Back in the day, real reviewers and smart consumers would call out any type of bullshit like DLSS because they saw a mile away that its main function is to limit your options as a consumer by locking you into one vendor.
Does that sounds familiar?
Heh, Nvidia tried many, many times to have a proprietary feature that gamers will buy their GPU's for and hats off to them as they kept at it through thick and thin. They kept failing and consumers never really gave in for a long time. I remember Kyle over at [H] and a few others butchered nvidia so hard in one of the articles they actually took back or never released something dodgy that they were cooking up, can't remember what exactly it was. Don't think it was TWIMTBP but my god was that another shitshow.
I still chuckle at hairworks when i fire up witcher 3, You want nice hair for Geralt? You need an nvidia card for fuck all reason. Of course, just like most of nvidia's proprietary features at the time, it was crap with little to no difference in fidelity (hello RT, hairworks, excessive tesselation etc) for the performance impact. And of course it could be processed with AMD GPU's, just like they locked down bokeh and a few other features to nvidia GPU's only in Just Cause 2. The list is massive.
DLSS and RT are the ones that stuck but nvidia did go all in on both including a name change altogether. DLSS is great as it allowed playable framerates with not much of a visual impact but for me it really depends on the game. I still can't even turn DLSS on in Warzone, FH5 and a couple of titles because it's..shit. But as a whole it was good as it pushed AMD to release FSR which helped a lot of gamers extend the life of their GPU's from both camps.
RT though, don't even get me started. Great for people who like it and more power to them, but for me it's a piece of shit in its present form. It offers very little visual impact for a massive performance drop. Give me better textures instead maybe, those 4k/8k texture mods sure look great in the older games. There's no turning back though and RT is here to stay so how about you do it in moderation and not excessively resulting in 15fps for nvidia and 5 for AMD. Maybe bake it in the engine or something like what UE is doing I suppose. They did the same with tessellation till they realised they were only screwing the consumers and it wasn't helping their bottom line and just went on to the next thing.
