Nvidia CEO: ‘The future [of GPUs] is neural rendering. That’s the way graphics ought to be’

Love or hate it, upscaling technology like Nvidia’s DLSS have expanded the definition around gaming performance. And while hardware enthusiasts still want to know what to expect for raster performance, free of any software tricks, we’ll have to wait a while longer for a definitive answer.

When PCWorld’s own Adam Patrick Murray asked about the RTX 5090 and the future of AI gaming GPUs at a CES 2026 Q&A session for media and analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dove briefly into his current view on GPUs, AI, and gaming—one where upcoming video games will house layers and layers of AI:

(Transcript lightly edited for clarity.)

PCWorld: Adam, with PCWorld, I’d like to talk about gaming for a second—

Huang: Yes, it’s awesome. Me too!

PCWorld: So Nvidia continues to push DLSS to be better and faster with what’s been introduced—

Huang: Pretty amazing, right? Just quickly: Before GeForce brought CUDA to the world, which brought AI to the world, and then after that, we used AI to bring RTX to gamers and DLSS to gamers. And so, you know, without GeForce, there would be no AI today. Without AI, there would be no DLSS today. That’s great.

PCWorld: It’s harmonious, yeah. My question, one of my questions, is—is the RTX 5090 the fastest GPU that gamers will ever see in traditional rasterization? And what does an AI gaming GPU look like in the future?

Huang: I think that the answer is hard to predict. Maybe another way of saying it is that the future is neural rendering. It is basically DLSS. That’s the way graphics ought to be. And so, I think you’re going to see more and more advances of DLSS. We’re working on things in the lab that are just utterly shocking and incredible. And so I would expect that the ability for us to generate imagery of almost any style from photo realism, extreme photo realism, basically a photograph interacting with you at 500 frames a second, all the way to cartoon shading, if you like. All that entire range is going to be quite sensible to expect. You should also expect that future video games are essentially AI characters within them, and so it’s almost as if every character will have their own AI, and every character will be animated robotically using AI. The realism of these games is going to really, really climb in the next several years, and it’s going to be quite extraordinary, you know. And so I think this is a great time to be in video games, frankly.

With the surprise announcement of DLSS 4.5, which will offer RTX gamers further resolution boosts and frame rate bumps, Nvidia does appear to be focused less on where gaming performance improvements come from. Its launch of G-Sync Pulsar display tech (available in select monitors starting this Wednesday, January 7) also reflects this stance, improving motion clarity with a combination of high-end panel specs and clever software control.