card and chuck in some RAM to replicate that. DLSS 3.5 can go up to five times better. A side-by-side comparison of Alan Wake 2 sees the original version running at 5fps, and the DLSS 3.5 version running at 90fps. Astounding. Not only that, but it also improves image quality - albeit, incredibly subtly from what I could tell - with ever-so-slightly enhanced shadows and lighting. DLSS 3.5 launches this autumn for Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Portal RTX. Minus one point for it not being in more stuff. 

Score: 4/5

Your eyes don't need to be too good to see a difference here. / NVIDIA

NVIDIA ACE

The most controversial demo I play is Covert Protocol. It’s a first-person Hitman where NPCs are chatbots, basically. The aim is to uncover information about your target by talking to characters through a microphone. Using the twin powers of AI and the cloud, they listen to your words and respond convincingly. It feels amazing to disrupt a tech conference at a hotel by telling a keynote speaker there was a big fire and he was about to burn alive, but at the same time, NVIDIA ACE does threaten the livelihoods of voice actors everywhere. So, you know. 

Score: 5/5 for the tech and 0/5 for the ramifications 

Covert Protocol is proving divisive. / NVIDIA

RTX Remix

Retro remakes are about to get turbocharged. This tech turns on while you’re playing a game and automatically captures its assets into one easily navigable folder. From here, it’s much simpler to mod, drastically reducing time spent looking for specific objects, textures, and items. An RTX Remixed version of Half-Life 2 I see swaps pre-baked lighting with real light sources, which looks miraculous. The drawback is it only works on DirectX 9 games, so games made pre-2006. Niche but effective. 

Score: 3/5

RTX HDR 

Add HDR to literally any game with this tech. As long as your monitor is HDR-enabled, it doesn’t matter if the game isn’t. Sunlight bouncing off the bonnet of a car in Incursion: Reforged pops noticeably brighter compared to how it looks in standard dynamic range (SDR), which is duller and flatter. Apparently, only ten out of 50 of the most-played games on NVIDIA GeForce have built-in HDR support - this gives it to all of them. I asked the NVIDIA rep if it works with any game ever made and they said yes. I will choose to trust them. 

Score: 4/5

RTX Video

There’s a version of this tech that works with videos rather than video games. In other words, convert any YouTube or Netflix video to HDR and bask in the brighter glow of sunlight peeking over a mountain, or wallow in the deeper blackness of a descent into the Mariana Trench with James Cameron. You can toggle RDX HDR on and off, and even modify the contrast and saturation. Again, though, you will need to be watching on an HDR monitor, and using an NVIDIA-powered device, which limits its use.

Score: 3/5

NVIDIA G-SYNC Pulsar VRR Evolved

This technology is said to remove the blur when objects move on screen, resulting in a much clearer image. The demo I play involves a man strafing left and right in Counter-Strike. He was impossibly fluid at 120fps, with impressive clarity around his character model. That’s when the demo handler tells me he hadn’t turned on the effect yet. With that, he flicks a switch and I fail to see a difference. It already looked pretty fluid. One for the esports pros.

Score: 2/5

Easy to spot the difference on a screenshot, less so with movement. / NVIDIA

GeForce Now with G-SYNC

Stream high-end PC games to low-end hardware - including your phone. I tried GeForce Now a few years back but games looked blurry and ran awfully. Even on high Internet speeds there was microstutter. With G-SYNC, however, frame rates are much smoother. I watch Cyberpunk 2077 running with max settings on a middling Macbook, and Fortnite in 4K at 120fps (under tightly controlled circumstances, granted). Elsewhere in the room is Alan Wake 2 streaming at 1440p, 60fps on a phone, hooked up to a monitor via HDMI cable. It’s miraculous - when it works. 

Score: 4/5

GeForce NOW Ultimate

The premium GeForce tier is getting better. For £20 a month, latency improves, and the frame rate cap rises from 120fps to 240fps. Or, for £10 a month, you get 1080p gaming at 60fps. That’s a solid deal given an NVIDIA laptop capable of pulling off max settings Cyberpunk 2077 will run you back about £2500. For me, though, the reliability of a gaming laptop trumps the inconsistency of cloud-based gaming (people’s Internet speeds fluctuate, there are queues to access games, sessions are limited to six or eight hours). There is, however, a free, 24-hour day pass. Use it to check how GeForce runs for you.

Score: 2/5

ChatRTX 

Not a game, granted, but too important not to include here. ChatRTX is a personalized chatbot that differs from ChatGPT in one major way: you download it to your PC. Now, that sounds like a privacy nightmare, but you can pick and choose what folders you want ChatRTX to access. NVIDIA also says your info is safe given everything is running locally. You could ask ChatRTX to do your tax returns, or find the rare instances where you look good in a photo, just by typing in the dialogue box. Inviting a chatbot to live on my laptop feels weird, to be honest, but it makes day-to-day tasks quicker, and could fundamentally change how we use computers.

Score: 4/5