Nvidia's CEO says "we created the modern video game industry," but all its push into AI upscaling has done is destroy good game optimization

While speaking at the Morgan Stanley Media and Telecom Conference this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had some outlandish claims to make about his company's stake in the video game industry. The AI and graphics card giant's CEO said that, thanks to the business's production of GPUs and 3D graphics systems in the best gaming PCs, his brand "created the modern video game industry".

"Computer graphics was used for things like animation movies, of course, at the time that we were founded," Huang started.

"It was during that time where computer graphics was becoming more capable, and we could simulate virtual reality with it, and we applied it to creating a new industry, which did not exist at the time called video games. And so 3D graphics was modernized in my time, consumerized in my time. And the whole video game industry was created in my time," he surmised.

Neglecting the arcade era, a slew of the best retro console contenders, and countless video games made before RTX was even a glint on one of his reflective jackets, he had even more to say:

"It was Nvidia that pulled it all together. The reason why we're so beloved in the video game industry and we're so deep in it still is, in a lot of ways, we created the modern video game industry."

All of this is a pretty astonishing take for the CEO of an AI company to make, especially after over a year of backlash toward its "fake frames" approach to its most recent generation of graphics cards, and when the company's AI arm is a much larger outfit than its GPU manufacturing. But the thing that really made my ears prick up was what came next:

"From the algorithms associated with it, the libraries. In the computer graphics industry without RTX, there would be nothing today. Without our contribution of all the algorithms that goes into all of the game engines, you wouldn't be able to enjoy the type of video games you enjoy today."

It was here that I had to stop, and begrudgingly agree with Huang's sentiments, albeit not in the way he likely wanted me to. Although he's blatantly ignoring the tireless work of game developers who spend their lives creating the exceptional video games we have access to today, he does have a point.

So much of modern video game performance these days is dictated by whether or not one has support for Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, or Intel XeSS. AI upscaling is a huge way for people to unlock higher frame rates on their gaming PCs and consoles. Without it, even Nvidia's most up-to-date hardware, like the RTX 5070, can't run games like Cyberpunk 2077 (which came out over five years ago) in 4K, with ray tracing at up to 10fps, let alone 60fps.

Yes, games have become a lot more technically demanding, to the point where hardware can barely keep up with their demands, but isn't it then up to the hardware brands to try and match the software's speeds with components that can actually run them? The best CPUs feel like they've kept up with innovations in architecture and engineering. The best RAM for gaming and the best SSDs for gaming have arguably become faster than they need to be for gaming tasks, but graphics cards are the ironic bottleneck of the gaming hardware market.

Nvidia's answer to this complex issue was leaning more heavily into AI upscaling, and it's now developed such an advanced form of it with multi-frame generation that it's really the thing you're buying one of the brand's GPUs for. It's essentially a cheat code for better performance without needing to spend ages in the settings menus of your favorite games, but it's a software fix, not a hardware one.

I can't imagine how helpful a tool that is for game developers too, because instead of spending months polishing a game before release to make sure it performs well enough not to be review bombed, all they need to do is secure some DLSS support, and their game will run well for a large swath of players.

But it's here where I stop agreeing with Huang's sentiments. Nvidia certainly created the current status quo in graphical performance, but maybe we should be pointing the finger, not giving thanks.

Games have always been computationally demanding. There were games on the PS2 (which, this week, turned 26 years old) and before, that were doing extremely technically demanding things with physics and graphics systems. There were 3D graphics that had never been seen before in games like Shadow of the Colossus, GTA: San Andreas, and even the Burnout titles. Those games were demanding, but they were made to run on the PS2 because that was the hardware people had access to.

Games today aren't optimized like they used to be. The industry (which Nvidia certainly didn't create) was functioning just fine without the algorithms Jensen Huang was alluding to. The first 3D-capable GPU was the 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics in the mid-90s; Nvidia conceptualized the modern graphics card and gave life to more 3D graphical rendering power for game developers.

Yes, modern games are eons above PS2 ones in terms of the amount of computational power they need, but back in the day, game performance didn't rely on some Nvidia-flavored secret sauce to run smoothly. It feels to me more and more these days, as someone who reviews all sorts of gaming PCs and components, that games are now made for hardware that doesn't actually exist. It's like we've all accepted that it's okay for Nvidia's upscaling to put a bandaid over the wound.

How many PC ports have arrived in recent years that have immediately shocked paying customers with poor performance on even the most advanced hardware? High Guard is a very recent example, but I'm sure you'll remember the performance woes of Monster Hunter Wilds, Jedi Survivor, or Sony's ports of The Last of Us Part I and II on PC. Poor performance is everywhere today, but so long as you can flick a switch with DLSS or FSR and still see a higher frame rate, it's alright.

I don't mean this to sound like a slight at game developers, because the truth is that they're trying to cater to so many different types of hardware while making their game stand out in a highly competitive and oversaturated market. It's not like the old days when they could really get to know a few specific bits of hardware and design games directly for them. Not to mention, they're working against demands from publishers, friction with modern engines, and limited budgets, especially in smaller indie teams.

I take issue with Nvidia, not game developers. I take issue with Huang claiming that it "created" the modern video games industry and saying that without its prohibitively expensive technology, nobody would be able to play them.

This brand has arguably created that issue by not manufacturing consumer hardware that can keep up with the industry's demands. Instead, it created a cure-all in DLSS that's exclusive to its platforms, and then hiked the price of that cure-all so that gamers accept that it's the norm to pay for hardware that's really just a ticket to AI upscaling software.

If we were to review graphics cards on a purely hardware level, we would see Nvidia's GPUs unable to achieve a native 4K30fps while costing massively inflated prices. How would that sound: "3/10, the contemporary equivalent of not being able to run Crysis."

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