A few days ago, Nvidia unveiled demos of DLSS 5, their next generation of AI image enhancement and upscaling technology. Aside from the controversy about what DLSS 5 did to art/aesthetics of games, it was very disingenuous or out-of-touch that Nvidia would use an RTX 5090, let alone two of those to present the new capabilities of DLSS 5 over prior versions of DLSS.
I get that this is typical halo marketing, but the performance difference between this card and next lower tier is over $2,000. Right now, the Nvidia RTX 5090 market price exceeds what the vast majority of gamers would pay for a complete gaming system since it starts at $3,799.99 as of this writing.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey of February 2026, only 0.25% of their population of gamers had this card whereas the cards in the top 20 all hovered over 1%.
Despite the backlash from the gaming community, I believe this will hardly dent Nvidia’s 92% market share of the gaming GPUs.