The new AI-based denoiser probably uses the tensor cores which is severely underutilized on gaming, thus netting extra performance seemingly out of thin air. One of the main criticism of the new Nvidia cards was how much silicon area they use for those RT and AI cores which could’ve been used to improve performance of traditional rendering had Nvidia used the area for standard GPU cores instead. Now it seems Nvidia finally have more ways to utilize those silicon for gaming, though it’s not clear whether they’re finally fully utilized yet (there were reports about how the tensor cores only have 1% utilization even with DLSS frame generation turned on).
The new AI-based denoiser probably uses the tensor cores which is severely underutilized on gaming, thus netting extra performance seemingly out of thin air. One of the main criticism of the new Nvidia cards was how much silicon area they use for those RT and AI cores which could’ve been used to improve performance of traditional rendering had Nvidia used the area for standard GPU cores instead. Now it seems Nvidia finally have more ways to utilize those silicon for gaming, though it’s not clear whether they’re finally fully utilized yet (there were reports about how the tensor cores only have 1% utilization even with DLSS frame generation turned on).
If they did use that space for raster AMD would be toast right now.