You may hate “fake” frames. But if you didn’t know they were AI generated, would you like them in games more than natively rendered ones? Turns out, German publication ComputerBase found the answer is often… yes. At least, more often than raging online discussions might indicate. Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. Missed the surprising topics on our YouTube show or latest news from across the web? You’re in the right place. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website ! Here’s how the tests worked: ComputerBase chose six games to pull scenes from using Nvidia’s DLSS 4.5, AMD’s FSR 4, and native rendering. Then the outlet placed those unlabeled segments side-by-side and had the community vote for their favorite. In three of the six games ( Anno 117 , Arc Raiders , and Horizon Forbidden West ), DLSS 4.5 took more than 50 percent of the vote—and for two other games ( Arc Raiders and The Last of Us Part II ), over 40 percent. To me, this is a fascinating contrast between what people say they want, and what they actually gravitate toward. I understand how the softening emphasis on raster performance could feel like a grift. By this long-standing measure, GPU makers keep slowing progress, while still asking consumers for more and more cash. And yet, if you plop down a bunch of pixels in front of a decent portion of gamers, a majority of them will pick those that include “fake” frames. They want what looks best, and for many, that’s apparently AI-enhanced scenes. Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI was the future of games—that neural rendering was the “ way graphics ought to be .” You could interpret these ComputerBase poll results as vindication of that belief, that the majority already embraces that destiny. I don’t, though. I see an opportunity to better articulate what you prefer visually—so you can better demand it from coming technology. The breakdown of the results (machine translated from the original German). ComputerBase I looked at the “blind” game comparisons, as well as earlier side-by-side comparisons with labeling. For me, the DLSS 4.5 scenes sometimes look over-rendered. Take Assassin’s Creed Shadows as an example—all of the grass looks more defined with DLSS 4.5, yes. But the human eye doesn’t focus on everything in view. It concentrates on a certain portion, and whatever is not in that area starts to lose detail. In games, I prefer a hierarchy of visuals, so I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of crispness to approximate that. And that’s how the natively rendered version gets my vote. But what if I didn’t have to choose native rendering for that desired outcome? What if I could instead expect upscaling to simulate both what I want (accuracy of focus) and what others want (accuracy of detail)? I wonder if we’d care as much about traditional raster vs. AI upscaling performance. (At least, when it comes to visuals.) At the end of the day, gamers will have DLSS pushed on them. Nvidia holds over 90 percent market share for consumer GPUs, and its CEO is all-in on AI upscaling. We won’t have a choice about the coming shift, no matter how long we debate it. But I think we have influence over how good it becomes—as long as our expectations are clear. In this episode of The Full Nerd In this episode of The Full Nerd , Adam Patrick Murray, Alaina Yee, Will Smith, and Michael Crider discuss the idea of PC rentals, Puget System’s hardware reliability report, and peripherals that recently crossed our desks. Let me tell you, I’ve never seen Adam react as fast as he did to my thoughts on renting a Steam Machine. But despite him trying to rally the masses against me, it turns out not everyone took up arms against my proposal. Alex Esteves / Foundry Missed our live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd Network YouTube channel , and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time! Don’t miss out on our NEW shows, either—you can catch episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and The Full Nerd: Extra Edition on our channel, too. PLUS: Adam’s new joint show with Retro Gaming Corps has finally launched! Catch Episode 0 of Expedition: Handheld now! And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community —it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds. This week’s slimmer nerd news I dumped a lot on y’all last week—so we’re taking more of a breather this week. But plenty demanded attention this week, including rumors of delayed CPUs, nifty science, and a really cool (hot) custom PC. Andrey Matveev / Unsplash HP put a number on it : The company said in a recent earnings call that for its desktop PCs, memory and storage now eat about 35 percent of the cost. Watch out on public Wi-Fi : A new exploit makes open networks once again a risk for meddler-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. Times change : Used to be that internal capture cards always trumped external units. But Will did some testing, and it turns out that old guideline doesn’t hold up the same now. Vaccine against dementia? The link hasn’t been fully confirmed, and the exact amount of benefit is unclear, but you know what? I’d take even a 15 to 20 percent decrease in risk of developing dementia. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree : Such is the conclusion I took from this article about chimpanzees and why alcohol shows up in their urine. Billet Labs Steampunk PC : This system built into an old-school, 200-pound radiator lends extra weight (ahem) to the idea of a desktop computer as a space heater… That would be a bummer : Brad’s out again, so I’m slipping in this rumor about AMD’s Zen 6 and Intel’s Nova Lake CPUs possibly getting delayed until January 2027. Boo. Value buy : One of the keyboards we discussed this week was the Ducky OK-M, Mike’s new budget pick for best mechanical keyboard. There’s a lot packed into it. Earthquake trigger : As a Californian, learning that solar flares could trigger earthquakes makes me a tad nervous. We’re supposed to be due for a big one. Catch you all next week—I don’t know about you all, but I’m a little confused by how close spring is already. But you won’t catch me complaining about the warming temps. Alaina This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung , founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.