(Image credit: Tom's Hardware) Nvidia’s RTX 30-series graphics cards made a big splash when they began arriving all the way back in 2020. Those products delivered a huge performance leap in their day, but time marches on for us all. The oldest Ampere cards are just a few months away from their sixth birthdays, and even though Nvidia has continued to support 30-series cards with its latest Game Ready driver optimizations and DLSS model upgrades, other signature GeForce features like DLSS Frame Generation are never coming to Ampere. Even where new software features are technically supported, Ampere comes with big asterisks. DLSS 4.5 is the first upscaling model to take advantage of FP8 acceleration that’s exclusive to RTX 40- and 50-series Tensor Cores. RTX 30-series cards can still technically run DLSS 4.5 upscaling models, but the improved image quality they offer now demands a significant performance penalty from Ampere compared to past DLSS versions.…