I had the same feeling, but with a TNT2 card. I first played Half-Life with software rendering, 320x240 in my fishbowl 14" monitor. Then a few months later I bought the TNT2 (M64, the cheap version), and began my 2nd playthrough at a glorious 640x480 with much better FPS. It was awesome.

I actually like DLSS <= 4.5, when it’s well used. It’s just a scaling technique, like bilinear or 2xSai, but instead of using a regular mathematical formula to calculate the interpolated pixels, it uses a neural network. Of course the final results vary, depending on how much of the image you interpolate, the training data and if you use previous frame data and stuff like that (motion vectors, etc.).

OTOH, DLSS 5, sloptracing or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t seem to be a scaling technique (even if it most likely can do that too). It seems to be a video enhancing technique, with stability features included (anchored to 3d objects) to avoid the common morphing artifacts in early video GenAI (pre-Sora 2).