With the unveiling of the RTX 50 series of graphics cards, Nvidia has effectively crowned itself the king of high-end gaming GPU designers. At Nvidia's CES 2025 keynote, CEO Jensen Huang showcased what he believes the future will look like, starting with the implementation of "AI" into Nvidia's next generation of GPUs. Indeed, "AI" seemed to the the word of the day for Nvidia as most of their keynote was centered around autonomous vehicles and robots, concepts that were once limited to the realm of science fiction.
If Nvidia were to be believed, true artificial intelligence is just around the corner, waiting for the chance to kill all the humans and take our jobs. For now, "AI" will have to be content with rendering more reflective puddles in games via DLSS.
DLSS itself is basically a fancy term for "rendering technologies that uses AI to boost FPS, reduce latency, and improve image quality" and has been supported by Nvidia GPUs since the RTX 20 series. The RTX 50 series will be utilizing DLSS 4, which is "backed by an Nvidia AI supercomputer in the cloud constantly improving your PC's gaming capabilities."
Putting aside the marketing buzzword salad, Nvidia's RTX 50 series seems like a great leap forward for GPUs. Digital Foundry's demonstration of the RTX 5080 appears to echo this sentiment, showing that at the absolute highest level the RTX 50 series can make a game like Cyberpunk 2077 run like it was originally advertised.
Therein lies the conundrum with the RTX 50 series though. With a price tag ranging from between $550 to $2,000, this next generation of GPU is likely going to be wildly out of reach for the average gamer, bringing up the question, "Who is this for?"
Nvidia's RTX 50 Series: The Best GPUs For A Game That Doesn't Yet Exist

In fact, according to Steam's own end-user survey, only about 20% of the participants are using RTX 40 series GPUs. Most are sticking to the 30 series and below, and it's reasonable to assume that lower end hardware is far more prevalent as casual gamers are probably not shelling out hundreds of dollars for a newer GPU. For that matter, it's doubtful that casual players would be particularly inclined to take part in the survey to begin with.
If anything, it seems irresponsible to recommend the RTX 50 series to most people because it is complete overkill for the vast majority of games. Perhaps in 10 years we'll get games that "need" DLSS, but the RTX 20 series and above supports DLSS anyways, so it's kind of a moot point.
A look at Steam's top sellers list reinforces this notion as it shows that the most popular games are not exactly hardware intensive. As an example, Marvel Rivals and Helldivers 2 are both perfectly content with Nvidia's RTX 20 series GPUs. Elden Ring recommends a GTX 1070. Balatro can be run on a toaster.
As you go down the list, Cyberpunk 2077's status as an outlier becomes more and more apparent, making it simultaneously the best and worst game to use to show what a graphics card is capable of. The average game simply isn't going to need state-of-the-art GPUs to look good, doubly so if it's a decade-old game like Counter-Strike 2 or Minecraft.
Nvidia's RTX 50 Series: Do You Guys Not Have Phones?

Things look even more dire when you throw in the fact that the mobile gaming market is actually the same size as the combined PC and console gaming market. According to PC Gamer and Statista, the PC gaming market is the smallest of the three by far, making up less than 25% of the overall gaming market revenue in 2023 and 2024. If Nvidia's RTX 50 series is overkill for "normal" PC games, then using it for PC ports of mobile games would be akin to strapping a jet engine onto a bicycle to make the bike go faster.
As an example, Hoyoverse recently added ray tracing to Zenless Zone Zero exclusively to the PS5. It's an improvement to be sure, but you kind of have to know what to look for to notice it, and most people probably aren't going to notice it when in combat. Besides, ZZZ's good looks hinges more on its art style than any particular graphical setting.
Unfortunately for Nvidia's marketing department, they want you to associate ray tracing exclusively with their RTX GPUs. Yet if it's not noticeable in normal gameplay, or if enabling it causes performance issues, then you're not exactly losing out by buying an equally priced console that can also run ray tracing.
This brings up another issue with such blisteringly high-end GPUs as the Nvidia RTX 50 series. Game developers themselves should and will rightfully target the lowest practical common denominator when it comes to hardware. Otherwise it becomes a never-ending arms race where developers would have to spend more resources for better graphics that only an increasingly smaller percentage of the audience will enjoy.
You can see this play out in real time when it comes to Skyrim on the PC. It's generally a good idea to download some enhanced texture mods for Skyrim so that the game looks somewhat up to date, but it has to be done in moderation. After all, there's no point in downloading a 4K texture pack if it causes you to drop to 10 FPS every time you look at a cloud.
Nvidia's RTX 50 Series: The Power of Marketing, Brand Recognition, and Hopes and Dreams

Furthermore, DLSS and RTX aren't magic, contrary to what Nvidia wants you to believe. Old games aren't going to look like modern games at the press of a button because no GPU in the existence is going to change a game's texture files. A human being has to manually make new textures then apply those textures to the game, a fact that is always conveniently left out of the "RTX On" marketing materials.
That being said, while Nvidia's RTX 50 GPUs are complete overkill now, who knows what the future of gaming might look like in 10 or 20 years. It wasn't that long ago that 30 FPS was the norm. Nowadays if a modern game is hitting 30 FPS, people act like the game should go straight to the dumpster.
Ray tracing itself certainly isn't going anywhere. It's another tool for developers to use, if they feel that it is necessary to use it. A painter doesn't need to use every brush available to them for the brushes to be imbued with value.
The future of "AI" assisted rendering is less clear. The use of "AI" in creative fields rightfully leaves a bad taste in people's mouths, to say nothing of practical performance. Cyberpunk 2077 might look fine while walking around at a leisurely pace, but at the end of the day if the game starts stuttering when the shooting starts and you have particles and visual effects flying everywhere, people will bump down their graphics settings.
Nvidia's RTX 50 Series: Who's the Real Customer?

Make no mistake, Nvidia's RTX 50 series GPU look like they're great pieces of hardware. Upgrading to a RTX 5070 doesn't seem that unreasonable if (and only if) you're several generations behind or you don't particularly care about what the GPU is actually doing under the hood. At the same time, one should keep in mind that the RTX 50 series is essentially a solution looking for a problem to solve as of now, especially when there's no shortage of alternatives.
The elephant in the room is that Nvidia wasn't necessarily marketing the RTX 50 series to the average gamer. Like it or not, Nvidia is setting their sights on something bigger than the gaming industry and the proof is in their own CES keynote.
Besides, who said that Nvidia can only sell GPUs to gamers? Hollywood, NASA, the United States Department of Defense, there's a long list of potential customers with pockets far deeper than those of gamers. As far as their shareholders are likely concerned, Nvidia doesn't even need to sell a single 50 series GPU so long as the line on Wall Street keeps going up. That's the real audience for Nvidia's RTX 50 series, and the concerns of your average gamer are barely an afterthought by comparison.