the 4090 can already handle Elite quite tidily at 4k even at higher refresh rates without an upscaler.
It can, but due to the only really effective AA solution for Odyssey being supersampling, 4k internal resolution is inadequate if one wants to address aliasing.
So for us cmdrs there's absolutely no point in touching a 50 series geforce gpu.
A limited improvement, but not no improvement.
Regardless, for us gamers a Bitcoin 3rd wave crash would be most welcome at some point this year!
Not sure why you'd think a crypto crash would matter.
Bitcoin mining hasn't been profitable on GPUs in a decade and with Ether having moved to proof-of-stake more than two years ago, the sum total of GPU minable crypto market share is small and utterly irrelevant to GPU demand.
GPU prices are high because supply is low and competition almost nonexistent. Supply isn't low because of unusual demand for client GPUs, it's low because it's foolish to build large quantities of client GPUs when datacenter AI accelerators have dramatically higher profit margins. Competition is non-existent because of the concious parallelism that has formed between AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. They've tacitly agreed to strategically neglect certain market segements to avoid directly competing with each other.
A 2000-2500USD RTX 5090, believe it or not, is barely worth building from NVIDIA's perspective. A B100 chip, which costs about the same to make, is going to go into parts that are sold for upwards of 30k USD and are in such high demand that they have an 18+ month backlog of orders.
The only reason NVIDIA even makes consumer video cards today is that they need to maintain mindshare incase something happens to AI demand.
I wonder, does DLSS have to be supported natively in the game engine or can it be applied post process similar to what OpenComposite did for FFV. In my small brain, it would be reasonable to render the game at lower resolution and apply DLSS as a post technique but, doubtless I am missing a slew of technical considerations. I've messed with shader code with HLSL before but I've never even thought to tackle DLSS.
DLSS is fundamentally an advanced form of TAA. It requires accurate motion vectors to work correctly.
Elite: Dangerous doesn't expose these motion vectors natively and while you can add post-process TAA in conjunction with motion estimation shaders, it's performance cost is high and it's quality is low compared to native engine support.