Nvidia announced DLSS 5 back in March and it received, let's say, mixed reactions. A lot of people weren't happy about how, judging by the demos, it seemed to essentially just slap a 'yassifying' AI filter on top of a game scene. Nvidia itself confirmed that all the tech has to work with for each AI frame is a traditional 2D frame and motion vectors, essentially confirming the "filter" idea. Now, at SIGGRAPH 2026, the company has explained that developers will get two main sliders to control DLSS 5's intensity.

My initial reaction was probably the same as yours: two whole sliders, whoop-de-doo. It's hardly a massive improvement from the one on-to-off masking slider we previously thought devs would have access to. But let's take a look at what they're actually controlling and how it works before we jump to conclusions.

The two sliders are for 'structural intensity' and 'tone intensity'. Despite what the word "structure" might seem to imply, Nvidia is keen to point out that "it is not changing the geometry in any way, and it is uplifting the image."

The structural intensity slider in fact is "modulating the high-frequency detail of the frame." This includes things such as ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, and reflections. The tone intensity slider is "modulating the low frequency detail of the frame", including "expressive" things such as lighting and, well, overall tone.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, the fact that these are the only controls given to devs could just mean that model is in fact tailored so well that it's not worth giving more control over it than necessary. The company explains the model preserves artistic intent thanks to "internal buffers", so perhaps it wants to keep these buffers intact.

You can see the controls in action in the segment below.

Nvidia also says that the company is building more controls for developers to use and is "working with our partners to incorporate their feedback."

It's also worth noting that game devs will be able to mask different objects in a game scene, changing the structural and tone intensities for each independently. Devs might, for instance, want to give some background objects the full DLSS 5 makeover but keep a lighter touch with the characters.

To be fair, judging by the demo given by Nvidia's creative artist, introduced as 'Gaff', cranking up the structural intensity a little can indeed add a bit more realism to the scene without affecting the overall tone of a scene. That would be the ideal, I think. Things such as subsurface scattering can make a big difference, and Gaff notes that this "would be incredibly expensive to do in traditional rendering."

Alright, that's my devil's advocating done. It does make sense for this to be Nvidia's strategy, given it needs to keep everything quick and snappy for rendering by making the model so that it "does not need to peek ahead", instead just using a render and motion vectors to create what is essentially an AI filter. But that doesn't make it any less disappointing that there are, as of now, just two sliders to use.

Still, I suppose it's all optional. And Nvidia is keen to note this new addition to its AI feature list will exist alongside the others which are still being worked on. It "extends the existing pipeline. It does not replace them."

At any rate, we'll just have to see whether the further controls alluded to will be available when DLSS 5 launches this fall.

It's easy to think about the development of videogame graphics as a linear progression sequence, where rendering techniques have incrementally, inextricably improved along time's arrow. 8-bit to 16-bit, 2D to 3D, baked lighting to dynamic lighting, real-time ray-tracing to DLSS.

But this is to trim history's tree of the many branches which have grown from that central trunk, to discount the alternatives, experiments, and evolutionary dead ends like voxels and vector graphics. One of the most unique examples appeared in the early '90s, when developers were still figuring out exactly how 3D graphics rendering could work. Between the 2.5D corridors of Doom and the 3D verticality of Quake, one British studio posited that the future of 3D graphics lay not in triangles, but balls.

That developer was Andrew Spencer. A UK programmer who cut his teeth in the Britsoft era making sports games for the Commodore 64, Spencer eventually founded his own studio (creatively named Andrew Spencer Studio) at the tail end of the '80s. Together with a small team, Spencer spent five years making his most famous game, the fantasy survival horror Ecstatica.

Ecstatica was built in a bespoke engine that was different from pretty much any game technology made before or since. Rather than using polygons to render the characters in its world, it used ellipsoids, letting developers build models out of spheres, ovals, and balls.

At the time, Spencer explained the logic of the system in an interview with Next Generation, stating that the goal was to create more "organic looking" characters. "Triangles tend to make hard, robotic-looking figures, whereas ellipsoids can be used to create more rounded, human alternatives. Ellipsoids can also be more efficient because you can make a much better-looking character out of fewer shapes."

But it wasn't just Spencer who was responsible for how Ecstatica looked. Credit is equally due to French animator Alain Maindron. In an interview with Time Extension, Maindron explained that Spencer's ellipsoid technology enabled smoother animation transitions than polygon-based techniques. "Andrew had created a 3D editor where I could work the 3D without much code knowledge," Maindron explained. "I could create backgrounds and characters and animate them pretty easily. Then he improved the engine, and I could even code the behaviour of characters."

Looking at screenshots of Esctatica today makes this idea seem ridiculous, especially given the game is supposed to be a grimdark survival horror. But you need to put yourself in the mindset of a player encountering this in 1994. Doom has been out for less than a year, and here Esctatica is showing players characters whose sprites don't spin around when you do.

Even so, Spencer himself stated that Ecstatica was merely a testing ground for the technology, a baseline upon which to build something more ambitious. This eventually coalesced into the studio's next project—Urban Decay.

Like Ecstatica, Urban Decay combined Spencer's ellipsoid tech with a dark, mature videogame setting. This time, however, that setting wasn't a medieval fantasy world, but a modern-day urban scenario, with players blasting goons and gangsters in a violent US ghetto.

Interestingly, Urban Decay's tech paralleled the progression of traditional polygon rendering. Urban Decay used double the number of ellipsoids in its character models, while also supporting SVGA graphics and featuring advanced face and hand animations. According to composer Mike Clarke, Urban Decay even featured a very early version of rag-doll physics, with enemies that "would fall down stairs after you shot [them]."

The available screenshots of Urban Decay show a game with a more consistent, confident art style than Ecstatica, even if, to modern eyes, the characters still look like they would burst if you pricked them with a pin.

Unfortunately, Urban Decay never saw the light of day. According to programmer Ken Doyle, the game went through "endless requests for design and style changes" which included abandoning the ellipsoid style for "a more regular poly look". This ultimately led to the departure of the game's primary creative force, animator Eamonn Butler, and the project was put on hold.

With Urban Decay in limbo, Andrew Spencer Studio turned to building a sequel to Ecstatica. This basically took the technological innovations the team had pursued with Urban Decay, then incorporated them in a straightforward follow-up to Ecstatica. Straightforward in concept, anyway. Structurally, Ecstatica is infamous for its baffling puzzle design, though this didn't stop it from reviewing well on its launch in 1997.

By this point, though, the fate of ellipsoid graphics had already been sealed. The ingenuity of Spencer's tech was that it relied wholly on software rendering, but games were increasingly relying on hardware to boost the power of triangles. In an interview with Edge prior to Ecstatica 2's launch, Spencer lamented the challenges of porting the sequel to PlayStation, stating that the console was "geared toward triangles, not ellipsoids" and that "ellipsoids are mostly software-driven, which the PlayStation doesn't like."

This isn't to suggest that we somehow missed out due to the death of ellipsoid graphics, though I am curious to know what games would look like if you scaled the number of balls to modern polygon counts. Rather, the point is that not every technological innovation is indicative of progress, the next step in an unstoppable march toward the future. Sometimes new tech is complete balls, destined to be left behind.

At this year's Computex event, Nvidia announced something that many PC enthusiasts have been waiting for. No, not its Arm-powered RTX Spark laptop chip, but a forthcoming update for DLSS Ray Reconstruction, one that brings it on par with the rest of the DLSS 4.5 package.

Back in January, Nvidia launched DLSS 4.5, with a significantly upgraded Super Resolution (upscaling) algorithm that uses a transformer model instead of a convolutional neural network to improve visual fidelity at the expense of some performance. At the same time, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation (DMFG) was also announced, but that took a while to finally arrive.

However, one upgrade was noticeable by its absence, and that was anything new on the Ray Reconstruction (RR) front. This is Nvidia's AI-powered ray tracing denoiser, a system that tidies up ray-traced scenes, but what makes it somewhat unique is that it also runs DLSS Super Resolution at the same time.

As things currently stand, you have one of two choices when playing ray-traced games with DLSS: You can either have DLSS 4.5 transformer upscaling or DLSS Ray Reconstruction; you can't have both. What that means is that you have no way of enjoying the benefits of the newer upscaler, because RR uses an older one that employs a convolutional neural network.

In August, that will no longer be the case, because DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction will make an official appearance in at least 27 games, including Cyberpunk 2077 (naturally), Doom: The Dark Ages, Alan Wake 2, Pragmata, Resident Evil Requiem, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Hogwarts Legacy, and Crimson Desert.

This second-generation RR algorithm not only employs a transformer model for its upscaling stage, but the AI denoiser also leverages a larger training dataset, processing 20% more parameters, to give "improved lighting accuracy, better temporal stability, and clearer motion in ray-traced and path-traced content".

While it'll be great to finally have a denoiser+upscaler that's as good as the rest of the DLSS 4.5 suite, Nvidia has certainly taken a long time to bring it out. Admittedly, it's not like we're utterly swamped with ray-traced games that fully support DLSS, but I think I would have preferred to have seen it before DMFG.

Radeon GPU owners will probably know that AMD also has an AI denoiser, as part of its FSR Redstone project, but so far, there's been no word on when we're going to see that being used in more than just the one game that it's currently employed in (Black Ops 7).

I think it's fair to say that Nvidia's DLSS 5 reveal earlier this year didn't go entirely to plan. Or, to put it in stronger terms, it caused a huge amount of internet debate, with voices across the industry weighing in on whether this kind of image-altering AI generation tech had a place in our games.

Hell, it even split the PC Gamer team in half. Anyway, it's all gone quiet on the DLSS 5 front since then, but the latest GeForce Game Ready Driver (610.47) has a few new profile entries that appear to make reference to it (via Videocardz).

The new entries were spotted by Warkratos on the Guru3D forums, and come in the form of three additions: "Enable DLSS NR override", "Enable DLSS NR SL override", and "Override DLSS NR presets."

The presumption here is that the NR designation is a reference to Nvidia's neural rendering tech, and therefore comes in preparation for DLSS 5's eventual release. And no, before you ask, enabling the new entries via Nvidia Profile Inspector does not turn on DLSS 5 in your games. A shame, but thems the breaks.

Other than those aforementioned image quality reveals (and some clarification from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang after the response), we know relatively little about DLSS 5—beyond the fact that it may not be as clever as we initially thought.

Still, it certainly seems like a potential game-changer in the most literal sense of the term, but I suppose it makes sense that the company would want to keep any further developments under its hat until it's more ready for primetime.

I'd wager that the next time we see something from Nvidia regarding the controversial tech, it'll be a lot more watered down than the version we saw earlier this year. The company has been keen to point out that developers will have creative control over how far the AI enhancements are allowed to go, so perhaps we might have a tamer demo in store sometime in the future.

Computex 2026 begins next week, and Nvidia will be hosting one of the keynotes. While no mention has been made of a DLSS 5 appearance, perhaps we might see something more then. Or, given the version just a few months ago was said to require two RTX 5090s to run, perhaps any further reveal is still a long way off while Nvidia works out the finer details.

DLSS 5 was initially said to be coming in the autumn of this year, but that may have changed in the months since, especially given the hubbub around its initial reception.

All we have is speculation for now, but these entries seem to show that Nvidia is working away in the background on its neural rendering tech, with an eye towards future releases. Fingers crossed it all works out in the end, ey?

If you're the owner of a recent Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card, you probably won't have given much thought to the fact that all the big game releases this year support the majority of the DLSS AI technology suite. On the other hand, if it's an AMD Radeon or Intel Arc card in your gaming PC, you're probably wondering why today's games seem to be short-changing you, and for 007 First Light, it's another one to add to the list of 'Where's my FSR 4/XeSS?'

Now that IO Interactive's new Bond adventure is out in the wild, I've finally had the chance to dig into what upscaling and frame generation systems it supports. Well, as Nvidia notes in its latest GeForce blog, you get DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation.

The game's options interface is somewhat clunky, but you can easily switch between DLAA for pixel-perfect anti-aliasing or scale the frame all the way down with Ultra Performance upscaling.

That's not the case with AMD FSR, though. You get Quality, Balanced, and Performance modes only: no native AA or Ultra Perf to be seen. Oh, and no FSR Frame Generation, either. More importantly for RX 9000-series owners, you don't get FSR 4, just version 3.1.5. And Intel's XeSS is notable by its complete absence.

007 First Light isn't the only 2026 game to have such limited options. Forza Horizon 6 does have a decent spread of FSR and XeSS upscaling modes, including Native AA, but it too is only FSR 3.1.5, and there's no sign of AMD or Intel's frame gen algorithms.

Pragmata does have FSR 4.1 but no frame gen, and no XeSS whatsoever. Resident Evil: Requiem is a little better with the full suite of FSR (3 and 4) and DLSS 4 (4.5 via the Nvidia App), but it's another game without XeSS support.

And let's not even begin to mention being able to use path tracing or any kind of AI-based ray tracing denoiser on an AMD or Intel GPU. Sure, the latter doesn't have the high-end hardware nor the software to cover both, but the latest Radeon cards certainly do (though AMD still hasn't released its FSR Redstone denoiser yet).

The more conspiratorial among us may think that this is some kind of deliberate plot by Nvidia, contractually requiring developers to exclude implementing competitors' technologies. Well, you can doff your tinfoil hats, because that's not the case.

"Nvidia does not and will not block, restrict, discourage, or hinder developers from implementing competitor technologies in any way," says Keita Iida, vice president of developer relations. "We provide the support and tools for all game developers to easily integrate DLSS if they choose and even created Nvidia Streamline to make it easier for game developers to add competitive technologies to their games."

The decision not to fully support the latest version of FSR or XeSS, incorporating the full set of performance-enhancing features, is one that's entirely down to the developers. IO Interactive and Playground Games chose to skip FSR 4 and AMD's frame gen in 007 First Light and Forza Horizon 6, respectively.

One could argue that Nvidia's sheer dominance of the discrete graphics card market means that it makes sense for a game studio to only target the most common GPU feature set, but if you've already done some of the work to implement FSR or XeSS, then why not the full suite?

Yes, FSR 3.1 frame generation isn't the best out there, with every other system available producing noticeably superior results. But I'd argue that it's better to let gamers choose for themselves as to what they want to use; if they'd prefer to have superior frame rates over perfect graphics, that's fine. Just give them the option.

As things currently stand, only one group of PC gamers has that freedom, and it's the RTX crowd.

There's a chance that, if your games have been stuttering with DLSS frame generation enabled, it's because you have VSync on and didn't know the two don't always play nicely. If you're one of the unlucky few, you might want to try updating your Nvidia drivers.

Game Ready Driver 596.49 has reportedly enhanced smoothness when the two are working together. When the discussion thread opened up on the Nvidia subreddit, this fix immediately met some support. As of the time of writing, the top upvoted comment says, "Huge if true, gargantuos if verifiable."

Another account responds to this comment saying, "I can confirm it". Previously, on their RTX 4090 rig at Ultra settings with 2x frame generation, they reportedly saw noticeable micro-stutter and hitching and had to swap to FSR to fix the issue. Now, they claim 2x frame generation "works perfectly with vsync enabled."

Not everyone is having such a great time, with one user saying it's still an issue for them and another saying Monster Hunter Wilds performs poorly for them. However, a third user points out that Monster Hunter Wilds performed poorly for them even without VSync and swapping to FSR helped.

Capcom seem to get mentioned quite a lot in the thread, with some claiming Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem stutter less now, and others claiming things are just as bad. However, it's hard to verify with every one of these cases that the problem lies at the feet of Nvidia's shiny new drivers. Still, some success is a good sign and worth updating your drivers over.

You can download the driver by the driver's direct download link or by doing so in the Nvidia App. My download of the drivers by themselves sits at under 1 GB, and there's not too much else to them, other than that one fix. It includes compatibility updates for Forza Horizon 6, Directive 8020, and Subnautica 2, and comes with a fix for a Foundry Mari 7.0v2 flickering issue.

As always, if something is playing up in your rig when you try to play games, updating your drivers is a decent first step.

There are many different facets to the collection of technologies that come under the banner of 'AI', and many of them have become almost a constant presence in our lives whether we like it or not. Even if we're not card carrying members of the ChatGPT Pro clique, there is a pervasiveness to it all where you will be lucky to go ten minutes without someone mentioning or referencing AI. Or having some AI-generated AK47-toting panda jammed into your eyeballs via some ever-more unhinged ad campaign.

And when it comes to PC gaming specifically, most of us are very much against the idea of either us or the devs using AI in games. You only have to look at the furor around DLSS 5 to get an idea of what the hivemind thinks about AI in gaming terms.

But I really wanted to know what that looked like in percentage terms, so asked: Do you use AI, and if so, what for? To get some nuance in the conversation I enabled users to pick three answers if they wanted and use AI for different things. But I'd say the answers are more explicit than nuanced.

Do you use AI, and if so, what for?

Votes (%)

I don't use AI at all

47

I use it for in-game upscaling, such as DLSS or FSR4

27

I use it for research or ideation

23

I use it for coding

18

I USE IT FOR EVERYTHING

7

It writes my emails for me

4

It does all my schoolwork

2

I have OpenClaw set up running my digital life

1

Votes (%) Data

Product	Value
I don't use AI at all	47
I use it for in-game upscaling, such as DLSS or FSR4	27
I use it for research or ideation	23
I use it for coding	18
I USE IT FOR EVERYTHING	7
It writes my emails for me	4
It does all my schoolwork	2
I have OpenClaw set up running my digital life	1

We asked what your AI usage was like with people able to select up to 3 different options to cover multiple use cases

I expected there to be a healthy percentage of readers who took part in the poll saying they don't use AI at all, but given that PC gamers have had DLSS since 2019 I thought more would use upscaling than those who don't use anything. And yet we have 47%—almost half of readers who answered the poll—saying they don't even use DLSS or FSR.

Now, I get that the vehemently ideologically opposed may well be happy to accept lower frame rates in their PC games to maintain their place atop that ivory tower, and that I am merely a weak human being for sticking DLSS Quality on wherever I see it in the settings. But really... half of you don't do it?

The flip side of that stat is that a little more than half of you do use AI for different things. A surprisingly low—to me, at least—27% of readers say they use AI-based upscaling, but 23% are already using AI for ideation and research.

I find it also interesting that 18% of our readers are actively using AI to code with. And I can understand that, as someone who has changed the way I approach testing because of access to AI coding tools. If there isn't a tool to test something, there's a chance now a dummy like me can make my own.

The alternative view is that 7% of readers say they use it for effectively everything. Which is actually a lot more than I would have thought, as is the 1% of readers who have set up OpenClaw to ruin their digital life. Sorry, run their digital life.

I'm now keen to dig a little deeper into that upscaling use specifically. So, this week I'm asking: Do you use upscaling? Tell me more.

Is there a word that tech companies relish more than democratize? It sounds so good, doesn't it. Slam dunk marketing copy: Everybody loves democracy! (Billionaires, avert your eyes and whistle innocently). In our mind-numbing AI era the word is doing more heavy lifting than ever, serving as the go-to phrase to suggest that any creative act that once involved pesky barriers like curiosity, practice, or hard-earned expertise is now accessible to all.

That's the heart of a new pitch from Roblox today: Roblox Reality, the company says, is a new AI platform aimed at "Democratizing photorealistic, multiplayer gaming." The general idea seems to be that this is the "good" version of Google's "AI worlds" presentation, which spat out videos that vaguely looked like videogames but obviously would have no grounding in, you know, game design. Roblox is instead pairing "the photorealism of Video World Models" with the underlying Roblox game engine, so that any game designed in Roblox could theoretically replace its basic, blocky graphics with jaw-dropping, hyperreal GRAPHICS.

In other words: Roblox creators will be able to slap an AI slop filter onto their games, though perhaps tactically the blog post above never actually uses the phrase "AI" to explain the technology.

In other other words: Roblox is doing a DLSS 5.

As with Nvidia's disastrous debut of an upscaling algorithm that overwrote the work of game artists to look "better," Roblox is a toolmaker no longer content with merely supplying the canvas and the paintbrush. The move makes sense from a technologist's point of view: you're only going to sell so many more paintbrushes (or in this free-to-play ecosystem, attract so many new painters) by making the brush better or easier to wield or whatever. The way you hyper scale is by promising people your new Super Brush can do all the painting for them.

AI boosters love to frame this sort of thing as democratization because it makes it easy to label opposition as gatekeeping, as if the ability to create art was born from unevenly distributed talent rather than from passion and perseverance. Generative AI promises a shortcut to arrive at the same end result without needing to put in all that work, but it misses the point that the process is where style and meaning and creative growth all come from.

As game designer and critic Austin Walker elegantly put it late last year, "Most of us did not choose to write or draw or design so that we could put products on the shelf. We chose to do it because it’s a set of skills we enjoy exercising, that give us fulfillment. It’s like asking a pro pitcher to just let a machine pitch for them. Fuck off and give me the ball."

The creators of Roblox Reality have identified a real problem—that making triple-A, highly detailed games is prohibitively expensive and impractical for all but the richest companies today. But that's still a problem technologists can tackle without suggesting the computer should just make up the graphics itself. The whole endeavor is also predicated on the idea that realism makes games better, or more appealing, when style almost always wins out over sheer detail. I don't think the people working on Roblox Reality even understand the draw of their platform if they see "photorealism" as a real benefit to the kinds of games that attract millions of players to it.

Are more people going to play Grow a Garden if it looks less like a plasticy Lego playspace and more like someone typed the prompt "cute colorful tradlife springtime homey garden" into Sora and then let Roblox Reality layer that skin over the game's skeleton? Roblox's biggest hits have much more in common with the "friendslop" games breaking out on Steam every few months—the likes of Peak, Repo, and RV There Yet? that find expression and comedy in their aesthetic choices. Peak would not have exploded in popularity if its blobby climbers looked like Temu Nathan Drake, which is the best any generative AI system that's digested and puked back up vast amounts of game art could hope for.

And in the same way that "asset flip" has become a recognizable aesthetic for derivative 3D games built in Unreal or Unity, I think players will be able to sense the artifice inherent in any game built under the assumption that only the core game systems need to be hand-designed, with Roblox Reality's video rendering slapped on top. It promises "breathtaking realism, secondary motion, natural dynamic environments, and fluid physics," but each of those promises comes with baggage.

How do the "fluid physics" affect the player's perception of motion and momentum and how a character feels to control? If something in a game looks like a realistic physics object, will they be disappointed if they can't solve Half-Life 2-style puzzles with it? How well does "breathtaking realism" pair with the sound effects? Imagine Nathan Drake again, but he makes the 2D Mario sound every time he jumps.

Even if Roblox Reality works and somehow doesn't look like absolute ass—a real longshot, based on the evidence we've seen from DLSS 5 and Sora and other generative tools so far—the novelty of millions of Roblox games all suddenly chasing a commodified photoreal makeover will fade quickly. The noise of that visual overstimulation will ultimately just stand to highlight how much the games still made by human minds and hands will stand out—like Over the Hill, an off-road driving game focused on the "minimalist serenity" of truckin' around, that already has a million wishlists on Steam.

"'Democratize' offers a synecdoche for an optimism that tech’s social goals and financial imperatives are aligned," critic Lora Kelley wrote for Mother Jones in 2022, just before AI drove the term's usage to new heights. The truth, so far, does not bear that optimism out, given how hard tech companies have been pushing AI in places its value isn't yet evident.

Engineers will no doubt keep trying, but you can't solve for art, no matter how hard you try.

This month PC Gamer gets world-exclusive access to Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, the climactic new expansion to Blizzard's hellishly good ARPG. For this elite, insider-access feature, PC Gamer travelled to Blizzard's HQ to play Lord of Hatred for multiple hours and interview many of the key devs who have worked to bring the expansion to life. And, with Mephisto, the Prime Evil of Hatred rising to bring doom to Sanctuary, PC gamers are in for a wickedly good challenge. However, with new Paladin and Warlock classes at their disposal, though, maybe it is Mephisto who should be worried!

We've got an exciting new opinion section in the magazine starting from this month, too. Drawing on PC Gamer's huge team of passionate PC gamers, here we deliver the spiciest takes in a series of entertaining and challenging op-eds. We've got regular columns on the FPS and RPG genre's latest developments, as well as the return of PC Gamer magazine's legendary Face Off column, where two editors battle it out in a fiery debate.

This issue also boasts a top-draw previews section loaded with really exciting new games, too. And that starts with a world-exclusive preview of the thrilling new narrative action-adventure game, Directive 8020. Not only does PC Gamer get exclusive access to the game, playing it for multiple hours ahead of anyone else, but we also interview its key developers to discover why this space-based survival horror experience is not to be missed. In addition, we also preview Control Resonant, Ashes of the Singularity 2, Star Wars: Galactic Racer, Pragmata, Slay the Spire 2, Masters of Albion, and Xenonauts 2.

Then, in terms of reviews, we deliver definitive judgments on Crimson Desert, Death Stranding 2, World of Warcraft: Midnight, Marathon, Screamer, Banquet for Fools, and Aether & Iron, among other games.

Cover feature: Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred

Written by: Tyler Colp

Magazine exclusive: Until May 27th, 2026

What's in this month's cover story: For this month's special lead feature, we send Tyler Colp on a holy mission to Blizzard's HQ to discover everything there is to know about Diablo 4's climatic new Lord of Hatred expansion. With unprecedented access to the game and its key developers, we get the inside scoop on why Lord of Hatred cements Blizzard as the king of the ARPG, as well as why this expansion is totally unmissable.

Secondary feature

Additional content in this month's issue

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Capcom's new sci-fi hit, Pragmata, was released to glowing reviews late last week, and much praise has been heaped on its relatively excellent performance. That's with ray tracing enabled instead of the game's path tracing option, of course. Path tracing is known to be a resource hog, particularly in a game world covered in shadows and reflections.

However, some have pointed out that the difference in image quality between conventional ray tracing and full path tracing can be quite pronounced. This thread on the Radeon subreddit is one example, where some gamers are positing that the difference is so massive, it might be an attempt to make regular ray tracing look worse in order to make path tracing look better.

Is me getting insane or there are people celebrating this? from r/radeon

Or indeed, to make all forms of ray tracing (and therefore graphics cards capable of running it well) the defacto standard for a good-looking game, presumably in order to sell more GPUs. Or it's down to "lazy devs." There are a whole host of accusations bouncing around in here.

The thread references a YouTube video where clips of Pragmata are compared next to each other, running with ray tracing, path tracing, and conventional lighting. And yes, in certain areas, the difference between images appears to be quite considerable.

To test these differences out for myself, I jumped into Pragmata to grab some screenshots. I'm not very far into the game at this point (a honking great robot is impeding my progress, so I'll be looking at this guide later), but I've grabbed some comparisons from the early game areas so we can all take a look.

Path tracing, 4K Max settings

Ray tracing, 4K Max settings

Image credit: Capcom

For the sake of keeping things simple, I've gone for a direct comparison between two path-traced images and their ray-traced equivalents, as it's no great surprise that turning RT off entirely lowers the shadows, lighting, and reflection quality. Or indeed, removes certain examples of those things entirely.

As you can see from the comparison above, there's actually a fair difference between the shadows in this dimly-lit scene. The path traced version shows much cleaner cut lines at the edge of the shadow geometry, along with some extra detail that really does help the game world look more "real".

Check out those papers in the top middle section of the screenshots. The standard ray traced versions look to be sitting almost flat with the floor, while the path-traced version adds a lot of shadowing, and thereby the illusion of considerable depth.

The tipped over cart is probably the biggest demonstration of path tracing versus ray tracing here. Not only are the shadows it casts on the floor much more well-defined, but the cart itself gains some highlights that give it more of a 3D effect.

Path tracing, 4K Max settings

Ray tracing, 4K Max settings

Image credit: Capcom

I've captured my other comparison shots in a more brightly lit room, complete with some ray-traced reflections. Hugh and Diana's reflection on the back wall is a fair bit blurrier with standard ray tracing, and the path traced version even manages to pick up some netting draped over a crate on the opposite wall.

What's also interesting to note is the lighting on the crates over to the right hand side of the image, and the lighting of Hugh himself. His super-chonky spacesuit is a lot darker in the standard RT version, and there's a moodier tone to the scene overall.

I'd struggle to call the ray-traced version of either of these scenes ugly, though, or like they come from a different game. In fact, I've been playing Pragmata with path tracing turned off for performance reasons—and I'd say the "standard" ray tracing version looks pretty damn good overall.

Is ray tracing worse-looking than path tracing? Sure, absolutely. Do I feel like the art style was built with path tracing in mind? No, not really. It just helps with realistic lighting and reflections, as it's bloomin' supposed to.

And really, I think performance is likely to be the crux of the argument. At 4K Maximum settings, RT on, using an RTX 5070 Ti (with DLSS Balanced and 2x Frame Generation), the frame rate regularly bumps into the 144 Hz refresh rate limit of my monitor.

It's remarkably smooth to play at these settings, and the RTX 5070 Ti is not quite a fully-fledged, 4K-ready card. And as for the visuals? Yeah, it looks grand to me.

Turn on path tracing, though, and the frame rate drops into the mid 80s. Take frame generation out of the equation, and it's clear that Pragmata's path tracing demands are a bit too much for this card to handle. Here's hoping for massive path tracing performance improvements sometime soon, ey?

But the key question is, is this a conspiracy from Big Graphics Card™ to get gamers to upgrade to an expensive GPU? Personally, I really don't think so.

In Pragmata's case, I'd say the image differences are far more likely to be due to a relatively mild, performance-friendly implementation of ray tracing, with path tracing thrown in for the mega-GPU-ed amongst us.

Because, y'know, we all jump up and down when a game comes out with poor optimisation, and Capcom wants those glowing review scores. And while yes, the game can look noticeably better with path tracing turned on in some scenarios, I'd say it was still a bit of a stunner with regular ray tracing, too.

My advice? Keep the RT somewhere reasonable, forget about path tracing, and enjoy those extra frames. Now, where's my royalty check? That shadowy man in an overcoat did promise me a mega payoff, after all.

The reveal of DLSS 5 was pretty much the biggest thing to happen in PC gaming last month, and also one of the most contentious. Indeed, our own team reacted with a whole heap of different emotions, from general antipathy to vitriolic ranting. In fact only a few of us were in any way measured in our response.

So we thought we'd leave things to calm down a touch, assess what DLSS 5 might actually be doing behind the scenes—turns out it might not be as smart as we might have hoped—and let the dust settle before taking the temperature of PC Gamer readers.

We put the question to you last week: Could Nvidia convince you to use DLSS 5? And, honestly, the answers are not all that surprising.

I'm not surprised that the majority of readers said they would never use the technology, with a full 71% of answers to the poll responding they could not be convinced to turn the feature on. But I have to say I'm a little surprised that, out of those polled, 37%—the largest percentage of responses—said it wouldn't matter how good the feature looked, they were ethically opposed to it, and would never enable it.

I will say that is probably quite an easy thing to say right now, with just a few screenshots of Starfield, FC26, and yassified Grace filling our minds' eyes, but if we get a little more clarity from Nvidia and devs on how it's used, and a new game comes out that looks amazing and plays brilliantly on a single GPU, I think at least some of those respondents might have their faith tested.

I do find it interesting that 10% of readers are already convinced and are all ready to go DLLS On with the new AI-powered feature when it arrives in the fall (if it is indeed still going to be released that soon). There are also another 9% of respondants who would happily enable it in certain games. That's largely where I've ended up; where something that doesn't have a distinct art style and is going for photorealism as a goal, such as FC26, does actually look better than the original.

Just needs to not be an absolute resource hog to do it, though...

Finally, we have 10% saying they would happily enable it if the games looked better than the very AI-gen look they have in the first promo material. Which is a fair enough assessment given that we're talking about a single model, extrapolating all the context for a frame from a single, static, 2D image and some motion vectors. There's a real chance that if Nvidia and the devs aren't careful an uncomfortable level of homogeneity would be our future.

The results weren't so cut and dried when we asked you about switching to Linux, where 43% of you have , or will be switching to gaming on Linux this year. And this week we've also been asking you about your preferred gaming resolution. Anything 4:3, right?

If you're currently playing Crimson Desert on an AMD graphics card, you should hopefully find that the performance has improved with the latest patch. That's because the game now implements FSR SDK 2.2, which should offer better and more consistent upscaling and frame generation.

As shared on April 4, this is part of update 1.02.00, and Pearl Abyss notes that FSR frame generation has been improved in turn. FSR upscaling has also been improved across the board, including on Xbox and PlayStation.

This is not the only graphics improvement seen in the latest patch. Previously, GPU memory usage could increase too much when DLSS was configured, but this has been resolved in a patch, and excessive GPU load and shimmering, when FSR or DLSS is enabled, have also been said to be improved.

Pearl Abyss has also fixed problems with foliage not properly rendering in ray-traced reflections, when FSR or DLSS is enabled, and has fixed a flickering issue when DLAA or HDR is enabled. Finally, character faces were rendering incorrectly indoors when graphics were set to low, and this has now been fixed.

The latest patch notes also come with a handful of graphics fixes for PlayStation 5 and Xbox, and it claims to have "fixed several stability, performance optimisation, and crash issues across PC, console, and Mac."

One thing worth pointing out is that Crimson Desert does have some noticeable problems regarding Nvidia's DLSS Ray Reconstruction. Upscaling and frame generation improvements will make the game look better, but we've noticed some "boiling" effects in-game and ugly textures. That's all to say that the game will likely look and play better with better FSR support, but it doesn't seem to fix all of our problems with it yet.

Still, even if not all of our graphics-related problems have been fixed, Pearl Abyss has been diligent with its updates since launch, from performance fixes to tweaks to controls. Our Molly liked the game quite a bit in her review, and our Fraser argues the storytelling is not terrible, actually. I've been playing it on and off myself, but maybe I'll hold out just a little longer to play it at its best.

In a sublime example of the internet's "I made this" effect, an Italian TV channel temporarily took down Nvidia's March 16 video "Announcing Nvidia DLSS 5" via copyright strike, claiming the content as its own.

As reported by NikTek on X.com, the DLSS 5 reveal trailer was unavailable in Italy for more than 24 hours, with the message "This video contains content from La7, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds" taking its place. While we're doing a little reverse-engineering here to understand what happened, La7 seemingly used footage from DLSS 5 in a recent broadcast, then started issuing copyright claims based on that footage.

Brazen? Yes. Funny? Even more so, considering the overt distaste both players and the games industry have shown for DLSS5.

The impact extended further than Nvidia's own YouTube channel. Multiple other posters on X chimed in to share their own videos being demonetized and region blocked due to a copyright claim. Former IGN editor Destin Legarie posted about the incident on April 4, prompting a rather unhelpful response from YouTube's official X account explaining the basics of its Content ID system.

"The channel making these claims does not own the rights to an Nvidia trailer they used without permission during their talk show," Legarie shot back. "They just created work for YouTube by abusing the system."

Legarie posted on Monday that La7 has released the claim. Using a VPN, PC Gamer confirmed that Nvidia's reveal trailer is also now once again viewable in Italy.

YouTube's Content ID system is often criticized for being abusable, with frivolous claims on videos that should fall under fair use often meaning smaller channels see their videos demonetized unless they can contest a claim, a process that can take weeks. It's equally common for these automated systems to go too far, ending up in claims that are quickly revoked as soon as a real human being takes notice.

It's funnier to think of someone at TV channel La7 deciding it owns all coverage of Nvidia DLSS 5 after producing one talk show segment about it, but it seems more likely that someone clicked a "protect our copyright" button without fully understanding what it would entail.

Or maybe La7 was gung ho about taking credit for the new technology until it realized it was picking a fight with Dave Oshry, at which point the only safe move was immediate surrender.

Minecraft creator and opinion-haver Notch has taken to X to complain about Nvidia's upscaling and Frame Generation tech, DLSS. You might have heard of it, particularly its controversial new iteration. However, it's the whole concept of DLSS that seems to be confusing Notch.

"DLSS fundamentally makes no sense," the creator of the best-selling video game of all time opines. "Because the graphics card is too slow to run the game at reasonable speeds, you use THE SAME HARDWARE to run a neural network to generate frames in between the existing ones."

Putting aside the fact that Notch appears to be talking about Frame Generation specifically here, which is just one aspect of DLSS, lumping graphics card hardware into one monolith of a category is a touch reductionist, as specific ML-optimised Tensor Cores handle the...

You know what, the X thread replies have already done a lot of the work for me. So, I'll give you a choice selection of those instead.

An overall point could be made, I guess, that graphics card design and development could (or should) be focussed towards raw raster performance, instead of developing machine learning-specific hardware to assist.

However, with the advent of ray tracing (and ever-more-demanding game engine tech), the industry has shifted away from resource-intensive brute force rendering techniques, and has instead prioritised AI developments to keep the graphical ball rolling.

As Nvidia's vice president of Applied Deep Learning Research, Bryan Catanzaro, explained back in 2023:

"Moore's Law is dead. We don't know as a civilisation how to keep turning the crank on traditional ways of doing things. We have to be smarter."

"You fundamentally realise you have to be more intelligent about the graphics rendering process," Catanzaro continued. "Brute force—let's re-render every frame 120 times a second at 2160p output—that is wasteful because we know that there are a lot of correlations in the output of any rendering process.

"We know that there are a lot of opportunities to be smarter, to reuse compute. And then deliver transformational image quality benefits, things like Cyberpunk, that we could never have imagined doing before."

Our Nick is performing some in-depth testing of DLSS and Frame Generation at this very moment, and has passed me the image above from our own data to represent that very point.

"Everything in the blue box is what the GPU has to do to render one frame," Nick explains. "Everything after that is what the GPU has to do interpolate one additional frame with AI."

That's not to say that DLSS is everyone's cup of tea, or that Nvidia's AI enhancements are flawless. Opinions will vary greatly here. Nor is it entirely unreasonable to rail against the idea of machine learning algorithms generating frames within your games as a catch-all solution—particularly as the tech is not without caveats.

Especially when Multi Frame Generation on lower-spec cards gets involved, or developers rely too heavily on it for reasonable performance.

However, it does all make sense, at the very least. Hope this helps. I hate to be that guy, but sometimes this job just puts you there, y'know?

After spending several days testing Nvidia's new Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, I wrote about my findings, so that you can judge for yourself whether it's worth using or not. I also briefly mentioned that the DLSS 4.5 update included a new preset for frame generation, purported to improve the user interface in certain games. Having tested that aspect again, I have to say that I'm struggling to see what the fuss is about.

Essentially, presets are like a config file for the AI frame generation to use, adjusting the weightings of the calculations. In the case of DLSS Super Resolution (i.e. upscaling), the different presets are designed to favour a particular frame resolution and/or performance expectation.

With the new frame generation update, though, the extra preset is exclusively for "enhanc[ing] in-game user interfaces by incorporating additional game engine data, improving visual quality and clarity of static user interface elements." Sounds great, yes? Well, let's see it in action.

For the testing of the DLSS update, Nvidia suggested we should use Dragon Age: The Veilguard or Hogwarts Legacy, saying that these games clearly show the benefits of the new preset. I've picked the former game, as it loads up quicker than Hogwarts, and has a snappier interface for adjusting settings.

To begin with, here's a brief clip of Dragon Age, running at 4K DLSS Quality, with High graphics, using a 3x Multi Frame Generation override and the default preset A, both forced active via the latest beta Nvidia App.

This particular game has multiple UI elements, some permanently visible, such as the mini-map and quest info, and others that only appear when you press a certain button. In all cases, using frame gen preset A doesn't seem to cause any problems that my old eyes can see.

Now let's take a look at how those elements all look when using preset B.

Am I missing something here? I watched both videos carefully, over and over. I've paused them at critically similar points to directly compare UI elements, but I just can't see what's different between the frame gen presets. Nvidia's statistics overlay confirms which one is being used, so it's not like I've activated the wrong one by accident.

Even if you directly compare the two presets by taking a snapshot of each video at the right moment, at maximum quality, there's honestly no difference that I can see in the UI elements. In the images below, make sure to click 'View original' to see them at their best.

I've done the same comparisons with Hogwarts Legacy, focusing on the Room of Requirement, which Nvidia says is a great place to see the improvements introduced by Preset B, but once again, I cannot see a jot of difference.

All of which leaves me to conclude that there is only one of three possible explanations: (1) I've completely missed something really obvious in my dotage; (2) Nvidia's being rather hyperbolic about preset B; or (3) the new preset isn't actually being used, and it's a bug in the drivers (regardless of what Nvidia App is saying).

Given that the new DLSS Dynamic Multi Frame Generation update has issues with fps limiters in games, I'm thinking that this is most likely a driver bug. Or at the very least, I hope it is, simply because that means there's a chance it could all be fixed and we do get to see better UI elements with the new preset.

The Nvidia App beta has been updated to include DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi Frame Generation support for RTX 50-series owners. The much-anticipated tech allows for dynamic adjustment of AI generated frames based on a target frame rate, with the goal being consistently smooth, high fps gameplay.

The tech allows for up to 6x frame generation, which is a considerable boost over the 4x maximum of previous efforts. Our Nick has been testing the tech recently and has come away somewhat impressed, although there are caveats to maxing out the number of generated frames, particularly on lower spec cards.

DMFG can be either activated as a global option, or per individual game via the Graphics tab in the Nvidia App. The app can be configured to sync up with your monitor's refresh rate, or configured to a custom max frame rate for those who like to tweak the settings.

A new DLSS Frame Generation model (for RTX 40-series and 50-series cards) is also included with the update, which aims to take into account UI screen elements and provide better stability of frame-generated images when interacting with onscreen overlays and text.

The update also adds a beta preview of a feature called Auto Shader Compilation, which attempts to rebuild your DirectX 12 game shader cache after a driver update during system idle time.

With more and more games avoiding stuttering issues with an initial shader compilation pass, the feature aims to cut down on a complete rebuild of the shader cache for every game after every driver update. As Nvidia has been firing out the hotfixes for its drivers at a rapid rate over the past few months, the beta preview of this particular feature seems timely.

Users will need to opt into the beta version of the app within the Settings>About page to test it out, and will need GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 to take advantage of all the new goodies.

DLSS 5 is contentious, to put it lightly. Though execs from the likes of Capcom and Bethesda seem on board with the new generative AI rendering tool, some of its employees didn't even know it was going to be announced (admittedly, the logistics of informing all employees does make my head spin, not to mention a legal minefield of NDAs). Then, alongside this, the announcement drew ire from many developers, with some calling it "slop" or "disrespectful to the intentional art direction of devs". I recently had the chance to pick the brains of Dave Oshry, the co-founder of indie publisher New Blood Interactive, and David Szymanski, the developer behind Dusk, Iron Lung, and Gloomwood, to get their reactions to the tech.

Oshry tells me, "We as developers and players need to push back against this bullshit just like we did with NFTs and crypto games and try in vain to do with predatory micro transactions, loot boxes and battle passes."

Generative AI is already a hot topic among game developers. Some fear for the ethics of models that can technically scrape whatever work they like, and others fear that their output could contribute to the mass firing of many. A lot of game developers worry that executives making decisions might not favour the quality of handmade work over the benefits of getting artificial intelligence to create assets quickly and cheaply.

DLSS 5 is not making assets and instead working with premade assets to make them more photorealistic, but that fear still exists. Oshry argues, "This is fundamentally changing the way video games look based on artificial intelligence that's been trained on Instagram models and Epstein memes."

"You used to have to spend hours poorly modding your games to make them look this 'cinematic', and now Nvidia is going to let you do it for free! Just kidding, it'll cost like $5,000."

What Oshry is referring to here is the two RTX 5090's required to render the DLSS 5 demo that Nvidia showed off last week. Nvidia has said it will be able to run off just one GPU, but one can assume that will be a high-end one, so a rather expensive setup will likely be needed for the launch of DLSS 5 later this year.

He goes on to argue, "At this rate, why make game art at all? Why not just draw some shapes and colours and let AI generate what it thinks it should look like?"

Last week, Oshry tweeted, alongside other critiques of DLSS 5, "We need to push back harder against it", so I asked what that looks like for developers and gamers.

"The only thing we can do besides calling them out on it and making them feel bad is voting with our wallets. Cripple their sales, tank their stock price. Stop collaborating with them as developers. Then maybe they'll think about going back to giving us what we want."

Oshry does clarify that he has "no dog in this fight other than being a PC gamer". He notes that New Blood makes retro indie games, and Amid Evil is the only game it has put DLSS and RTX in and "it was a huge pain in the ass, arguably made the game look worse, and didn't get us any extra sales. But it was a fun experiment and Nvidia sent us some free GPUs for our trouble. Yippie."

Oshry notes Nvidia's constant role on the cutting edge and how products 3DVision and Nvidia Shield weren't massive hits in the industry. He calls PhysX (which is only sort of supported on RTX 50-series graphics) "costly but it sure was cool as hell watching concrete pillars dynamically explode into pieces during shootouts in Mafia 2."

As far as newer tech is concerned, he says RTX and Path Tracing are very costly bits of tech, though they make Cyberpunk 2077 look good. He does argue, though, that the jury's still out on frame generation.

Catching up with Szymanski, he tells me he agrees with everything said by Dave (including how cool PhysX was) but notes that, "even if we set aside all (relevant and valid) concerns about artistic intent and generative AI itself, the lighting and contrast it adds (or removes, in some parts) makes scenes look less realistic and believable."

"It especially sucks seeing it showcased in Resident Evil: Requiem," he notes, "a game that exemplifies quality and passion in AAA game design. Seeing Grace and Leon getting run through the slop filter as a 'victory lap' definitely feels like insult and injury combined into one."

A common refutation of criticism of DLSS 5 is that it's optional, but Szymanski argues it's not actually that optional. "You mean optional like upscaling? You mean optional like temporal AA? Optional like realtime GI? Optional like any number of 'optional' features that anyone who has played a AAA game in the past half decade can tell you aren't really optional, because games are now built to lean on those technologies."

Szymanski tells me that DLSS, TAA, and ray tracing are paying off, but at the cost of clarity, accessibility, and playability."While I'm not a graphics tech expert, I'm still not convinced that they've solved many problems that didn't already have solutions"

The debate around DLSS 5 is currently being had by game developers, with Jean Pierre Kellams, a lead producer over at Epic Games, saying, "If that was shown as a next-gen hardware reveal and not AI you guys would be going nuts."

Kellams argues that Grace Ashcroft from Resident Evil Requiem looks better with DLSS 5: "Her skin shader has much better subsurface scattering (she doesn't have the Japanese game character perfect skin). Her lips actually have creases now. Her ear stud is now catching light properly."

Even Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's director has recently argued, "This is just a little uncanny beginning. No way haters will stop this. It's way more than a soap opera effect every TV has when you turn motion smoothing on."

DLSS 5 seems to be less smart than we initially thought, too. Jacob Freeman, GeForce Evangelist, describes it as taking a "2D frame plus motion vectors as input", which makes it pretty similar to applying an AI filter over the top of the game. It running in real-time is still impressive, but it brings into question the developer's ability to play with said tools.

Szymanski feels gamers have been paying more and more for "lateral movements in rendering", and DLSS 5 represents a boiling point for it. "Nobody wants a fucking glorified autocorrect painting over the work of actual human beings making actual art."

He tells me that all he (and most gamers) want are games at a consistent frame rate with a good resolution, strong art design and consistent lighting "on hardware that doesn't require us to remortgage our house, using technology that doesn't necessitate turning the world into a Mad Max wasteland."

Importantly, both Oshry and Szymanski feel the public element of the criticism against Nvidia is important. Szymanski says, "I don't know if DLSS5 is going to be here to stay or not, but it's heartening to at least see so many of us in agreement"

"Hopefully if we're all loud and insistent enough, and we throw the weight of our wallets around, companies like Nvidia will eventually get the message."

"That or this will simply be the newest in a long line of features that indie developers don't have to use, and the indie and AA scenes will continue to provide a wild variety of visual styles that don't require thousands of dollars in hardware to render."

Nvidia's DLSS 5 hit the gaming public to much controversy—including from us here at PC Gamer. In one corner, you've got folks who are just seeing it as a very fancy filter analogous to AI upscaling, in the other, you've got Instagram filter Grace Ashcroft trotted out as a proud advancement of technology rather than an uncanny kneecap to creative intent.

The latest defender of the tech, Daniel Vávra, also happens to've been the director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2—though he's now currently taking a step back from development studio Warhorse to focus on a film.

The former creative director wrote on X (thanks, PCGamesN): "I can imagine in the future devs will be able to train this tech for [a] particular art style or specific people faces, and it might replace expensive raytracing etc. This is just a little uncanny beginning. No way haters will stop this. It's way more than a soap opera effect every TV has when you turn motion smoothing on."

Vávra's a controversial figure, having been vocally in support of Gamergate back in 2015, rallying against "social justice warriors", and making some tasteless jokes about the first game's mostly-white cast.

That's in contrast to KCD2, which seemed purposefully adverse to culture war nonsense. It featured gay romance and a more diverse setting with proportionate representation—exhaustion that Vávra, to his credit, echoes with appropriate disdain. But he's also pro-Musk and called Canada an Orwellian country recently. So, er.

Basically, given his propensity for opinionated posting, it doesn't surprise me that he's hiked up his gambeson to wade into this topic, and has, in fact, talked with a sort of resigned acceptance about AI before.

As I noted in our group opinion piece on the stuff, I'm deeply cynical of the tech—partially just because of pattern recognition, most every AI promise has fallen flat, why not this one—but also because that garish, ghoulish, uncanny trailer was put forward by Nvidia.

And as much as the company wants you to believe it's not into AI slop, its out-of-touch understanding as to what is and isn't acceptable to its audiences strikes me more than enough cause for scepticism. I can see a small window where it might be useful—I'm certainly not complaining about AI upscaling.

But DLSS 5 is clearly more than that, and I just can't see a future in which this tech becomes widely adopted and is, as Vávra implies, fine-tuned by devs to avoid overriding the artstyle. It's just naive—executives will try to use this tech to cut important corners, as they have with almost every other piece of AI technology before now.

That's if it even can be used that way: Our hardware writer, Dave James, was one of the tech's initial defenders amongst our crew—but as he's observed last week, DLSS 5 seems increasingly like something developers can't even theoretically fine-tune: "The more we hear about Nvidia's DLSS 5 feature, the worse it seems to get."

After all the furore surrounding Nvidia's DLSS 5 announcement, which was met with a mixture of curiosity around its AI capabilities and outright objection to the aesthetic changes it appears to make to existing games, CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back against the critique.

Despite stating that the DLSS 5 backlash was "completely wrong" late last week, the Nvidia chief has since taken a more thoughtful tone in an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. When asked to explain the drama around DLSS 5, Huang said:

"I think their [gamers] perspective makes sense, and I can see where they're coming from, because I don't love AI slop myself. All of the AI generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful... so I'm empathetic towards what they're thinking.

"That's just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do," Huang continued. "I showed several examples of it, but DLSS 5 is 3D conditioned, 3D guided, it's ground truth structure data guided, so the artists determine the geometry. We are completely truthful to the geometry... in every single frame.

"It's conditioned by the textures, the artistry of the artists, and so every single frame it enhances, but it doesn't change anything."

Hmm. One of the problems with DLSS 5's announcement has been the mixed messaging around exactly how it operates, and I'm not sure Huang's words make things clearer. Certainly, a splitting of hairs between the terms "enhance" and "change" is debatable—and from the demos shown to date, it seems the latter is perhaps more appropriate to describe the infamous "yassified Grace."

"Because the system is open, you could train your own models to determine and you could even, in the future, prompt it," Huang continues. "So you can give it even an example, and it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry... and so all of that is done for the artist so that they can create something that is more beautiful, but still in the style that they want.

"I think that they [gamers] got the impression that the games are going to come out, the way games are shipped, and then we're going to post process it. That's not what DLSS is intended to do. DLSS is integrated with the artists. It's about giving the artist the tool of AI, the tool of generative AI. They could decide not to use it, you know?"

I think one of the interesting things to pull out of Huang's words is the use of future tense. You could train your own models. You could, in the future, prompt it. But, as was revealed in a recent Q&A session with GeForce Evangelist Jacob Freeman, what DLSS 5 appears to be doing in the demos shown to date is essentially applying an adjustable AI filter to already-rendered 2D frames, with some motion vector data thrown into the soup.

This is all really, really messy. What strikes me at this point is that the version of DLSS 5 shown to the public, and the messaging around how it operates, is still a muddle of AI terminology and odd process descriptions that, at points, seem to directly contradict each other.

And while Huang seems more empathetic towards the gamers' concerns, it does seem like what we've been shown to date is a very early version of something that, on a conceptual level, doesn't seem to have clearly defined parameters.

I guess all there is to do now is to wait for more demonstrations, technical deep dives, and really anything that gives us a clearer bead on what our AI-enhanced gaming future will actually look like. May you live in interesting times, as the old proverb goes.

We've been trying to get answers out of Nvidia about DLSS 5 for a couple days now, and we're still waiting to hear if we'll get them. But techtuber Daniel Owen has got some. Detailed in a new video, Jacob Freeman, GeForce evangelist, has provided some rather enlightening details about what DLSS 5 is actually doing.

And it seems right now to be far less smart than I expected.

Given the demos over at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) this week were being run using a pair of RTX 5090 graphics cards—one to render the games normally and another $4,000 GPU to run the DLSS 5 compute path—it seemed like maybe there was something beyond just the AI filter it seemed on first flush when Jen-Hsun dropped it at the beginning of his GTC keynote this week.

But no, answers direct from Nvidia itself suggest that all the current early preview iteration of DLSS 5 is using as an input is a static, 2D image. As Freeman says: "DLSS 5 takes a 2D frame plus motion vectors as input."

So, unless Freeman is grossly oversimplifying things here, it really is essentially taking a screenshot of a game and applying an AI filter to it. Sure, it's impressive that Nvidia has delivered the compute pathways to allow for this to be done at such a rate of licks that it can effectively be used in real-time during a scene, and that it seems to be able to maintain consistency between those frames, too, but the actual technical elements of the DLSS 5 'enhancements' don't really sound that in-depth.

The DLSS 5 model is only ever aware of the motion vectors attached to a static image (where objects in the scene have come from and where they're going) and a single 2D image. It has no understanding, beyond the flat surface of that frame, of the 3D geometry or depth of a scene, or of the specifics of any lighting found outside of the image in front of it.

Freeman notes the DLSS 5 model has been trained like this, and is designed to be able to infer information about "complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast—all by analysing a single frame."

So, it all just comes down to what it can infer from a 2D image, and is not able to be given any "ground truth" about what is actually feeding into that scene. It's apparently completely limited to screen space and the model has zero awareness of anything that sits outside of the single image it's working on. A best guess is okay in some cases, sure, but we're talking about going down a probabilistic path for things like environmental lighting when, if you're rocking path tracing, you have very definite areas and sources of lighting.

And definite lighting is an area where developers can have very definite ideas about how they want their game to look in the final reckoning. DLSS 5 isn't going to help there if it's just taking a punt at what it thinks it should look like.

Owen also asks specifically about concerns around the underlying geometry and textures appearing to be materially changed by DLSS 5 as well as about Nvidia's assertions that the feature can "enhance PBR [physically based rendering] properties on materials (roughness, more realism), with more realistic interaction of light."

They note the changed hairline of a model in Starfield and the entirely problematic issue of the, what will forever be known as, 'yassified Grace'. While Freeman notes, as Nvidia has explicitly stated before, the underlying geometry isn't changing, that doesn't automatically mean that you're still going to see it. What it seems to be doing is that the DLSS 5 model may simply paint something else it prefers over the top of the underlying geometry so that almost becomes a moot point.

On the PBR side of things, again things feel far more simplified than I expected. There is apparently no level of DLSS 5 that is hooking into the game engine so the model has the sort of hooks that can tell it what to expect from a surface—what material it is, whether it's wet, how rough it is, etc.—so the only way it can "enhance PBR properties" is by 'looking' at them and taking an educated guess as to what they are. It doesn't actually have any access to what the developers have put into their world, just inference.

"Materials are inferred from the rendered frame," says Freeman, noting again that there are no other inputs.

The other concerning detail of the Nvidia responses surround just what dials and levers developers have to retain artistic control over a scene. And it seems that's kinda all they are. I naïvely assumed, from my experiences with gen AI, that there would be some kind of prompt mechanism, where the developer might be able to tune the DLSS 5 model, to adjust the level of 'heat' or to rein in its wilder creative impulses, or maybe ask for certain things to be added or adjusted in a scene.

But no, it seems you get a kind of slider so you can choose the intensity of the effect, using alpha blending to weight a scene more towards the original render or AI output, colour grading control, and the ability to mask off objects or parts of a scene to keep them out of DLSS 5's reach.

If, as happens to Grace, a character is given what seems like a full face of make up in a scene where that doesn't really make sense, the developers seemingly have the option to either dial the output down so you can't really see it, or turn it off entirely. They apparently just can't ask for another pass without the lip gloss.

Then you have to circle back to the fears folk have expressed about potential homogeneity arising from a single model deciding what our game characters look like. Sure, you're not changing the underlying geometry, but if the same DLSS 5 model is painting over your characters they surely run the risk of starting to look a lot like each other. What if there was another sad lady with cheek bones you could cut yourself on rocking a blond bob, wouldn't they look an awful lot like yassified Grace?

The masking is an odd one, however. As Nick on our team points out, to be able to selectively mask objects there must be some sort of understanding of depth for DLSS 5 to be able to consistently not yassify someone or something.

The more we hear about Nvidia's DLSS 5 feature, the worse it seems to get. Which is honestly counter to what I was expecting. I was hoping we'd have some insight from developers who have used it to highlight just what controls they have over the model, and how they go about retaining the artistic expression which has been at the heart of many peoples' consternation about the technology.

But I am not here right now to question the ethics of its implementation—that's a whole other topic for ire—nor to deny the fact that I do, in some circumstances, think it looks pretty good. I like what I saw of Assassin's Creed Shadows' environments, and I'd absolutely play FC 26 with it enabled. I just thought it was doing something a little smarter behind the scenes with all that compute it's using.

And maybe it still is. Maybe Jacob Freeman isn't explaining it correctly, or hasn't the clearance to actually go into detail about what DLSS 5 is technically doing beyond that raw 2D frame/motion vector input.

During the GTC keynote reveal Jen-Hsun said: "We fused controllable 3D graphics, the ground truth of virtual worlds, the structured data of virtual worlds, of generated worlds. We combined 3D graphics with generative AI, probabilistic computing.

"One of them is completely predictive, the other one, probabilistic yet highly realistic. The content is beautiful as well as controllable. This concept of fusing structured information and generative AI will repeat itself in one industry after another. Structured data is the foundation of trustworthy AI."

But right now it feels very much like there is a huge disconnect between the ground truth of a given game world—Jen-Hsun's vaunted structured data—and the DLSS 5 frosting being layered on top—that unstructured AI-generated data. The promised fusion feels rather more layered than I expected given the introduction. I thought the two things were being brough together in some holy union in an effort for each to benefit the other, but it's seeming like far less of a mixing than I'd hoped.

However it shakes out, one thing is clear, the reveal of DLSS 5 has been a true omnishambles of an announcement. From the almost context-free drop at GTC, to the yassified Grace becoming the ersatz poster child of the technology, to Jen-Hsun telling everyone they're just plain wrong, to the huge misstep in actually referring to this as DLSS 5 at all. It's all been a painful exercise in mismanagement and mismessaging.

Among the many debates surrounding Nvidia's DLSS 5 announcement is one about artist autonomy and creative freedom. Effectively, the question is 'do these tools hinder or contribute to artistic direction?', and developers are pretty mixed on that one, to put it lightly. Where the likes of Bethesda boss Todd Howard and Capcom executive Jun Takeuchi seem to be in support of it, many developers are anxious, disgusted, or even blindsided by it.

According to Insider Gaming, a Ubisoft developer said, “We found out at the same time as the public”.

It's not clear who this developer is, which department they work in, or how widespread that secrecy is at Ubisoft, but Assassin's Creed Shadows was one of the games used to showcase DLSS 5 during its reveal earlier this week.

As well as Ubisoft, developers at Capcom reportedly told Insider Gaming they were shocked by the announcement, as Capcom had historically been "anti-AI". Resident Evil Requiem's shot of Grace Ashcroft is among the most highly criticised from the DLSS 5 reveal, with our own Tyler Wilde arguing it 'clearly overwrites game characters with AI beauty standards.'

Jensen Huang has said devs have 'artistic control' and Bethesda argued the same, though with mega corporations getting access to these tools, it begs the question 'who really gets to decide if developers use DLSS 5?'

A company as large as Ubisoft couldn't possibly tell all its artists, designers, and producers of the DLSS 5 announcement without a lot of paperwork and likely NDAs to go with it. So, would it check whether individual developers are comfortable with generative AI tools like DLSS 5 before implementation for the public?

Still, it's worth noting that DLSS 5 won't launch until later this year, and the demo shown this week likely won't be the final product. DLSS 5 seems to offer the ability to toggle and customise the strength of its AI generation to some degree, and that's before noting that generative AI imagery has vastly improved over the last few years in terms of technical quality.

Generative AI has been criticised not only for its quality but for its ethics, and that's a debate sitting near the core of this announcement. There are concerns about both the work models used to train and how their output is used. If executives believe there's more money to be made in generative AI assets than handmade ones, what's to stop them from employing fewer real artists?

DLSS 5 is not intended to add new textures, but the underlying philosophy of making existing textures more photorealistic is a concern for many developers. At the very least, the devs might have taken the news better if they knew ahead of time.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has responded to the widespread criticism of DLSS 5. Nvidia's new generation of upscaling technology majors on AI-enhanced lighting but also introduces generative AI at the geometry and asset level and can result in dramatic changes to the look of character models in particular. And that has many observers up in arms, or at least making fun of DLSS 5.

Tom's Hardware attended a Q&A at Nvidia's ongoing GTC event and queried Huang about the negative response to DLSS 5. According to Huang, the critics have it wrong.

"First of all, they're completely wrong," Huang said, "the reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI."

Importantly, he said, developers can "fine-tune the generative AI" and that it "doesn't change the artistic control." Whether that's making a "toon shader" or making the game look like it's "made of glass," DLSS 5 apparently opens up all manner of possibilities, all of which are in the control of the developer.

Of course, the granularity of that control is likely critical here and remains somewhat of an unknown. It's not entirely clear if using DLSS 5 from a developer perspective will be like choosing from a relatively limited menu of "looks" or "styles" or if it's much more open ended.

If the former, well, that's when the fears expressed over the past day or so kick in. The idea that all games with be slathered with the same generative AI gloss is, essentially, what many object to.

But the reality could be both. In other words, there could be some pre-baked settings that developers can choose from for expediency while also having the option of diving in and getting fully involved in how DLSS 5 interprets everything from lighting to materials and assets.

Huang's comments certainly seem to suggest extensive developer control. "All of that is in the control — direct control — of the game developer," Huang said, "this is very different than generative AI, it’s content-control generative AI. That’s why we call it neural rendering."

The other problem with DLSS 5, at this stage at least, is computational intensity. For the demos Nvidia has been showing at GTC, DLSS 5 has been running on a second RTX 5090 graphics card in parallel to a primary 5090 running the game engine itself. That's obviously far from practical or cost effective.

Nvidia says it has DLSS 5 running on a single GPU "in the labs". But if so, why not show the demos running on that single GPU solution? Whatever, DLSS 5 in its current form is clearly a very demanding model and the question remains over whether Nvidia will be able to scale it down into something that can not only run on a single GPU, but can run on the kinds of more affordable GPUs that the vast majority of gamers use. It needs to run on RTX 5060s, not 5090s.

If there is an uncontroversial appeal to DLSS 5, it's the prospect of enabling the lighting realism of ray tracing and path tracing but without the debilitating computational load of calculating all that light bouncing around a scene. To deliver on that proposition, DLSS 5 will need to be far, far more efficient than the dual-5090 hardware setup required for the demo implies. And that improvement needs to come quickly. DLSS 5 will supposedly be released later this year.

At the Nvidia GTC 2026 keynote, leather-clad CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang introduced an almost entirely context-free sizzle reel for its new DLSS 5 technology, coming to GPUs near you this Fall.

And the reaction has been… probably not what Nvidia expected. In some quarters it's seen as transformative, in others it's seen as transformative. On the one hand it has the potential to deliver a new level of photorealism into PC games this year, but on the other it has the more obvious potential to homogenise game graphics, and most especially characters, way beyond developers and artists' original intentions.

Exhibit A: Grace Ashcroft.

The discourse, on the whole, has certainly not been positive. And we certainly have opinions…

Ah, what a mess. While I'm not completely opposed to the idea of generative AI being injected into my games in new and interesting ways, I couldn't help but react in horror as to what Nvidia's new tech can do to character faces.

I'm sure this is a personal taste thing, but the fact that Grace Ashcroft appears to have been Instagram-filtered into a completely different person is genuinely worrying. Nvidia seems keen to point out that developers will have control over just how far the AI will go in terms of sprucing things up, but turning the tech up to 11 from the get-go was always going to provoke an outcry.

Not to mention the AI beauty standards angle. Plumped lips, heavy eye makeup, a chiselled "I've just had expensive surgery" jawline. It all feels a little… well, gross, if I'm honest. I do wonder what the original character artists think about what's been done to their carefully-crafted models, and whether they feel it's an improvement.

And then there's the scene lighting overall. Everything seems to have been hit with a hefty dose of the contrast stick, with what looks suspiciously like our old friend bloom making an overt appearance. Again, personal taste will factor in here—but while some areas look to be much improved, others seem to have been tweaked by a teenager experimenting with Photoshop sliders.

It's not pleasant imagery to my eyes, and that was before I saw it in motion. Combine the plasticine, overly-shiny AI faces with a moving character model, and my own un-AI-ed visage starts to screw up in YouTube thumbnail-friendly fashion. I'm sure the technology will improve with time, but there's a horribly uncanny, morphing, shifting effect to the video we've been shown to date. Distracting? Yeah, something along those lines.

If the demos had been tweaked to deliver more subtle results, I think most of us would be more curious about the tech. Unfortunately, hitting games with a massive dose of AI vaseline and dubious character cosmetic surgery has provoked quite the negative response. And I, for one, cannot help but agree. It's gaming, Jim, but not as we know it—and a major misstep in terms of its presentation.

Nvidia's botched DLSS 5 reveal is undoubtedly obscuring what could be a revolutionary shift in game rendering. That ray-tracing and path-tracing are computationally intensive is very well known. But what if you could essentially insert that kind of realistic lighting into a game without the need to brute-force all those light-bouncing calculations and instead do it with AI? That's essentially the idea behind DLSS 5.

For now, it's really just an idea. Nvidia's DLSS 5 demo actually required a second RTX 5090 GPU running in parallel to support what is clearly a very hefty AI model. But it's early doors for DLSS 5 and if Nvidia can squeeze the model down into something that can run on mainstream GPUs, it could be genuinely revolutionary.

In the meantime, all of that is being lost thanks to some, at best, heavy handed AI filters being applied to game character models, presumably because Nvidia wanted to insert some superficial visual impact, to make DLSS 5 look obviously different. That was a very bad call. But let's be clear, those AI filters are not what's potentially most interesting and important about DLSS 5.

You could argue Nvidia's yassification of games is pretty much the same as modders trying to make Skyrim NPCs look like AI-generated porn—I've already seen this argument so many times—but you'd be wrong. This ignores the huge influence Nvidia has over gaming. Modding is still comparatively niche, and mods that so dramatically reinterpret a dev's vision even more so. When Nvidia pulls shit like this, it has a gargantuan impact. This is one of the biggest, most important companies in gaming saying "Hey, games should look like this", and what "this" is is a fucking nightmare. Uncanny, creepy and unnecessary, completely circumventing the artistic vision behind a game. It's the homogenisation of videogame art, and that sucks.

Like so much AI-generated slop, it just looks terrible. Like some Twitter incel 'shopping a character to make them look hotter, this soulless AI filter just ends up making characters look like dead-eyed sex dolls or rubber-faced mannequins relegated to the darkest corners of Tussauds. Anyone who thinks Nvidia's demonstration enhances realism (ignoring the fact that most games are not attempting realism) needs to go outside for a minute and look at some real humans. Because this ain't it.

Any studio executive or publisher who approves of this mess has completely sold out and shouldn't be making games. They should just quit and join one of countless companies doing the AI grift—they're always looking for ethically stunted evangelists.

I've got to second Fraser, here—not only do I think this AI filter makes every single game look like it's been bound up in glossy, tasteless saran wrap, I also think it completely defeats the point in the first place. One thing AI bros don't get about art is that it's immensely complicated to make, especially at the kind of scale required for videogames.

Take Resident Evil: Requiem, for example. Lighting has always been an art in horror, even when bound by technical limitations—sometimes enhanced by them, as was the case with the iconic, conveniently draw-distance reducing fog in Silent Hill 2. And it's clear some very talented people have taken great care to produce a specific brand of gloominess in Requiem.

Watching Nvidia puff out its chest to inspirational music as a slow wipe takes that careful work out back and shoots it dead is so typically devoid of understanding or taste that it hits me as parody. You have to really (and I mean, really) not be paying attention to anything you're watching or looking at to go "yep, this is great."

See Leon stepping out of the car, his face cast in dark, oppressive shadow. Then watch the Nvidia slop filter make him glow like he's in Moulin Rouge! Isn't this better? Don't you like this? Look, it's got more graphics in it.

You could make the argument that this sort of thing might be welcome in games that, say, aren't as "artistically dense". I'm aware that certain sports games get mechanically produced and shot out of their overlords' great machine minds on a yearly basis, so maybe this kind of tripe's more welcome there.

Humbug, I say. Not only is that defeatist, and also harsh on the doubtless time-starved people trying to make those games look presentable on a wicked schedule, but it's also no great excuse. We're better than this, surely. If a game looks bad, I don't think it's worth whacking poor Grace Ashcroft with the dystopic Instagram filter (let alone the other ethical concerns with AI) just to let Starfield get away with looking a bit gray and uninteresting.

I also don't find the idea that this sort of thing might be good in the hands of developers all that convincing, because here's the thing: Like a lot of AI grist, these tools are doing things that developers are, writ large, already very good at. They've been inventing their way past technical limitations for decades with design, not an amalgam of stolen work pumped into a grey goo filter.

I'm kinda frustrated, a bit disappointed, but not entirely surprised at what the reaction has been around the DLSS 5 reveal last night. AI Grace is the thread that's running through a huge number of the complaints around the technology showcase. And if that's your first experience of what DLSS 5 is doing, I can completely understand the kneejerk antipathy that is prevalent. Capcom has got too excited with DLSS 5, turned all the AI controls up as far as they'll go and let the model go to town on what it thinks Ms. Ashcroft ought to look like.

And it's not good, feels entirely like any other AI filter, and leaves you feeling a bit icky.

I also get it if you are wholeheartedly against artificial intelligence in any of its myriad forms and want it kept as far away from your favourite hobby as possible.

But I find it disappointing, but again not surprising, there's no nuance to the discussion. I've been shut down within the PC Gamer team for expressing any feelings of positivity around this nascent technology, but Resident Evil: Requiem isn't the only game presented here, we still don't know a ton about how it's used by devs, and you can already see within the other titles that were shown off where they have been more measured in their use of the tech.

It's a day after the event, and I'm still processing what I saw, what we've been told, and now I really want to get my hands on it and talk to some of the people behind it before damning the whole enterprise to development hell. There are things in that presentation, after all, which I believe do look good. The environmental lighting on Assassin's Creed Shadows, and the effectiveness of the implementation in the Zorah tech demo, all speak to the different levels of usage that will be in the hands of the devs.

Right now, I understand the fear, but don't buy the death of artistic expression argument, and until I'm shown that it is in fact just a binary on/off switch (which I don't believe it is), and that developers are going to be forced to use it, then I'm not going to be convinced that this will become something that will destroy artistry in games development.

The invention of the camera was demonised by painters, and yet artistic expression flourished after the first shutter went click.

Developers specifically chasing a certain art style will still do that, may just use DLSS 5 for the lighting, or for materials, or will probably eschew it altogether. Which will be a choice, as it will be for PC gamers. And I kinda like choice.

But there are other issues, exemplified by Capcom's heavy handed usage. Devs are going to have to take some responsibility to avoid a period of complete homogeneity, as we had when they all got excited about bloom and rim lighting.

Then there are other issues, such as the performance. Right now it is seriously computationally intensive, and we do not live in a space where computation is affordable or even accessible. If you're turning ray tracing off in today's games, you're going to be doing the same for DLSS 5. And then even calling it DLSS 5. This does not feel like what I understand to be super sampling.

Though maybe that's the thing. I'm an old man who likes playing games, so maybe I just don't understand technology or art.

Time to risk alienating the entire PC gaming community here—but there has to be someone willing to bring some balance to the force. Look, I hate AI too, especially AI images and videos. But not every DLSS 5 video and image here looks bad.

I get the reaction to the Resident Evil and Hogwarts Legacy demo, sure, but to my eyes, at least, what we've seen of Starfield, Fifa, Assassin's Creed, and Oblivion Remastered looks great. This variation only adds credence to Nvidia's claim that "game developers have full, detailed artistic control over DLSS 5's effects to ensure they maintain their game's unique aesthetic."

Assuming this is true—and given the variation shown, there's no reason to assume otherwise—the only bad decision here was to throw a couple of poor examples that are over-adjusted towards an unrealistic, glossy aesthetic, at the forefront. That doesn't make for a good marketing recipe when combined with a public that's been rightly primed to sniff out and protest AI slop that many companies seem to keep championing.

Now, as much as I enjoy the memes, I can see the case that the popular discussion is overlooking the things DLSS 5 does right, such as really making environmental lighting shine. However, I'd counter that the reason yassified Grace Ashcroft dominates the conversation is because of Nvidia's tone-deaf marketing.

It is staggering to me that the way a company priding itself on keeping its finger to the pulse of tech would choose to showcase its snazzy new upscaling right out of the gate with gameplay footage that looks as though it's been run through a wholly unsubtle TikTok beauty filter—and don't even get me started on the fact the live demos at GTC currently take two GPUs to do it.

I can understand wanting to pull out all the stops to ensure the differences between DLSS 5 on and off are obvious to even a lay audience, but I think it's safe to say that tactic has backfired for Nvidia. Here's hoping DLSS 5 can make a more thoughtful, better implemented second impression later this year.

There's a moment in Digital Foundry's video hands-on with DLSS 5 that, to me, communicates how thoroughly we've lost the plot somewhere along the way: The tech is toggled off and on while interacting with a wood elf in Oblivion Remastered, which produces the effect of watching as a character is suddenly wracked into a sleep paralysis demon garbed in the ill-fitting skin of a human man, each added wrinkle and manufactured plane traced with a searing, lacerating sharpness.

"We've never seen elves look this realistic," the commentary says. "It's crazy."

And I just want us to take a moment and ask ourselves: Is a photorealistic elf actually a better one? Are we more interested in videogames as art, or as tech demos?

I'm posing the question because these early looks at DLSS 5, despite Nvidia's insistence to the contrary, demonstrate a fundamental contempt for artistic intent. Nvidia's wood elf yassification might produce an image with arguably higher visual fidelity, but it's completely changed the scene in the process. The lighting isn't improved. It's different. Color tones and intensities have been warped; characters have been retrofitted with entirely different affects; the basic sense of atmosphere has been reshaped according to the arbitrary priorities and intrinsic biases of the technology.

When it's intimated that this is all worth it if it's in service of photorealism, I feel compelled to note that there's a lot of dogshit photography in the world. Higher fidelity is fine, but if it's overwriting the artistry behind the image, it's not worth the cost.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 reveal has pulled in some very strong opinions. Since its unveiling, both Nvidia and Bethesda have clarified that developers will have creative freedom, but many developers have labelled it "slop" and "disrespectful to the intentional art direction of devs". One particularly strong voice in favour of the tech is the lead producer of Epic Games, Jean Pierre Kellams.

As shared over on X, Kellams says, "All you guys roasting DLSS 5 like it doesn’t look better/is detracting from art direction are absolutely insane."

"The lighting and shading improvements are bonkers. If that was shown as a next-gen hardware reveal and not “AI” you guys would be going nuts like the Watch Dogs demo."

If you don't know Kellams for his work on the likes of Fortnite, you may know him for his history with Platinum Games, working on the English adaptation of Bayonetta 2, The Wonderful 101, Devil May Cry, and more.

Ex-Intel alum and former owner of PC Perspective, Ryan Shrout, said that Kellam's post "seems like the right answer to me", and they went hands-on with the tech yesterday. They argue it's "not a face filter" and "What I saw in the demos was a comprehensive improvement across the entire scene. And the moment that really drove this home wasn't a face. It was a coffee maker."

Shrout says, "One of the things I came away most encouraged by is the developer control story. This is critical. If DLSS 5 were a black box that slapped a one-size-fits-all enhancement over every game, the artistic intent concerns would be completely valid. But that's not what this is."

Interestingly, when a comment inevitably brings up the yassified Grace Ashcroft Nvidia showed off, Kellams argues, "Her skin shader has much better subsurface scattering (she doesn't have the Japanese game character perfect skin). Her lips actually have creases now. Her ear stud is now catching light properly."

Kellams finalizes his point, saying, "If I was a technical artist, I'd be begging for this right now. It's essentially making super high resolution physically accurate lighting trivially cheap. If this is the demo, I can't wait until tech artists start really digging in."

Part of his argument is that DLSS 5 could be resource-efficient and that "the technical trade offs that you have to make for performance to get that level of lighting is untenable."

Notably, this is something Nvidia noted with its RTX 50 series launch. In a demo, showing off neural materials, it managed to bring down memory usage on fabric by a third, which certainly does bolster this opinion. It claims "Neural Texture Compression leverages neural networks accessed through neural shaders to compress and decompress material textures more efficiently than traditional methods."

Notably, when discussing artistic intent, Kellams argues that you can't guess at intent until a director comes out and states as such, and that some of the tone or atmosphere from games are purely tradeoffs made for certain engines or models. He claims Nvidia's Resident Evil Requiem demo "has WAY WAY WAY better lighting" and a more realistic world.

"The gloominess you became accustomed to is actually a feature of lighting tradeoffs that DLSS 5 is 'fixing'", Kellams states.

Though the demo Shrout and the likes of Digital Foundry got access to was seen running through two RTX 5090s, it's worth noting that it will be at max 4K settings for demonstration purposes, and Nvidia has said the tech will be usable on a single GPU when it launches later this year. We'll have to get hands-on to find out the performance hit you will get in return for DLSS 5.

But wide adoption of DLSS 5 will largely be about how consumers react to it, and Kellams thinks that ship has already sailed. "I get that some very vocal people don’t like AI. But guess what. Technology doesn’t care if you like it. It is a tool. AI isn’t coming. It is here. Just this morning my oncologist was telling me all the ways it is helping cancer treatment and research."

Nvidia has announced DLSS 5, which it calls the "future of real-time rendering", and an early demo has made it mostly look like an AI filter slapped over a handful of games. The results have not been massively positive as a result. Yet, Bethesda, which partnered with Nvidia to show it off in Starfield and Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered seem all in on it as an upscaling option.

In Nvidia's announcement, Todd Howard says, "With DLSS 5 the artistic style and detail shine through without being held back by the traditional limits of real-time rendering. We’re excited to work with this new technology and look to bring DLSS 5 to Starfield and future Bethesda titles."

After Digital Foundry put out its analysis of the tech, based on hands-on experience, Bethesda responded to the post over on X.

It says, "This is a very early look, and our art teams will be further adjusting the lighting and final effect to look the way we think works best for each game. This will all be under our artists’ control, and totally optional for players."

That last point is a key element of the conversation being had. Nvidia said last night that developers have "artistic control" over how DLSS 5 is implemented, but it wasn't clear what level of control they have, other than just turning the DLSS 5 toggle to 'off'. It did later clarify "The SDK includes things like intensity, color grading and masking off places where the effect shouldn't be applied. It's not a filter - DLSS 5 inputs the game’s color and motion vectors for each frame into the model, anchoring the output in the source 3D content."

Bethesda's comments here suggest a level of thought put into its implementation, and further clarifies that gamers can simply turn it off.

Replies to Bethesda haven't been massively supportive, with the post getting 2,300 likes and almost 800 comments at the time of writing. Generally, that's an abnormal like-to-reply ratio, with many of the top comments being overtly negative. Many believe that the use of AI to this degree is wrong, and this is partially tied to both quality and ethical concerns with AI itself.

This isn't helped by the fact that the faces in almost all of Nvidia's highlight reels look uncanny and awfully Instagram-like. Resident Evil Requiem's Grace Ashcroft is perhaps hit worst by the yassification beam, but grunts in Starfield also look like a cheap filter has been placed on top. DLSS 5 isn't just a filter, though; it works on a hardware level and impacts lighting, too. For its downsides, lighting in the Starfield clips doesn't look nearly as bad as the human-ish figures.

Nvidia's roll-out of this early demo has not managed to sell the tech very well to many developers, and it's no wonder why. Many are already not massive fans of AI, so showing clips that make games look potentially worse only makes the company profiting from AI (and its negative effects) look worse.

After teasing it as "the future of real-time rendering", Nvidia has finally announced DLSS 5, an AI-led model for photorealistic visuals…that mostly looks like an AI filter slapped over Resident Evil Requiem. However, it's game developers, with their honed art direction and style, who will care the most about DLSS 5, and that reaction has been mostly mixed to put it lightly.

Over on X, New Blood co-founder Dave Oshry shares a meme calling the tech "Pure Slopium", a reference to AI slop. 'Is this a 3D model?', an account dedicated to teaching X users about 3D models, similarly, labels DLSS 5 a "slop filter" and calls Nvidia "an absolute joke".

The word slop is used a lot in regard to Nvidia's announcement. Indie developer Guselect says, "bad ending: now every game is AI slop."

Over on BlueSky, Karla Ortiz, a Puerto Rican artist who worked for Ubisoft, Blizzard, Marvel and more, says:

"This is so disrespectful to the intentional art direction of devs. If devs wanted to lean in to hyper realism they would," she says. "This also drastically changes key aspects of visuals like character features, focal points, lighting and so on. What a terrible invention. Nvidia should shelve this one."

This is so disrespectful to the intentional art direction of devs. If devs wanted to lean in to hyper realism they would. This also drastically changes key aspects of visuals like character features, focal points, lighting and so on. What a terrible invention. Nvidia should shelve this one 😭

— @kortizart.bsky.social (@kortizart.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-03-18T09:41:18.569Z

Some fears about the tech are more existential than simply perceiving something as looking bad. Jon Ingold, narrative director and co-founder of Inkle, shares a screenshot of its game Heaven's Vault, arguing that DLSS 5 would remove its main character. Heaven's Vault is a game largely about archaeology, history, and a desire to preserve culture, so this post implies DLSS 5's AI beauty filter style would actually erase the identity of characters that don't fit certain beauty norms.

This same fear is expressed by illustrator Corey Brickley, who says: "What if we blended every famous woman into one woman and then that's every woman you see now."

Chris Gardiner, narrative director at FailBetter Games, calls this AI beauty standard the "Scarlett Johansesonification of videogames." Catchy.

Kansai-based game dev Alwei critiques what the model does to lighting, plus expressions, and art direction, stating: "The artwork created by artists has a solid intention behind it, and if that can't be controlled, it has no meaning."

Sam Barlow, known for his work on Immortality, Her Story, and Telling Lies, argues that the choice of games intentionally ignores those which use face models, too. "Can you imagine the legality of and just the optics of your game starring Lea Seydoux and Elle Fanning changing their faces? Making Conan O’ Brien look like a catalogue model Chris Hensworth?"

Funny thing with the DLSS stuff - they only picked games that don’t use actor likenesses. Can you imagine the legality of and just the optics of your game starring Lea Seydoux and Elle Fanning changing their faces? Making Conan O’ Brien look like a catalogue model Chris Hensworth?

— @mrsambarlow.bsky.social (@mrsambarlow.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-03-18T09:41:18.535Z

Not all game developer reactions are negative towards DLSS 5. In the announcement for DLSS 5, Todd Howard shared, “When Nvidia showed us DLSS 5 and we got it running in Starfield, it was amazing how it brought it to life. We've played it. We can't wait for all of you to do so as well.”

For positive reactions outside of Nvidia's official press release, Kazuya Okada, ex-Epic Games software engineer, wishes "we could use super-high-quality images and videos—created in advance in the game engine's editor, ignoring the load—as training data, and then apply them to actual upscaling somehow…"

3D model creator tarava777 says, "It's ultimately an optional process handled by the GPU, essentially a kind of 'aftermarket mod.' You can't do it without a GPU, and it can be turned ON/OFF at will.

"This is just a tech demo, not something that's going to be released as-is. We need to take those aspects in stride with a cool head, right? Personally, I think advancements like this are in a realm where 'whether you like it or hate it, there's no stopping them anymore'."

The 'optional' element of that is certainly notable. Developers who don't want to use it, or gamers who don't want to see it, can choose not to do so. And there's some excitement in favour of using it too.

CG artist and the writer of the CG art blog "3Dnchu" argues, "It's amazing that this can be done in real time...This feels like an evolution that's gonna stir up a lot of buzz in all sorts of ways, huh."

Some like actor Rahul Kohli mainly met the reaction with dumbfoundment, "DLSS5 has to be a joke right? Right? Guys?"

Bruno Diaz, who worked as a senior writer and lead narrative systems designer for Failbetter Games, argues that prohibitive hardware requirements could stop it from making a splash anyway. "If DLSS 5 actually ships, it'll probably be so performance costly that few people will be willing to use it."

The demo for the tech used two RTX 5090s, which would cost the average gamer around $8,000 to get ahold of. It is worth noting that these games are running at 4K max settings, so cranking resolution down to 1440p or even 1080p will lower power requirements. Nvidia says it has got the tech working on a single GPU (presumably just one measly RTX 5090), but that is still a lot for your rig to be able to run it.

One can assume the tech has been revealed because Nvidia assumes gamers will actually be able to run it once it launches in the Fall, but we'll need to go hands-on to understand its hardware limitations.

Ultimately, this tech is very new and still relatively early in its development. Most have not had the chance to go hands-on with it, and how it will perform in real-time will be the most telling aspect of its release. Game developers online, or at least the most vocal of them in the West, seem rather sceptical, and Nvidia's Grace Ashcroft AI makeover perhaps isn't the best selling point for it.

That's not helped by the fact that DLSS 5's presentation is just over one minute of a two-hour GTC keynote presentation, with little explanation on how the model works, how much it can be tweaked, among many other things.

Nvidia says devs have "artistic control" with DLSS 5, but it could go so much further to specify how. Whether or not this will really be the future of real-time rendering will largely depend on mainstream adoption (both from gamers and developers) and on how easy it is to run, and that's not something easy to grasp from initial reactions. With DLSS 5 set to launch later this year, that will be the real testing ground for whether or not people actually want it, and if that's better or worse for the games, as a result.

During the Nvidia GTC keynote, company CEO Jensen Huang reiterated the company's commitment to gaming, stating that "This is the house that GeForce made." However, the company is still full steam ahead on AI, leveraging the tech to "revolutionise how graphics are made" in the form of DLSS 5.

We got our first look at the tech last night, and the response has been mixed to say the least. Resident Evil Requiem was one game used to showcase the upscaling tech, and while I personally don't mind seeing Leon S. Kennedy with even more scruff, the tech makes Grace Ashcroft look like a totally different person, with distinctly higher cheekbones and fuller lips. Nvidia has said devs will retain 'artistic control' with this tech but, in the case of Grace, it's hard not to feel like DLSS 5 has daubed her with AI beauty standards.

It's such a dramatic shift that plenty of PC gamers have been poking fun at DLSS 5, dismissing it as akin to a 'yassification filter'. Case in terrifying point, I stumbled across this Bluesky post that yassifies Requiem's stalker enemy, The Girl. Now that I've seen it, you can't unsee it either—you're welcome.

Elsewhere online, the memes have been similarly on point. In a similar vein to that downright haunting take on The Girl, developer Neal Agarwal reimagined The Password Game with a distinctly fleshy twist.

After that, I think you've earned a palette cleanser. Among Us developer Innersloth was quick to playfully imagine what DLSS 5 could do with its game. Similarly, the official Cult of the Lamb X account also had fun reimagining the game's similarly cartoon-y art style.

Meanwhile over on Reddit, r/PCMasterRace is perhaps predictably having a whale of a time dunking on DLSS 5. Besides a look-in from Handsome Squidward, an unfavourable comparison to Sonic the Hedgehog's original movie design, and even a throwback to Ecce Mono, the community turned their gaze to r/Nvidia. Alleging mods were deleting comments en masse, Redditors seized on yet another obvious DLSS 5 punchline.

Thanks Nvidia from r/pcmasterrace

Now, the case could be made that the tech's genuine improvement to environmental lighting is getting lost among all the memes. Furthermore, leveraging AI to get more out of older hardware, especially in the midst of a memory supply crisis that has made PC components even more expensive, is no small thing either.

To be fair to the tech, DLSS 5 arguably had a better showing in EA Sports FC—where the character models are even more closely based on real people in the form of recognisable sports persona. Unfortunately, the tech's implementation of photorealism in Starfield did not play well with that game's stiff conversation animations, creating a downright uncanny effect in my humble opinion.

DLSS 4's multi-frame generation felt like a genuine game-changer. DLSS 5 is attempting to change the game again, but so far that's looking far more literal than many would like. Here's hoping the implementation will be refined over the coming months, and I'll recognise Grace Ashcroft next time she stumbles over her own feet.

Nvidia's DLSS has been a boon for those of us who hang on to old GPUs for longer than game developers want to support them, but a problem with AI upscaling is that its inferences subtly alter the look of games.

With DLSS 5, Nvidia has dropped the subtlety and made overwriting the original graphics the point, using "3D-guided neural rendering" to enhance traditionally-rendered graphics—or ruin them, depending on your perspective.

DLSS 5 was introduced at Nvidia GTC today with a video showing how it can transform real-time graphics on the fly, putting a photoreal sheen on games like Resident Evil: Requiem and Hogwarts Legacy. Digital Foundry also has a deeper dive into the tech.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the generative AI is "controlled perfectly" by the structured data provided by the 3D renderer, and according to Nvidia's Jacob Freeman, developers "have artistic control over DLSS 5's effects to ensure they maintain their game's aesthetic." This was affirmed by Bethesda, which said on X that the DLSS 5 support coming to Starfield and Oblivion Remastered is entirely under its artists' control.

But even in Nvidia's demonstration, the source material is altered in ways don't seem in keeping with the designs of the underlying 3D models. Grace Ashcroft's face, for instance, doesn't just look like it's lit more realistically: She's given fuller lips and sharper cheek bones in the transformation, demonstrating an apparent bias for a certain beauty standard trained into the AI model.

I've watched the video several times to try to determine if I'm just misinterpreting a lighting change as a structural change to the character, but every time I rewatch the transition, I see a substantially altered face. We've seen this 'yassification' effect—to use the modern parlance—from other AI models.

As with everything AI, DLSS 5 has instantly been controversial, with the term "AI slop filter" showing up on social media within minutes of the announcement.

Exactly how much control game developers will really have over DLSS 5 is to be seen—and they can choose not to support it—but that seems like a small detail against the bigger trend here. As Dave predicted in 2024, we're heading toward a world where players and tech companies have the final say in what videogames look like, not their creators.

NVIDIA: What if we introduce ray tracing so you can have really high quality real-time lighting, models that cast shadows on themselves, and game lighting that looks _really_ real?Also NVIDIA: What if we do that, and then throw out that lighting to run the yassify filter so everyone looks HOT?

— @willsmith.fun (@willsmith.fun.bsky.social) 2026-03-26T23:43:45.132Z

Above: One example of the social media reaction to DLSS 5, from Tested co-founder Will Smith.

To some degree that's already true on PC, where it's possible to adjust graphics settings and use mods to transform a game's style, but AI-assisted rendering now presents a big-tech controlled shortcut that could radically influence how game art and creative ownership are perceived in the future.

DLSS 5 is arriving in the fall, and a few of the games that will support it off the bat are Assassin's Creed Shadows, Hogwarts Legacy, Phantom Blade Zero, Resident Evil Requiem, Sea of Remnants, Starfield, Oblivion Remastered, and Where Winds Meet.

"Computer graphics comes to life... now what did we do?" Asks Nvidia CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang after showing off just how kinda stunning/kinda AI-filter-y DLSS 5 could look in games. It's honestly a weird, almost entirely contextless teaser. Though more context has come since, with Nvidia announcing it as a "real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials."

Anyways... back to Jen-Hsun.

"We fused controllable 3D graphics, the ground truth of virtual worlds, the structured data of virtual worlds, of generated worlds. We combined 3D graphics with generative AI, probabilistic computing.

"One of them is completely predictive, the other one, probabilistic yet highly realistic. The content is beautiful as well as controllable. This concept of fusing structured information and generative AI will repeat itself in one industry after another. Structured data is the foundation of trustworthy AI."

There are live demos over at GTC, which Digital Foundry has had access to ahead of the keynote today, and notes that in the demo, where the RTX 5090 is being used to render the path tracing version of Resident Evil Requiem and the standard Oblivion Remastered, a whole other RTX 5090 is being used to power the DLSS 5 component.

That's quite the hardware requirement, but hopefully when DLSS 5 comes out in the Autumn/Fall of this year it won't be quite so intimidating. Apparently, in the labs, Nvidia already has DLSS 5 running on a single GPU, but obviously the targets are going to have to be that it will run on single GPUs that aren't RTX 5090s. After all, those $4,000 cards are pretty hard to come by...

Nvidia is talking about this as just a snapshot of current development, so not exactly what DLSS 5 is going to look or perform like in release.

But how does it work?

According to Nvidia, "DLSS 5 takes a game's color and motion vectors for each frame as input, and uses an AI model to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame. DLSS 5 runs in real time at up to 4K resolution for smooth, interactive gameplay."

The model in use is apparently trained "end-to-end" to understand the fine details of a scene, from the characters, to the hair and fabric in the clothing, and the slightly translucent nature of human skin, as well as a host of different environmental factors, too.

And all this from analysing a single frame and extrapolating it to the rest. Sounds pretty wild, if you ask me.

To me, it kinda just looks like a pretty AI lighting filter, which I guess is fine, though a lot of care is going to have to be taken to ensure our game characters don't just end up all looking like utterly homogenous AI faces, just because that's what the DLSS 5 model thinks humans ought to look like that.

Thankfully, this seems to be something that's at the forefront of Nvidia's thinking on this, with a lot of mention of retain the original game artists' original vision.

Jen-Hsun is quoted on the Nvidia blog as saying: "DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics—blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression."

The same post goes on to explain that there are a host of different controls baked into DLSS 5 for game developers to tweak the knobs and pull the levers of the technology, in order to have the game world looking how they want:

"DLSS 5 provides game developers with detailed controls for intensity, color grading and masking, so artists can determine where and how enhancements are applied to maintain each game’s unique aesthetic. Integration is seamless, using the same NVIDIA Streamline framework used by existing DLSS and NVIDIA Reflex technologies."

And if you want an example of DLSS 5 games sticking to the original creative design of the developers you only have to look at the Starfield example. I mean, it still looks very, very, very Starfield. And no, that is not a compliment.

Still, you can be sure that there will be a lot of issues, from within and without game development, about the level of AI artifice is being placed on top of the games. There will be conversations to be had about artistic intent on the part of the designers and devs, but also what the end-user actually wants to see in their games.

It's going to be interesting to see how this initial take on DLSS 5 is going to be received, because I'm expecting it not to be pretty.

Anyways, in terms of confirmed games signed up for it...

"DLSS 5 will arrive this fall and be supported by the industry’s biggest publishers and game developers, including Bethesda, CAPCOM, Hotta Studio, NetEase, NCSOFT, S-GAME, Tencent, Ubisoft and Warner Bros. Games. DLSS 5 will come to games including AION 2, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Black State, CINDER CITY, Delta Force, Hogwarts Legacy, Justice, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, NTE: Neverness to Everness, Phantom Blade Zero, Resident Evil Requiem, Sea of Remnants, Starfield, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Where Winds Meet and more."

DLSS 4.5 may have been with us since January of this year, but one of its most interesting features, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, is finally coming to Nvidia app beta users on March 31.

The update boosts the top frame gen count for RTX 50-series GPUs to 6x, being made up of five AI generated frames to the one rendered traditionally by your graphics card. It also allows the upscaler to shift around the number of frames generated on the fly, hence the term "dynamic".

Give it a frame rate target to hit, and it'll swap around the number of generated frames depending on the demands of the scene—which should mean locked fps, high-frame rate gaming and a bridging of performance dips, designed to create a silky-smooth gaming experience.

That's the theory, anyway. That being said, I did get a chance to see Dynamic Multi Frame Generation in action at CES 2026, and came away pretty impressed with the transition between 2x, 4x, and 6x frame gen in The Outer Worlds 2.

I spent some time running backwards and forwards between two areas, one in a ship cockpit that hit its target frame rate at 2-4x Frame Generation, and a busier internal scene that needed 6x frame gen to keep up. I endeavoured to wiggle the mouse around and dance between the two areas in an attempt to trip up the switch between modes, but the transition was seamless as far as I could tell.

As the feature will be found in beta versions of the Nvidia App, those RTX 50-series card owners who wish to try it out will need to enable the beta release via the Settings > About page come the end of March.

Over 200 games will be supported at launch, so it'll be interesting to see if that super-smooth switching experience translates across a whole swathe of different releases.

As for DLSS 4.5 itself, Nvidia has announced 20 more games with native integration. These included the upcoming 007: First Light, Control Resonant, and Tides of Annihilation, alongside a slew of existing games including Gray Zone Warfare, Where Winds Meet, and StarRupture.

So, the march of updates to Nvidia's upscaling, frame-inserting tech continues, although whether Dynamic Multi Frame Generation works as well in practice as it did in the demos remains to be seen. Whether the input latency jumps around considerably between the different modes is also something we'll also have to test for ourselves.

However, Nvidia claimed a PC latency of 53 ms in path-traced Black Myth Wukong running at 6x frame gen, 4K, 246 fps earlier this year, which seems pretty acceptable at top whack.

And given the improved visuals of Nvidia's 2nd gen transformer models, hopefully some of MFG's earlier visual quirks when turned up to the guns will now be put to bed. It won't be long until we find out, at the very least.

German website ComputerBase.de has conducted a blind comparison test pitting AMD's and Nvidia's latest AI-based upscaling technologies against native rendering at 4K in a poll of over 1,000 gamers. Across six different games, Nvidia DLSS came out on top as the stated preference of gamers, beating not only AMD FSR but also native 4K rendering.

The six games tested were Anno 117, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, Satisfactory, and The Last of Us Part 2. Around 1,000 to 1,200 gamers voted for their preference in each title based on viewing pre-rendered videos comparing the two upscaling technologies with native 4K rendering.

The video player used by ComputerBase allows users to see all three rendering modes side-by-side or any two in split-screen with a manual slider to switch between the two modes. Users can zoom in and out, pause or adjust the playback, all allowing for a pretty forensic examination of image quality.

In each test, the competing rendering modes were not identified, allowing for a true "blind" comparison. For the record, the upscalers were set to Quality with a target output of 4K, while the native 4K mode used the game's TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) implementation.

Remarkably, DLSS 4.5 won every single game, with native 4K rendering coming in second across the board, and thus AMD's latest AI-based FSR (variously known as FSR 4 or FSR Redstone) coming in last in every title. DLSS's winning margin was greatest in Satisfactory, where 60.9% of gamers preferred it, with just 15.1% choosing native 4K and a mere 12.4% favouring FSR. The closest result was Cyberpunk 2077, where 34.4% chose DLSS, 32.4% preferred native, and 10.6% thought FSR looked best. Roughly 10% of gamers across all six titles said they did not have a preference.

That DLSS is preferred to FSR probably isn't a huge surprise, though the total dominance of Nvidia's upscaler is impressive. But what about DLSS beating native rendering? There are some good reasons why DLSS upscaling can look better than native, especially at 4K.

DLSS generates detail based on several methods, including temporal and vector data. As a consequence, DLSS can actually sharpen textures beyond their native appearance. So, upscaled rendering can actually look more detailed than native in some scenarios. Moreover, many modern games are coded with upscaling in mind, so optimal image quality is intentionally achieved with upscaling.

Of course, both DLSS and FSR have developed substantially over the years. So, this is just a snapshot in time. But, right now, this survey clearly puts DLSS ahead, a conclusion with which I would personally concur. AMD's AI-based FSR update is certainly an improvement. But DLSS is still better, most of the time.

An interesting added insight that this comparison doesn't include is Intel's XeSS upscaling, which has generally been pretty competitive and, perhaps, splits the difference between DLSS and FSR. Intel's presence in the GPU market is obviously very limited, so the most advanced version of XeSS, which requires an Intel Arc GPU is of questionable relevance. However, Intel also offers a version of XeSS that runs on all three of the GPU vendors' hardware. So, it would be interesting to see how well that would fare.

Anywho, what with the mess the hardware market is right now, thanks to the AI boom, extracting ever more performance out of existing GPUs has never been more important. Like it or lump it, upscaling quality and performance has become incredibly important.

There was a long period of time where the phrase 'ray tracing' was almost inescapable and slapped onto all the prettiest-looking games. However, as the memory crisis continues to devastate hardware prices, and game performance gets even more unpredictable, optimised games have become a real sign of a quality launch. And now, ray tracing is a bit of a rarity among the most popular new games.

Looking back at the last 12 months of the biggest games, I've spotted a mere handful that have ray tracing of any kind (optional or not), with only a few baking it into moment-to-moment interactions.

I've checked through the Steam player figures, incorporating both the top 100 for player currents right now, plus the top 100 for all-time player peak, and spotted a peculiar trend. Of 21 games, only 5 have proper ray tracing, and one of those five (Monster Hunter Wilds) only uses it for simple reflections.

You can see the full breakdown below.

It is worth noting that Borderlands 4 uses software-based Lumen (thanks to Unreal Engine 5) and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 uses voxel-based global illumination, which is based on voxel ray tracing. Global illumination, which you can spot in the likes of Nioh 3, can use ray tracing or even path tracing in the process, but it is pretty intensive, which is why so many games don't do it this way.

Many of the top games are more indie-focused and, therefore, less likely to employ such high-performance techniques. In any case, my table shows just how much people like more budget-friendly and easy-to-run indie games, too.

Thanks to the wider adoption of Unreal Engine 5, we might see more games with software-based ray tracing thanks to its implementation of Lumen. But Arc Raiders uses the engine and has hardware-level ray tracing.

Software ray tracing in Lumen is designed to be quick and simple; enabling hardware ray tracing in Lumen produces better quality results but with an expected drop in performance unless the hardware can hack it. Naturally, which techniques developers choose to implement will be based on what they think works for it, but software ray-traced Lumen is a default in UE5, so teams may not want to change that.

Interestingly, though, we saw a direct move away from hardware-based ray tracing for Elden Ring: Nightreign in 2025. Where Elden Ring got ray tracing post-launch, Elden Ring: Nightreign is still missing that option.

When the RTX 20 series was announced, its headline feature was the implementation of hardware-based ray tracing through RT cores, with the addition of DLSS practically being a footnote. Naturally, DLSS is a strong way of getting your rig to run hardware ray-traced games, even if it's a little underpowered.

Battlefield was pretty much a poster child for the technology, showing off its pretty reflections in Nvidia trailers. At the time, Lars Gustavsson, the senior producer, said "as technology has advanced, it has allowed us to continue to push for a more richer and more immersive experience". He argued, "Nvidia RTX technology allows us to draw much more realistic reflections. I think that players will be truly amazed to see real-time ray tracing in a big game."

Just last year, however, Battlefield 6 went entirely without it and aimed purely for playability. Technical director Christian Buhl said, "There are pros and cons to a lot of those different technologies … Our goal is for everything to be performant without a lot of extra stuff." He also said, "We want Battlefield 6 to run great without [DLSS], and we want to give you the option to use it if you want."

Battlefield 6 is a relatively easy-to-run game, and a pretty one at that. It foregoes ray tracing and shows that there's more than one way to skin the digital cat, or blow up the enemy's tank. I think many (myself included) would have assumed ray tracing as standard for Battlefield 6, but it looked great without it, and picked up a hefty player count in the process.

It's not just about the most popular Steam games either. Best story winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 doesn't have hardware-based ray tracing, nor did best action game winner Hollow Knight: Silksong—though that might've been a bit ridiculous. In fact, of our picks for the best games of the year, just one (Arc Raiders) uses hardware ray tracing.

This isn't to say that hardware-based ray tracing is dying. In 2025, we still saw it in:

• Assassin's Creed: Shadows
• Avowed
• Dying Light: the Best (post-launch)
• Doom: The Dark Ages (path tracing post-launch)
• Outer Worlds 2
• Cronos: The New Dawn
• FBC: Firebreak

It instead suggests that ray tracing has seemingly shifted from a thing you slap on the box to show off puddles, to a technique teams can use if it fits their style and direction. And even when it's not implemented on a hardware level, it can still find its way into pipeline somewhere.

We have seen some titles launch with ray tracing as the only option in recent years, like Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Black Myth: Wukong. This again feels like part of that shift, like ray tracing as a technique is a fundamental part of how the world is constructed.

The fact that so few of the most popular games have ray tracing is particularly strange, given that the range of cards capable of using the technique is only getting greater over time. We have three generations of Nvidia cards now, and even though they're getting tougher to buy at MSRP, there are tonnes out there in the wild, and in rigs.

And ray tracing isn't a gimmick. It often looks absolutely gorgeous, and it's simply a better way to go about a heap of effects in games. When I'm given the option and know I can handle it, I just can't help but turn it on. It helps that ray tracing is often easier to implement than bespoke reflection, which can certainly help with development time and establishing a firm artistic throughline.

However, this shift from ray tracing as standard in big-budget games could allow for better optimisation, especially if it's an optional toggle and not an afterthought. With the global memory crisis showing no signs of ending any time soon, hardware is getting harder to buy and more expensive, so any efforts to move away from standard practices in favour of what the team thinks the game needs is a win in my book, even if I sure would have loved to see Mewgenics with photorealistic puddles.

How low can you go? A simple question, but one with intriguing and occasionally hilarious results when applied to PC gaming and upscaling. The answer, apparently, is 77p or thereabouts. Yep, not 720p or any other triple-digit vertical res, but a very countable 77 vertical pixels. Yikes.

This all comes courtesy of YouTuber 2kliksphilip, who did the dirty work so you don't have to. He set himself the task of achieving the lowest possible base resolution in Red Dead Redemption 2 and then applying various upscaling technologies to compare the results.

Turns out they vary from absolutely awful to still-kinda-potatovision-but-better-than-you'd-probably-guess, if that's not an unforgivably excessive use hyphenation and compound adjectives.

Anywho, to go lower than 720p, for starters you actually have to edit Red Dead Redemption 2's config file. 2kliksphilip first tried 120p base resolution, then 90p. At this point, text and menu controls get very hard to read even given those elements are rendered at the upscaled resolution, which is double the vertical pixel count but still very low.

Next he tried 60p and the game crashes. Turns out there's a lower limit on game rendering. "The technology just isn't there yet to handle a game at this resolution," is 2kliksphilip's deadpan observation.

Apparently that hard limit for the upscaled output is 410 horizontal pixels. There's actually no vertical limit, but 410 pixels by one pixel would be fairly silly. So, 2kliksphilip settled on that 410 horizontal figure and a conventional aspect ratio, which translated into 77p base resolution.

In other words, we're talking 137 by 77 pixels, upscaled to 410 by 231 via DLSS 4 and then LS1 lossless upscaled to 3,690 by 2,079 to achieve the fullscreen potatovision. Funnily enough, at that setting there's significant stuttering thanks to the lossless scaling. So, of course he added frame gen to smooth things out while also increasing the latency. Perfect for running 77p on his RTX 5090. Huzzah!

Long term, 2kliksphilip's ambition is for Nvidia to remove all limits from DLSS upscaling and allow games to be scaled up from a single pixel. You know, just because. More seriously, as he says, it would be interesting to see just how low you can go before the whole thing really breaks down and the upscaled output isn't recognisable as a game.

Until then, it's all good, clean, potato-quality fun. Actually, 2kliksphilip also has a more serious, though also occasionally (and intentionally) hilarious, video covering all the current upscaling technologies scaling from 360p to 720p.

Turns out DLSS 4.5, using the L Preset, is by far the best and generates incredibly good results. In fact, they're pretty much indistinguishable from a 720p image downscaled from 4K, the latter being the gold standard for high-quality 720p rendering.

It is, frankly, incredible how well the DLSS 4.5 L preset resolves detail from the 360p base res; how a blocky, pixellated green mass somehow becomes individual blades of grass. Anywho, that video is also well worth a watch to see how it all works and is actually one of the best videos around for getting a feel for the competing upscaling techs.

The actual 77p reel? Well, it's also worth a watch, just for entertainment.

Nvidia's big thing for gamers^TM from CES this year has been the announcement and rapid release of DLSS 4.5. But, while all the noise I've seen has been about either confusion on the different model presets or the image stability enhancements (and occasional failures) it delivers, I've been surprised at just how much more computationally demanding it is. DLSS 4.5 can draw a ton more power from your graphics card.

Nick has been going to town testing DLSS 4.5 since the Nvidia App beta released, running presets across different games and across both an RTX 5090 and an RTX 3060 Ti, just to see how hefty the performance difference is between the GPU generations. While editing his article I've been scrubbing through the video benchmarks on the page, and while you're not always seeing a huge performance difference in terms of frame rates, you're often seeing a big delta between the power draw of the two DLSS models.

That there is a power differential at all isn't a surprise; when Nvidia introduced DLSS 4 at CES 2025 it explained the transformer model had allowed it to be more computationally expensive than the convolutional neural network model, and so it was using four times more compute than CNN. With DLSS 4.5, Nvidia has upped the ante again, and the godfather of DLSS, Brian Catanzaro, noted this year that it now uses five times more GPU compute.

But I didn't expect that to quite translate to the extra wattage levels Nick's been regularly seeing during his testing. Those Nvidia Tensor cores sure are working overtime now, and you can see in Cyberpunk 2077, especially with the RTX 5090, that sometimes the card is drawing as much as 50 W more than with just DLSS 4. It's most noticeable in the Model L (Ultra Performance) preset, but it's not because you're getting way higher frame rates—those are regularly lower precisely because it's more computationally demanding.

You can also see that same level of extra power draw in Spider Man Remastered and in Stalker 2 (though to a slightly lesser extent). What is worth noting here is that the Spidey and Stalker tests aren't quite like-for-like, while the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark is pretty much identical.

The RTX 3060 Ti, too, is often drawing more power with DLSS 4.5 than with DLSS 4, though obviously the lower power GPU isn't going to be sucking down an extra 50 W.

I mean, none of this is really going to stop me from using it. The extra level of stability the new transformer model regularly offers on an image basis does seem to be worth it, even if you are going to be paying for it. That's especially true if you're running at 4K—the Performance mode now has such impressive image quality at that level with a 1080p input resolution that I'd be happy shifting from Quality or Balanced to get those fps performance gains.

And, if you're rocking an RTX 5090 already then chances are you're not super concerned about the level of extra power draw on offer. Well, unless you fear for your toasty power cables anyways.

While we weren't expecting any major PC gaming announcements from Nvidia at this year's CES event, it was still somewhat disappointing that the main things we got were an update to DLSS and a new version of G-Sync Pulsar. But that's okay, because as it so happens, they're both actually pretty good. Well, in the case of the new DLSS 4.5, it's mostly good.

With version 4.5, Nvidia has introduced three new elements to its AI-powered suite of rendering technologies: a second generation transformer neural network for DLSS Super Resolution (aka upscaling), dynamic Multi Frame Generation (MFG), and a 6x mode. However, only the first one is available to use right now, as the new frame gen stuff won't make an appearance until spring.

How to use DLSS 4.5 in games

In order to force games to use the new upscaler, you'll need to use the 591.74 GeForce Game Ready drivers, plus the latest beta version of the Nvidia app (though a full release may be released by the time you're reading this). To get that, click on the Settings option in the Nvidia app, then select About, and finally check the option to opt into betas. You'll probably need to restart the app after that so that the program can check for an update.

It's important to note that DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution doesn't automatically work, as things currently stand, and you will need to enable it on a per-game basis. For example, if you want to use DLSS 4.5 instead of DLSS 4 in Black Myth: Wukong, head to the Graphics menu in the Nvidia app, select the game, and then scroll down to Driver Settings.

You should see an option labelled DLSS Override - Model Presets. By default, this will say 'Use the 3D application setting', but when you click on that, you'll be shown the following window.

If you don't want to mess about with DLSS neural network models/presets, just click on Latest, followed by the Apply button. The next time you dive into Wukong, it will be using the new transformer model for upscaling. Do note that it won't affect frame generation nor will it change how DLSS Ray Reconstruction works.

The latter is especially important to note because when you enable that in a game, it automatically uses its own version of DLSS Super Resolution, and for the time being, that still uses an older neural network. I'll say more about this later on.

DLSS Override also lets you select a specific model or preset, and Nvidia added two new ones in the new update. Model M is specifically optimised for DLSS Super Resolution Performance mode, while Model L is optimised for Ultra Performance mode when using 4K resolution. I've emphasised the point about 4K because while you can use it with 1440p or even 1080p, it doesn't look anywhere near as good as when enabled at 4K.

Think of these models/presets as being a specific recipe for cooking up an upscaled frame. One model might produce a sharper image compared to the others, but it might struggle more with fast-moving objects. Model M is actually the default choice for DLSS 4.5 (i.e. when you just select Latest in the override option), so for my testing, I've focused mostly on comparing that to the standard implementation of DLSS in a selection of games, which is DLSS 4, of course.

For testing, I've mostly used a GeForce RTX 5090, but I've done some runs on a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. The new transformer model is more complex than the first iteration, and far more so than the convolutional neural network in DLSS 2 and 3. That means there will be a performance hit in using DLSS 4.5, and the size of the impact will depend not only on what tier of GPU you're using, but how old it is, too.

The Tensor cores in RTX 20 and 30-series GPUs don't have native support for FP8 data formats (8-bit floating points), whereas RTX 40 and 50-series chips do. That means an RTX 3070 graphics card will see a larger performance hit than an RTX 4070 will when using DLSS 4.5.

The full specs for the test rig are: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition, Thermal Grizzly Der8enchtable, 32 GB Lexar Thor OC DDR5-6000 CL32, Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme, Thermaltake Toughpower PF3 1050 W, and Windows 11 25H2.

Make sure to expand each video below and set the resolution to its highest value to see the full comparison of DLSS 4 and DLSS 4.5 in each game.

Cyberpunk 2077

Starting off with the game that's almost always first in line to support Nvidia's latest AI tech, I used Cyberpunk 2077's built-in benchmark to have a consistent rendering sequence for comparing the upscaler models. Graphics settings were maxed out, including the use of path tracing (even for the old 3060 Ti!), with DLSS Ray Reconstruction disabled.

For the above video, 4K Performance mode was used, with the native DLSS 4 implementation on the left, and DLSS 4.5 using Model M on the right. If you watch the frame rates carefully, you'll notice that the extra workload of the new transformer isn't that much of a struggle for an RTX 5090, so the obvious question to ask is whether DLSS 4.5 is worth using or not.

The visual differences are very slight, but on the whole, DLSS 4.5 produces a more stable image, with less 'pixel crawling' on long thin objects (e.g. barbed wire on a fence), and it does a better job of retaining the colours of pixels, especially those which brightly contrast neighbouring pixels.

Performance mode upscaling at 4K means the frame is being rendered at 1080p (i.e. the vertical and horizontal resolutions are halved), but you honestly wouldn't be able to tell, unless you specifically searched for signs of the upscaling.

However, Performance mode upscaling at 1080p means the GPU is rendering an incredibly small 540p frame. That's so few pixels that even an RTX 3060 Ti can handle path-traced CP2077, though it's not quite hitting the golden mark of 60 fps.

The above video is 4K because I wanted to over-emphasise the differences in the upscalers; it doesn't look anywhere near as blurry as this on a native 1080p screen. Key things to watch out for in the video are the barman's jewellery, the outline of brightly-lit characters against dark backgrounds, and objects that have lots of thin/contrasted lines.

You should be able to see that while DLSS 4.5 does a better job of preserving pixel colours and reducing shimmering on edges, it's a little overzealous at handling fine lines (the barbed wire is less detailed until the camera is up close), as well as producing a more noticeable black 'halo' around bright objects against dark backgrounds.

On the other hand, DLSS 4.5 is less blurry than DLSS 4, and does a better job of preserving details of dark objects against bright backgrounds.

Interestingly, the performance hit of using DLSS 4.5 on the RTX 3060 Ti is very small, so much so that it's not worth worrying about, though that's partly down to the fact that the old GPU is heavily limited by the use of path tracing. On lighter graphics settings, the frame rate difference is likely to be more noticeable.

Switching to Ultra Performance mode and the Model L preset, the real strength of DLSS 4.5 becomes evident. The overall stability of the rendered frames (rendered at 720p) is much better than with DLSS 4, with shimmering and the flickering of distance edges greatly reduced.

The preservation of details and colours is superior, too, and while the overall quality of Ultra Performance mode isn't quite good enough for my tastes to warrant using it all the time, the fact that you can go from 720p to 4K and still look this good feels very impressive.

With the RTX 3060 Ti set to run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p, Ultra Performance mode DLSS means it's only rendering at 360p. That's lower than most gaming setups of the early 1990s, which typically ran at 480p. It's remarkable that any kind of usable image can be produced from so few pixels.

That said, I wouldn't want to play the game like this, despite the increase in frame rate from using Ultra Performance. DLSS 4.5 produces a better overall image than DLSS 4, again with less shimmering and flickering, but it's hardly what you'd call a treat for your eyes. The performance impact of using Model L (which is a little heavier than that of Model M) is more evident here, but losing around 10% of the frame rate isn't worth complaining about.

Black Myth: Wukong

As with Cyberpunk 2077, I tested Black Myth: Wukong at maximum graphics settings, including path tracing. The game doesn't support DLSS Ray Reconstruction, so there was no need to worry about that.

I chose this particular game because, by default, it produces an overly sharp final image. That can be scaled back in the game's graphics settings, but I left the slider alone as I wanted to see just how much sharper DLSS 4.5's output is compared to DLSS 4's.

The answer? It's too sharp, or at the very least, too sharp for this game on default settings. At first glance, you might think that DLSS 4.5 is retaining more detail than DLSS 4, but to my eyes, the level of sharpness is somewhat distracting. It's not a deal-breaking issue, though, as you can counter the problem by knocking the sharpening slide in the game's menu down a notch or two.

On the plus side, the game looks less washed out with DLSS 4.5, and in the later stages of the built-in benchmark run, you'll notice that the leaves and needles on trees look fuller than those in the DLSS 4 footage.

It's the same story with the RTX 3060 Ti at 1080p, though the excessive sharpening isn't quite as bad, due to the lower frame resolution. It's still noticeable, as is the performance hit from using the new transformer model, but where I'd want to tackle the sharpening at 4K on an RTX 5090, I'd be happy to play Black Myth: Wukong like this on an RTX 3060 Ti.

Running the tests again with Ultra Performance mode and Model L produces some unexpected results. Look at the trees in the background as the camera moves under the bridge, in the opening stages of the benchmark run. DLSS 4.5 makes quite a mess of them, whereas they're fine with DLSS 4.

That's being caused by the excessive sharpening, but whereas it's easy to counter this in Performance mode, I never managed to fully get rid of it in Ultra Performance mode. Even though DLSS 4.5 preserves details better than DLSS 4, I'd stick with the older upscaler in this game. It's not worth the hassle, nor the performance drop, regardless of how small it is.

However, at 1080p, the flickering and shimmering of the trees vanish, and the overall frame quality is better with DLSS 4.5 than with DLSS 4. Not that the game is actually playable like this, as the use of path tracing and full-blown Unreal Engine 5 Nanites is just too much for the little 3060 Ti. Even at 360p rendering.

Stalker 2

It's perhaps unfair to test another Unreal Engine 5 game, but where Black Myth: Wukong uses every graphics trick and feature of Epic's software package, Stalker 2 sticks with the performance-friendly version of Lumen global illumination (i.e. 'software' ray tracing), though it's still a serious GPU workout at maximum quality settings.

As there's no built-in benchmark in Stalker 2, I resorted to trying my best to have near-identical runs to make comparisons easier. It's fair to say that I wasn't overly successful in this aspect, but there's still enough in the footage to judge the relative merits of DLSS 4.5 to DLSS 4.

The main things to look out for are the telephone cables, suspended between poles, and the foliage on trees (especially as the camera moves closer to them). With DLSS 4, they both lack fine detail, but with DLSS 4.5, that problem is greatly reduced. It's not absolutely perfect, though Stalker 2's assets can sometimes look like this even at native rendering or with DLAA.

One thing of interest is that the game is mostly CPU-limited with these settings (4K Performance mode), as indicated by the lack of difference in performance and the relatively low GPU utilisation. However, you can see that the RTX 5090 uses considerably more power with DLSS 4.5. That's the extra Tensor core workload of the new transformer model in action.

At 1080p, you can more easily see just how much better DLSS 4.5 is at handling the telephone cables and foliage than DLSS 4 (don't forget that the 4K video is exaggerating how blurry the original 1080p footage looks). While it's not 100% perfect, the newer upscaler is clearly the one to use in this game, despite the marked performance hit.

I haven't included any footage of Ultra Performance for one simple reason: It's basically the same as with Performance mode, just with slightly worse results. Neither the RTX 3060 Ti nor the RTX 5090 run any faster with the highest level of upscaling, due to Stalker 2's heavy CPU loads, and the reduction in graphics fidelity means that Ultra Performance isn't really worth considering for this game.

Even though I've only shown you the results of DLSS 4.5 from three situations, it should be obvious now that the impact of the improvements that the new upscaler brings is heavily dependent on what game is used. For example, below is Spider-Man Remastered, and you'll be pushed to notice any difference at all between DLSS 4.5 and DLSS 4.

The same is true with Doom: The Dark Ages, where I even enabled 4x Multi Frame Generation to highlight any potential flaws in the new upscaler and Model L. While the 2nd-gen transformer model isn't used in Nvidia's frame interpolator, the system does rely on two rendered frames to generate extra ones. That means any glitches in those could be potentially magnified in AI-created frames.

I know it's hard to compare two pieces of footage, where the camera is swinging about all over the place, but pausing the video shows that both iterations of DLSS are perfectly acceptable in this game.

One important thing to note here is that DLSS Ray Reconstruction was disabled for these tests, and not because the system doesn't use the new transformer. It's because overriding DLSS 4.5 onto Doom: The Dark Ages causes almost all of the rendering to be cut out if DLSS RR is used at the same time.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the game just ignores the override, but not so here. So, without Ray Reconstruction, Doom: The Dark Ages has to use Nvidia's standard denoiser, which isn't anywhere near as good, and any speckles and bright spots you can see are because of that, not DLSS 4.5.

DLSS 4 vs DLSS 4.5—The verdict

So, what to make of DLSS 4.5? On the whole, I prefer it to DLSS 4. I've quickly tested it in a range of other games, and while none of them have made me think 'Wow, this is so much better than DLSS 4!', the overall image quality is better when taking everything into account. Some games show little to no gains, whereas others feel a lot crisper and clearer (DLSS 4.5's fondness for sharpening coming into play in those cases).

I've seen commentary from some hardware reviewers that seems to suggest that DLSS 4.5 Ultra Performance is now so good that you can use it all the time with 4K gaming, but my own testing suggests otherwise. It is better than before, but Performance mode is simply superior, and I'll be sticking with that myself.

Is the new Performance mode model good enough to switch from Quality or Balanced mode? Well, it depends. Objectively, those modes will still result in better graphics fidelity than 50% upscaling, but subjectively, the differences can feel so slight that it's well worth using Performance mode over anything else, just to enjoy a better frame rate.

However, as DLSS's neural networks were trained on very high resolution game footage, the output of the upscaler does get better, the greater the resolution of your monitor. At 4K, Performance mode is absolutely superb, regardless of which DLSS version you use, but at 1080p or 1440p, you're probably better off switching to DLSS 4.5.

There is one downside to using DLSS 4.5 that I haven't mentioned yet, and it's the fact that the new transformer model really works the GPU's Tensor cores hard. For example, at one point in the Ultra Performance tests in Cyberpunk 2077, the RTX 5090 was using almost 50 W more power with DLSS 4.5 than DLSS 4.

It might seem a little odd to see a GPU using more power to generate a lower frame rate, but that's the nature of AI-powered upscaling. You get astonishing visuals from just a handful of pixels, but it doesn't come free.

Regardless of this, the good thing about DLSS 4.5 is that it's very easy to try it out yourself. Just update the Nvidia app, flip a few settings, and then test away to your heart's content. Now, we just need to wait for Nvidia to update DLSS Ray Reconstruction, as well as DLSS Multi Frame Generation, and then we'll be all set to use DLSS 4.5 everywhere.

Call them FSR 4, FSR Redstone, FSR Whatever, AMD's latest generation of AI-enhanced upscaling technologies are definitely a major step forward. Which makes it a great pity that they're not available for older generations of AMD GPUs, like RDNA 3. The just possibly good news is that, in a new interview, AMD has left the door ever so slightly ajar for that happening in future.

For many, the frustration is that many of these new upscaling features can be made to run on RDNA 3 graphics and indeed, community-based hacks have achieved just that, albeit with mixed results. So why won't AMD give that effort some official support?

Speaking with PC World, Andrej Zdravkovic, Senior Vice President at AMD and the guy responsible for various driver features, including FSR upscaling technologies, explained that the lack of official support for the latest FSR tech on RDNA 3 basically comes down to the difficulty in delivering a consistent experience.

But when asked if there could be "an opportunity to make a beta version of Redstone that will run on RDNA 3," his answer is at least a little promising.

"That's currently not in the plan, but thanks for the hint. We may want to think about something like that and provide that to people who want to play with that. The challenge is always how to clearly define that," Zdravkovic says.

Without being overly optimistic, that's definitely not a "no."

Of course, there are good technical reasons why it's tricky to get the new features running on older GPUs. There are hardware differences between RDNA 3 GPUs, like the Radeon RX 7800 XT and newer RDNA 4 graphics cards, including the RX 9070 XT when it comes to machine learning acceleration. This means it's simply not possible to achieve the same performance on the older GPU generation. The code can be made to run, just not as well.

At what point "not as well" becomes bad enough that the feature becomes worthless is a subjective call, of course. So, the point being made here is that maybe it would be nice to allow end users to make that call.

AMD's concern is no doubt a combination of not wanting to deal with support issues thrown up by a half-baked and poorly performing set of features and, likewise, concerns over the impression it will give of overall product quality.

Of course, what would be really interesting is if AMD could add a little of its technical nous to supporting newer upscaling tech on older GPUs and get it all running a bit better than the community efforts have managed thus far.

For now, AMD isn't committing to anything like that or, indeed, committing to anything at all. So all I can say is, here's hoping!

Perhaps to the surprise of no one, Nvidia's time at CES 2026 was all about one thing: AI. That said, PC gaming wasn't entirely ignored, as DLSS 4.5 was ninja-launched with the promise of '4K 240 Hz path traced gaming'. However, DLSS is still AI-based and in a Q&A session with members of the press, CEO Jensen Huang made it clear that artificial intelligence isn't just for improving performance, it's how graphics needs to be done in the future.

This much we already know, as Nvidia banged its neural rendering drum starting at last year's CES and then throughout 2025, and it wasn't the only graphics company to do so. Microsoft announced the addition of cooperative vectors to Direct3D, which is pretty much required to implement neural rendering in games, and AMD's FSR Redstone is as AI-based as anything from Intel and Nvidia.

So, when PC World's Adam Patrick Murray asked Huang, "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?", it wasn't surprising that Nvidia's co-founder avoided the first question entirely and skipped straight to the topic of AI.

"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."

He then expanded with some examples of what he meant by this: "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."

The keyword here is generate. If one wishes to be pedantic, all graphics are generated, either through rasterization or neural networks. It's all just a massive heap of mathematics, broken down into logic operations on GPUs, crunching through endless streams of binary values. But there is one important difference with neural rendering, and it's that it requires far less input data to generate the same graphical output as rasterization.

Fire up the original Crysis from 2007, and all those beautiful visuals are generated from lists of vertices, piles of texture maps, and a veritable mountain of resources that are created during the process of rendering (e.g. depth buffers, G-buffers, render targets, and so on). That's still the case almost 20 years on, and the size and quantity of those resources are now truly massive.

As DLSS Super Resolution proves, though, they don't need to be in the era of AI graphics. Nvidia's upscaling system works by reducing the frame resolution for rendering, scaling it back up once finished, and then applying a neural network to the frame to clean up artefacts. One idea behind neural rendering is take that a step further and to use lower resolution assets in the first place, and generate higher quality stuff as and when required.

Does it ultimately matter how a game's graphics are produced as long as they look absolutely fine and run smoothly? I dare say most people will say 'no', but we don't have any games right now that use neural rendering for any part of the graphics pipeline, other than upscaling and/or frame generation. Everything else is still rasterization (even if ray tracing is used, raster is still there behind the scenes).

That means GeForce GPUs of the future, both near and far, will still need to progress in rasterization to ensure games of tomorrow look and run as intended. But with Nvidia being dead set on neural rendering (I don't think Huang said "That’s the way graphics ought to be" lightly), have RTX graphics cards reached a plateau in that respect?

Does the company now expect that all generational performance increments will come from better DLSS? Will GPUs of the future be nothing more than ASICs for AI? How would such chips process older graphics routines? Is PC gaming heading backwards in time to the era when you needed a new GPU for every major new game, because previous chips didn't support the tech inside?

Answers that generate more questions than they resolve certainly aren't a bad thing, but in this case, I wish Nvidia would give us a much clearer picture as to its roadmap for gaming GPUs and how it plans to support games of the past, present, and future.

Nvidia's new DLSS 4.5 announcement comes with the promise of 4K 240 Hz path-traced gameplay, and you know there's only one way we're going to get there right now: AI. With a combination of a second generation transformer model and an expanded Multi Frame Generation feature offering up to 6x frame gen, the green team reckons it can deliver "incredible 240 Hz+ smoothness" in some of the most graphically intensive games around.

Though, I'm guessing your mileage may vary.

MFG (or Multi Frame Generation if you're not into the whole brevity thing) was introduced at CES last year as one of the fancy new features of the RTX Blackwell GPU generation. It follows the now-familiar pattern of the original DLSS Frame Generation style of using a mixture of frame interpolation, optical flow calculations, and AI image generation to smooth out your gameplay.

Except with MFG on RTX Blackwell chips you're adding in up to three completely generated frames in between each actually rendered one, and now using a new optical flow AI model instead of dedicated accelerator hardware with an enhanced display engine to help frame pacing.

The headline-grabbing update for the RTX Blackwell architecture at CES this year, however, is that Nvidia is convinced it can slip up to five extra frames between each rendered frame to give you 4K gaming at 240 Hz even with path-traced games.

Whether it can convince you will be the key, however, because that's a bold claim, and I can already feel many a gamer bristling at the thought of upping the ante of frame generation to such an extent. Even as someone who enjoys frame gen on a beefy enough GPU, I will admit my credulity is feeling as stretched as yours right now. But Nvidia's banking on the new transformer model powering the DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution upscaler to help fix the visual artifacts associated with frame generation.

We're promised better temporal stability, reduced ghosting, and smoother edges with DLSS 4.5 thanks to a mix of that second-gen transformer model as well as improved training for the model itself. At last year's RTX Blackwell CES event Nvidia's VP of applied deep learning research, Brian Catanzaro noted that it has a supercomputer "with many 1000s of our latest and greatest GPUs, that is running 24/7, 365 days a year improving DLSS." And Nvidia's had another 12 months making that training dataset even bigger and has made it even better at analysing just where its upscaler is going wrong.

"When the DLSS model fails it looks like ghosting or flickering or blurriness," Catanzaro tells us. "And, you know, we find failures in many of the games we're looking at and we try to figure out what's going on, why does the model make the wrong choice about how to draw the image there?

"We then find ways to augment our training data set. Our training data sets are always growing. We're compiling examples of what good graphics looks like and what difficult problems DLSS needs to solve.

"We put those in our training set, and then we retrain the model, and then we test across hundreds of games in order to figure out how to make DLSS better. So, that's the process."

There's also more compute being used for DLSS now than even the previous generation of transformer model, which in itself used four times more compute than the old convolutional neural network (CNN) models which DLSS used to be built on. We're told the second-gen transformer now uses five times more compute (presumably than CNN), including greater contextual awareness and smarter pixel sampling.

This is essentially where the transformer models are smarter than the old CNN one. CNN models were fine for analysing big images, but transformer models are better at looking at the finer pixel details and the data and means you can spend compute resources more efficiently. Though in its first iteration it was certainly far from perfect, as you can see from my own testing of the 1st gen transformer model.

"The idea behind transformer models," Catanzaro explains, "is that attention—how you spend your compute and how you analyse data—should be driven by the data itself. And so the neural network should learn how to direct its attention in order to look at the parts of the data that are most interesting or most useful to make decisions.

"And, when you think about DLSS, you can imagine that there are a lot of opportunities to use attention to make a neural graphics model smarter, because some parts of the image are inherently more challenging."

Nvidia must believe it has made the graphics model smart enough now that it can get past those occasional visual issues and get away with turning the MFG dial up to 6x and not end up with a laggy artifact-ridden gaming experience.

You will still need to have an RTX 50-series GPU capable enough of delivering at 60 fps in your chosen path-traced game to be able to take advantage of the extra frame gen levels, however. Because even if you're getting hugely inflated frame rate figures that is all for naught if your PC latency gets into triple figures.

I've experienced that throughout all of my RTX Blackwell GPU testing from last year, where it became clear further down the stack just how limited MFG gets when the input frame rate is low and PC latency is high.

That's the same situation for any level of frame generation—whether on Nvidia or AMD—and it's certainly not the perfect panacea for poor gaming performance it might have at first appeared; you still need to have a whole heap of graphical grunt to make it a functional experience.

But if you do have that power already humming away in your rig, then another new feature being added into the Nvidia App sometime in the springtime will be of interest. Dynamic Multi Frame Generation allows you to use the DLSS Override feature of the app to either tie the Dynamic MFG feature to the maximum refresh rate of your screen or to a custom fixed level.

This then adjusts the level of MFG you require to hit that frame rate automatically, with Nvidia demonstrating what that might mean if you're lucky enough to have an RTX 5090 running in a selection of games. The example of Black Myth Wukong running at 246 fps on an RTX 5090 at 4K with path tracing and DLSS 4.5 running at 6x MFG looks very impressive, more so that it's reportedly doing so with just a PC latency of 53 ms.

That should be eminently playable, and I'm looking forward to testing that out in person when the feature is fully released to the public at large. Especially just to check out the impact of that improved transformer model and what effect it has on the frame gen issues that have put many a gamer off using the feature in the past.

But, outside of MFG, the exciting thing is that the new version of DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution isn't tied to the RTX 50-series graphics cards, meaning any RTX GPU will be able to take advantage of the new model. And because of the DLSS Override feature of the Nvidia App, there will be a ton of games—reportedly over 400 at launch—that will be able to use it right away.

That ought to mean every Nvidia RTX owner's AI-powered gaming will get that bit smarter, clearer, and sharper as 2026 goes on. But whether DLSS 4.5 is enough to convince a sceptical public that Dynamic Multi Frame Gen can be a feature you enable automatically, as upscaling has arguably become, will remain to be seen.

When it comes to GPUs and graphics technology, I know what I'd like to see in 2026. Super-modern processors that are a substantial leap forward in terms of performance, capabilities, and affordability. We won't get that, of course, because we didn't get that this year. Or last year. But there is something GPU-related that can be a lot better, and that's frame generation.

Ever since GPU upscaling and frame generation first appeared (DLSS 1.0 in 2019, DLSS 3.0 in 2022), I've always held the opinion that if you couldn't tell they were working, other than just from the performance lift, everyone would be happily using them by default. With the first iteration of both technologies and their corresponding alternatives from AMD and Intel, you could very much tell they were being used, and that's only served to tarnish their reputations.

However, when it comes to upscaling these days, it's about as close to perfection as you can get. Assuming it's been properly implemented into a game, of course. When it's all working as intended, Quality or Balanced upscaling at most resolutions does an incredible job, and I always enable it in every game that supports the most recent versions.

Alas, I can't say the same about frame generation. Don't get me wrong: Nvidia's Multi-Frame Generation in DLSS 4 is extremely good, but even in games that are the poster child for DLSS (e.g. Doom: The Dark Ages, Cyberpunk 2077), enabling frame gen requires a conscious decision to ignore its flaws and limitations.

You have to accept that it demands a base frame rate of, ideally, 60 fps before you enable it, to ensure that the added input latency inherent to frame generation is at an agreeable level. And while you're unlikely to notice on-screen gobbledegook when you're gaming at over 120 fps, the neural networks used in DLSS 4 MFG, FSR 4 Frame Generation, and XeSS-MFG will get things wrong at times.

DLSS Quality upscaling + 3X frame generation
Ryzen 7 9800X3D, GeForce RTX 5090, 4K, Ultra preset

There's no way around the latency issue with frame interpolation, unless you start delving into the world of predicting input changes (which is a whole different tech), but I can live with it in certain games. What I can't live with is when frame gen turns my perfectly rendered and upscaling graphics into a wonky, blurry mess.

If Nvidia, et al can properly sort out the visual quality of frame generation in 2026, then I'll be happy to use it as intended: a simple switch to seriously boost performance in games that comfortably hit 60 fps. My worry is that we won't because GPU companies can't usually sell more of their latest graphics cards this way. Instead, they tend to use tech like ray tracing or performance metrics such as FP32 TFLOPS to promote new GPUs.

FSR 4 Frame Generation being tied to RDNA 4 GPUs is the exception for AMD, not the norm, though Nvidia ties pretty much every new DLSS feature to a certain GeForce series. At least Intel's AI-powered interpolator works on every Arc card.

However, we're almost certainly not going to see any new GPU architecture in 2026, even if Nvidia Super updates miraculously appear or Intel actually launches its big Battlemage G31-based card, they'll have no actual physical changes inside the chips.

Nvidia's RTX 60-series is at least 14 months away, as RTX Blackwell only launched in January of this year. AMD's RDNA 4 architecture followed a few months later, and while Intel got the jump on both of them, releasing its Battlemage chips in December 2024, there's no sign of any plans for a successor to make an appearance next year.

This leaves the door open for everyone to stay in GPU news headlines by seriously updating their frame generation tech. Upscaling is about as good as it's ever going to get—refinements to the neural networks are all that's left to do—so frame interpolation is perfectly placed to get a nice overhaul.

FSR Performance upscaling + 2X frame generation
Ryzen 9 9900X, Radeon RX 9070 XT, 4K, RT Ultra preset

While I genuinely hope we do, I fear that we're only likely to be fed more AI stuff that has limited appeal or applications. For example, AMD has only just released its FSR 4 Frame Generation, so it's going to be concentrating on finalising FSR Radiance Cache for developers. Nvidia will probably push neural rendering a lot more in 2026, and Intel… well, who knows with Intel.

Right now, I'm not interested in any of that. Actually, I am, but that's just because I'm a graphics nerd, and have been for my entire computing life. But as a PC gamer, I just want fully-functional, works-as-intended performance boosters. I've already got solid upscalers like DLSS and FSR 4, and I've perfectly low-latency switches like Reflex. Now, I just want the same level of quality from frame generation.

It's not like I'm asking for cheap RAM or anything like that.

AMD has been teasing us with its next-gen FSR 4 "Redstone" upscaling tech since May. But finally, belatedly, we have a launch date. Redstone will be released on December 10. Huzzah!

Now, as we've detailed on multiple occasions, FSR 4 Redstone is AMD's latest AI-enhanced upscaling platform. Broadly speaking, it's an effort to catch up with Nvidia's equivalent DLSS technologies, which have been ahead of AMD's curve when it comes to the use of machine learning in general, along with some specific capabilities that AMD lacks.

The headline enhancement is more fully leveraging machine learning for upscaling, which is why, as we understand it and as the new AMD teaser trailer implies, Redstone will be tied to AMD's latest RDNA 4 GPUs, such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT. Only the latest AMD graphics architecture has sufficient hardware matrix math ability to run the AI code. Or so the story likely goes, anyway.

Slightly confusingly, AMD has also said that Redstone can run on Nvidia GPUs on account of being developed using code from a ROCm project known as AMD ML2CODE (Machine Learning to Code). FSR Redstone's neural rendering technology can therefore be "converted" into compute shader code. "This means that FSR Redstone's neural rendering core can also run on GPUs made by other companies," said Chris Hall, Senior Director of Software Development and head of AMD's ROCm project.

Whatever, while AMD has certainly improved its FSR upscaling over time, the general consensus is that FSR image quality lags behind that of Nvidia's competing DLSS upscaler. Could Redstone close the gap, or even put AMD ahead? We'll find out on December 10.

At the same time, AMD has also lacked certain features to compete with DLSS. One obvious example is an answer to Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction technology, which essentially accelerates and improves the image quality of various ray-tracing rendering techniques. AMD's equivalent is known as Ray Regeneration and comes as part of Redstone. As Andy mentioned a few days ago, Ray Regeneration is debuting in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, before the rest of the Redstone feature set is released.

AMD has also been slow to implement a full AI-enhanced frame generation technology. AMD does actually have that now in FSR 4, but it's expected to be enhanced for Redstone.

Another major new feature for Redstone will be neural radiance caching, which accelerates path-tracing by "continually learning how light bounces in a scene to predict and store indirect lighting."

Anywho, we've not long to wait now to see exactly what FSR Redstone is like. Will it match Nvidia's latest DLSS visual goodies? Will it be branded FSR 5? Or maybe FSR 4.1ai Max? All will be revealed in a few weeks.

Best graphics card 2025

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1. AMD Radeon RX 9070

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2. AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB

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3. Intel Arc B570

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4. Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

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5. Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090

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One of the best things about DLSS, or any upscaling tech for that matter, is the ability to adjust it to your preference. The image quality difference between Performance and Quality can often be dramatic, as it substantially changes the resolution of the game running underneath. The more pixels for the upscaler to work with, the better the graphical quality overall, for the most part. But if you want more performance on less-powerful, yet still-supported hardware? Simply back it down towards a lower setting.

Which is why it's pretty astonishing that Ninja Gaiden 4, the latest entry in the long-running series, has reduced it to a simple enabled/disabled option. As spotted by X user @Sebasti66855537, a thread on the Steam discussion page highlights the issue—and has received a disappointing response from the developer.

"At this time, DLSS options aren’t adjustable directly from the in-game graphics menu. To tweak DLSS modes (e.g. Performance/Quality), please open the NVIDIA App/GeForce Experience and adjust the DLSS settings there" say the devs.

However, another X user has spotted that the game's config.ini file allows you to change the scaling with a simple tweak, as expected. It's just not been linked to the UI in the settings menu, which strikes as a pretty jaw-dropping omission. And as for the dev's suggestion that you can override the settings in the Nvidia App instead? This appears to be purely for the Steam release, as the Nvidia App doesn't detect the Game Pass version.

Not to mention, it seems a little rich to expect players to jump out of a game to override settings that are already easily adjustable, just missing from the settings UI itself.

Treating DLSS like a blunt instrument has, unsurprisingly, not gone down well with the Ninja Gaiden community. Being a $70 game, many have complained that it's something of a glaring omission, reducing DLSS down to a catch-all option rather than something that can be tweaked to adjust the performance/image quality settings to suit their preferences.

According to commenters in the Steam thread, DLSS Enabled appears to set the upscaler to Quality, which isn't likely to tank the image quality too hard at most normal resolutions, at least. And, it must be said, the game has relatively light hardware requirements to begin with, although it's interesting that the minimum and recommended specs are both based on 1080p 60 fps gameplay with varying FSR settings.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot. AMD's upscaler is also present, and can be adjusted in the settings menu. Just not DLSS. Which strikes as something of a brave move, given that the most recent Steam survey shows the vast majority of players are still using Nvidia cards, despite the perceived popularity of AMD's recent efforts.

Our Nick captured the above video, showing some (rather confusingly named) FSR adjustments. That flashing between setting changes isn't a capture issue, by the way. The game appears to restart the renderer any time you mess with the upscaling, causing a jarring black screen.

It's all a bit of a mess, isn't it? While our Wes found a few things to like about Ninja Gaiden 4, he described it as giving the impression of "a band performing a workmanlike cover song: they're playing the right notes, but it just doesn't grip the soul in quite the same way." In this case, however, it'd still be nice to properly tune the instruments, no?

Battlefield 6 is finally here, and I think it's fair to say that expectations are high regarding its performance. The developers have made much noise about prioritising optimisation over best-in-class graphics, including eschewing ray traced lighting for a traditional baked-in approach, and the minimum specs list the dusty-old RTX 2060 and RX 5600 XT as all that's needed for 1080p 30 fps gameplay.

Which, given some of the releases so far this year, must come as a welcome relief for those of you running less than top-end hardware. I've had a chance to perform some early testing of Battlefield 6's performance on two of Nvidia's mid-to-upper-mid range GPUs, the RTX 4070 and RTX 5070 Ti, and I've got even better news for you—not only does the game look great, but it seems mercifully light on modern graphics cards at everything but the very top setting.

Which is appropriately named "Overkill". Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Jumping into the Battlefield 6 graphics settings screen reveals two preset menus for Performance and Graphics Quality, both of which default to Auto. The first switches between Balanced, Performance and Custom settings, while the second allows individual preset selections between Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and the aforementioned super-duper Overkill setting.

Below that is an option to tweak the graphics settings individually, with a decent selection of granular controls. Sun shadows and regular shadows can be adjusted separately, along with a healthy list of the usual suspects like texture quality, mesh adjustments, and reflections.

As for upscaling, it's tucked behind the Advanced menu, alongside a frame rate limiter and an option for a built-in performance overlay, among others. DLSS, FSR and XeSS are all supported, although without specific version numbers. However, as you might expect, Battlefield uses the latest version of Nvidia's upscaling tech, DLSS 4, complete with Multi Frame Generation support.

A peek inside the .dll files reveals what appears to be FSR 3.1 for AMD upscaling duties—although I'm running pre-release code, and FSR 4 is expected to be available at launch. As for XeSS? It's the latest version, which means Battlefield 6 is about as bang-up-to-date with upscalers as one could reasonably expect.

So, it's a strong start. There are enough options here to sink a Battlefield-sized, err, battleship, and that's before you start getting into the sound, gameplay, and control menus. I can't help but feel the Battlefield Studios team has taken the kitchen sink approach here, but the inclusion of simple graphics presets certainly removes some of the guesswork for the less tech-inclined.

Battlefield 6 performance

Given that Battlefield 6 is primarily a multiplayer shooter, setting up a repeatable performance test scenario has been something of a challenge. However, I have noticed that campaign performance and multiplayer performance seems very much the same, with one odd exception.

The campaign levels start off with a scripted, non-player controlled in-engine sequence, with significantly lower performance than the actual gameplay itself. The effect is most noticeable in the third mission, which starts out with troops being deployed from an aircraft carrier into beach landing vehicles, before control is handed over to the player as the assault begins.

At 4K Ultra settings using the RTX 5070 Ti with no upscaling or Frame Generation enabled, the frame rate hovers around the mid-50s, before instantly jumping to well over 80 fps the second you take control. I've not included these lows in my charts as they're not representative of actual gameplay performance, but it's something to be aware of nonetheless.

Still, look at those high frame rate figures overall. The RTX 5070 Ti is a very capable card, and one I use for 4K gaming on the daily, but almost always with some significant DLSS and Frame Generation help. The fact that it can keep Battlefield 6 above 60 fps at 4K Native with none of the AI-enhanced doohickeys enabled is pretty telling as to how much work has gone into the optimisation process here.

The exception, however, is the Ultra++ preset, or Overkill. This has reliably caused a significant frame rate drop in all of my testing scenarios (particularly at 4K, where it nearly halves the RTX 5070 Ti's average figures compared to 1440p), and looks to my eyes downright identical to the Ultra setting proper.

My advice? Unless you're running something truly beefy like the RTX 5080 or RTX 5090, I'd stick to Ultra, safe in the knowledge that you're gaining a whole lot of frames for virtually zero visual difference.

Turning our attention to the RTX 4070, it's pleasing to see that a previous generation mid-range card is capable of delivering excellent frame rates in most scenarios without a dose of DLSS. Personally, I've got no issue whatsoever with using Nvidia's upscaling tech in most of my games, but if you're the sort of person who demands all of your pixels be of the straight-rasterised variety, I'd say this is the game for you.

Using the Ultra preset at 4K Native results in a 56 fps average, which is darn good going given that 1440p gaming is much more suited to the RTX 4070's talents. Speaking of which, a 100 fps average result at 1440p with no upscaling help is downright brilliant. And as for 1080p? You guessed it, Battlefield 6 flies on this particular card—keeping itself well over 100 fps at all times and averaging out at 136 frames per second overall.

And, should you choose to enable upscaling and Frame Generation, be prepared for the frame rate to soar into the upper stratosphere. The RTX 5070 Ti, for example, managed to reach a 251 fps average at 1440p in my demanding test scenario—a figure so impressive, I repeated my run many times over to make sure I hadn't screwed up a setting.

In terms of overall experience, it's been remarkably smooth sailing on both GPUs. BF6 performs a shader optimisation pass on first boot (one of the quickest I've seen in recent memory, actually), and as a result I've experienced exactly one micro-stutter in the entirety of my testing.

So small of a stutter, in fact, that if I'd blinked at the right moment, I would have missed it. The updated Frostbite engine running underneath feels rock-solid under duress, and given that Battlefield 6 likes to blow up every single bit of scenery at a moment's notice, there's a whole lot of duress to work with.

And while we're talking performance, I'd also like to take a moment to appreciate the built-in overlay, which can be configured to provide a frame time graph, of all things. It's the most comprehensive performance monitor I've ever seen integrated into a game, and although I've been using our usual third-party software to gather my figures, I can't help but be impressed by how much effort has been put into its implementation.

Image quality

Ah, now I've gone and done it. Screenshots. My pre-release campaign adventures were cut short (it's only been available at certain times during the test period), so I've had to make do and use shots of a base in one of the multiplayer maps instead, letting my squad down in the process and leading to many unnecessary deaths. Sorry, folks. I've got a job to do.

Anyway, something to bear in mind here is that Battlefield 6 looks truly stunning in motion, in a way that screenshots fail to capture. And, it must be said, at no point during my adventures have I felt that ray tracing would have improved the experience, even though I'm an advocate of the tech overall.

I mean, just look at the state of it. Battlefield 6 is quite simply one of the best-looking multiplayer shooters I've ever set my eyes upon—and that's before you get to the reactivity of the environments. While not all scenery is destructible, it can certainly feel like you're constantly surrounded by flying debris—and I've often found myself caught with my metaphorical trousers down thanks to supposedly-solid cover smashing to pieces under heavy fire.

And again, it's the stability that has impressed me most. Even with the world quite literally coming down around my ears, a glance at the frame rate monitor shows that the performance is barely affected by all the chaos, a genuinely impressive result no matter which way you look at it.

It's worth mentioning that my CPU is fairly powerful, being an eight-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, but it's hardly a monster compared to some. Those of you with older processors may see more of a drop as buildings crumble to dust around you, but it bodes well that a previous gen mid-range chip is more than capable of keeping up with the physics requirements.

And I may be getting out of my remit here, but I'd like to talk about the sound design for a second. The weapons have some incredibly chonky sound effects, which, combined with the visual recoil, really adds to the immersion. It's a crunchy, bangy, smashy shooter that sucks you into its world, all the while being far less hardware demanding than its overall quality suggests—and, as a technical achievement, I think that's worth highlighting.

Analysis

After all the furore surrounding Borderlands 4's performance woes last month—and a year that seems filled with games designed to give mid-range machines a thorough kicking—it's truly refreshing to test something that feels like it's been designed from the ground up with smooth frame rates in mind.

I'd like to have tried out some lower-end GPUs to find out what Battlefield 6 runs like on more budget hardware, but alas, time constraints have had the best of me once more. Looking over these figures, however, I feel confident in saying that if your machine can keep up with the pace of most modern games, you should be in for a good time.

And, in an age where upscaling solutions like DLSS seem more like requirements rather than frame rate-boosting innovations, Battlefield 6 feels like a breath of fresh air. Far from being necessary, I think the upscaling extras can be treated as just that, rather than plaster to cover up the cracks of poor optimisation.

Here's hoping that more big-league developers take note. It turns out it's possible to make a cutting-edge, stunning-looking shooter that runs well in 2025. Who would have thought it possible, ey?

It seems like it's taken forever for GPU prices to fall to MSRP levels, let alone drop below them with a discount. Unfortunately, we're still not quite there across the full spectrum of graphics cards on the market, but here are two that are well worth considering.

One is a little under MSRP, the other is bang on its recommended price; both are worthy upgrades for anyone's gaming GPU. The real head-scratcher, though, is which one do you go for?

Quick links

• Zotac GeForce RTX 5070: $520 @ Newegg
• ASRock Radeon RX 9070: $550 @ Newegg

The first graphics card to consider is this Zotac GeForce RTX 5070. Nvidia's mid-tier GPU wasn't well-received at launch, partly because it wasn't a big leap up from the RTX 4070 Super, but mostly because stocks were low and prices were sky-high. It's obviously no faster months after launch, but at least the price tag is a lot more appealing.

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If you've already got an RTX 40-series card in your gaming PC, then you're probably better off waiting for the next generation of GeForce cards. However, should your rig be home to an RTX 20 or 30-series card, then the RTX 5070 will be a mighty upgrade for you.

That said, it's not the fastest GPU you can buy at this price point. Enter stage left, AMD's Radeon RX 9070. Like the RTX 5070, its launch price was ludicrously high due to very low stocks and high demand, but patience rewards the...err...patient. The RDNA 4 GPU inside this ASRock model is seriously mighty, and not just 'for the money'.

As you can see in our suite of gaming benchmarks, the RX 9070 is either faster or as fast as the RTX 5070. Sure, it's $30 more expensive, but that's just 6% more cash for a lot more dash. So why would you consider the 5070 in the first place, if the 9070 is so good?

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, DLSS 4. Nvidia's AI-powered technology suite of upscaling, frame generation, and ray reconstruction is seriously good these days, and while AMD also has a similar package in the form of FSR 4, it's far less widely supported and, if one looks closely enough, it's not quite as good.

Another reason why you'd pick the 5070 over the 9070 is support for content creation workloads, such as offline 3D rendering, AI processing, plus image and video editing. In these aspects, Nvidia still rules the roost, and although AMD has made great strides in these areas, if you're buying a new GPU for more than just gaming, you're far better off going for the RTX 5070.

For outright gaming, though, I heartily recommend the Radeon RX 9070. It's not just the best GPU that AMD has made in years; it's also a very capable graphics cruncher in its own right. You won't be disappointed if you buy one.

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Aside from the odd exam or forgotten homework nightmare, back to school season is firmly behind me—but that doesn't mean I'm not still looking over my shoulder for a tasty gaming laptop deal come September. Thankfully, Razer's only too happy to oblige with its delectable selection of Back-To-School Specials.

A number of Razer's Blade gaming laptops are enjoying sizable discounts in this sale, but let's zero in on the morsel that's really got me salivating: the Razer Blade 14 with a Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU under the hood. There's good reason this is our favorite 14-inch machine in our best gaming laptop guide, and with 26% lopped off this mighty machine's MSRP, it's only $1,700 when you buy directly from Razer.

Razer offers a lot of customization options for its gaming laptops. If you want to keep your costs down, you'll want to go for the black colourway—I don't know why, but the white colourway adds $300 to the price! After that, you'll want to select the RTX 5060, 1 TB of SSD storage, and 16 GB of RAM. To quote a forgotten pop song from my youth, that's what I go to school for.

Our Dave dug the 2025 version of this machine in his Razer Blade 14 review, even calling it his "ideal gaming laptop." He was particularly impressed by the Blade's build quality, quiet fan, solid battery life, and gorgeous OLED screen. All of that in a 14-inch form factor? That definitely sounds like a bit of kit I'd both happily write essays on as well as procrastinate writing essays on.

Speaking of gaming chops, the RTX 5060 may not be the most powerful graphics card you can scoop up for this machine, but it may well be perfectly balanced for this form factor. Let me explain: while reviewing the RTX 5070 version of the Razer Blade 14, Dave also spent a lot of time hands-on with the ROG Zephyrus G14, offering an obvious comparison point. Just for one thing, this deal makes the Razer Blade 14 cheaper than the G14 by about $700, and near-enough what you might consider 'affordable' for a Razer lappy.

At the risk of overstating the obvious, the experience of using a gaming laptop extends far beyond just how many frames you can squeeze out of the GPU—real or courtesy of DLSS upscaling which all of Nvidia's 50-series cards enjoy. Fan noise is a not-so-silent-killer when it comes to the overall experience of using a laptop; for me personally, just because I can whack all the settings up to ultra doesn't mean I will if the fan protests loudly enough. So, while this deal's offering of a RTX 5060 is not the most powerful mobile GPU you could get, within the aluminium chassis of the Razer Blade 14, you'll still be flying.

On September 18, GSC Game World released a patch for its Legends of the Zone remaster of the original Stalker games that adds Nvidia DLSS support, a seemingly absurd addition to the ancient shooters that makes more sense when you dig into the specifics of the remaster.

Once Nvidia's magic "make it run better" juice, DLSS and its alternative AI upscalers have become worryingly mandatory to run many of the most graphically demanding games, so why add it to Legends of the Zone, a remaster pack whose oldest game, Shadow of Chornobyl, came out all the way back in 2007?

User Avdievs in the Steam discussion page for the patch points out that DLSS' texture filtering and antialiasing components can be desirable even in a game that should be easy to run⁠—and Legends of the Zone can be much more of a performance hog than the original releases.

"That DLSS is the perfect option for the ones wishing to play with their insanely taxing indirect lighting in 4k 60+ fps," wrote user Spleen, referring to a new graphical feature introduced with Legends of the Zone's enhanced global illumination. In another, Russian language comment (translated via Google), Spleen wrote that "My 5080 is fully loaded at 4K 120 fps and is dropping frames with their new indirect lighting. Questions? So I'm not against DLSS at all."

Perhaps the cutting edge Nvidia tech has a place in this old warhorse of a game engine after all. It looks like GSC Game World has been turning things around after a rocky launch for Legends of the Zone: Its recent Steam reviews are Mostly Positive, in contrast to an overall Mixed status. PCG news writer and resident Stalker sicko, Joshua Wolens, was already chuffed back in July when GSC fixed an infinite quicksave bug that was brutalizing his PC.

In case you missed it, Borderlands 4 was released yesterday. Actually, I'm pretty sure you didn't miss it, because your newsfeeds are now likely full of positive reviews for the game itself, but a seemingly equal amount of backlash towards its poor performance. The game currently sits at a "Mixed" rating on Steam, with the chief complaint from players being the performance and early game crashing issues.

Publisher 2K Games has since updated the Steam community page with several optimised settings charts from Nvidia, but they make for unhappy reading. Maximum Frame Gen (2x for RTX 40-series owners, 4x for RTX 50-series cards), DLSS cranked to the guns—even the mighty RTX 5080, a $1,000+ GPU, appears to need a hefty dose of both to achieve 60 fps+ at 1440p resolution.

For context, this is a GPU that normally excels at 4K gaming with a touch of DLSS and Multi Frame Generation help. If you want to play at that resolution, however, even the $2,000+ RTX 5090 can struggle—as our Nick found out in his early Borderlands 4 performance impressions.

The community response has been unsurprising. A click through to the discussion page reveals a litany of complaints, from one demanding the developers "fix your ******* performance" to others suggesting that early players request a refund to voice their displeasure.

"There isn't a guide that can fix this," says the interestingly-named PeePeePantsCity. "No one on PC wants to play at ~60 fps. They didn't buy 3080s or 4080s to play games at 60 fps 1440p."

"Even with a 9800X3D and a 5090 (@4K) it runs like absolute buttcheeks," says user Sirleeofroy. "I mean I can play the game, but the horsepower cost is ridiculous."

That being said, it's not entirely doom and gloom. Some players report their machines are outperforming the recommendations, although the consistency of frame rate still appears to be an issue. Some point to reasonable frame rates in many areas, peppered with stuttering and frame drops in others, in some cases dropping from over 100 fps+ to much, much less depending on the scenario.

The comments are also littered with reports of crashing, again, something our Nick has experienced in his testing. A day-one 2.7 GB patch appears to have mitigated the issue somewhat, but Nick reports that he's still battling with the odd crash to desktop at this very moment.

Dear me. As someone who was looking forward to playing a bit of Borderlands 4 this weekend on an RTX 5070 Ti, this is rather bad news. According to Nvidia's settings guide, if I want to take advantage of my screen's native 4K resolution and play at 60 fps+, I should be setting DLSS 4 to Performance, cranking MFG to its maximum 4x rate, and turning most of my settings to either medium or low.

For reference, I play at 4K with this card on a daily basis in some of the most demanding games currently available. Usually, DLSS Balanced—in combination with a touch of Frame Gen—results in consistent 100 fps+ performance at max settings in most games I've tested to date. The glimmer of hope here, I suppose, is that every major Borderlands game has been released with ropey performance, something that's usually fixed in time with a sequence of patches.

Bring 'em on, that's what I say. By the looks of the reviews so far, Borderlands 4 is a joy to play—but nothing ruins the experience of a shiny new shooter more than terrible frame rates, in my book.

It's been about six months since AMD FSR 4 launched and one of the only real problems with it has been uptake. There just haven't been many games that officially support the upscaling and frame gen tech, and enabling it has often required the use of a third-party tool. Now, though, AMD has finally added the ability to enable FSR 4 in a bunch of games by flipping a toggle switch in the latest Adrenalin driver.

The Adrenalin 25.9.1 drivers, AMD explains, enable FSR 4 in over 85 games: "By updating your AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition driver, you automatically unlock access to this cutting-edge technology on your AMD Radeon RX 9000-series graphics card. Simply enable FSR 3.1 within the supported game and ensure the FSR 4 toggle is turned on from the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition application."

These titles are limited to ones that support DirectX 12 and FSR 3.1—more specifically, games that "have integrated a signed FSR 3.1 DLL according to the guidelines in our FSR 3.1 documentation for developers." That doesn't include Vulkan games, unfortunately.

Previously, to get FSR 4 up and running in games that aren't officially supported, AMD RX 9000-series gamers had to use third-party software OptiScaler to force-enable it. This, however, involved manually pasting files into your game installation folders and even changing settings in a batch script.

After launching towards the start of the year, there's been a lot of interest in seeing wider adoption for FSR 4. In addition to frame gen, AMD's latest generation of upscaling, in particular, has been lauded as it seems to finally be a competitive option against Nvidia's DLSS in terms of visual fidelity.

Unfortunately uptake has been pretty slow, though—it was only a month ago that Cyberpunk 2077 got FSR 4 support, for instance. Now, it should be easier for more users to make use of it. There are a couple of potential things to note, however.

First, this new driver-level override only works for (some) games that support FSR 3.1. OptiScaler, on the other hand, claimed to allow you to get FSR 4 up and running in games supporting FSR 2 and higher. So for non-3.1 games, you might still have to rely on OptiScaler if you want to try enabling FSR 4.

Second, we should remember that while this is a first-party solution, it's still only a one-party solution, meaning the games this update will benefit haven't had the FSR 4 implementation worked on by its devs (duh, that's the point, I know). Which means they might not look or perform quite as well as they could if FSR 4 were added officially by the game devs.

Oh, and of course there's the fact that only gamers with Radeon RX 9000-series graphics cards will be able to use the tech.

Still, it's a lot better than the minimal number of games that could get FSR 4 officially up and running before. Given Nvidia recently added a DLSS Override global toggle, with this AMD FSR 4 update in the mix, gamers on both green and red sides of the aisle can finally have some current-gen driver-level upscaling to rely on.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, a full remake of the classic MGS 3: Snake Eater, has only just been released for PC and consoles, but that means nothing to modders. Built in Unreal Engine 5, the developers chose to use its standard software ray tracing Lumen algorithm, and they also eschewed supporting frame generation. It turns out that the fix for both of these requires nothing more than adding a few lines to a single config file.

Word of this was reported by Wccftech, and having just spent a couple of hours testing it myself, I can confirm that it all works perfectly. Unreal Engine 5 has two modes for its Lumen global illumination system: software and hardware. The former is designed as a lightweight ray tracing solution that requires no specific RT hardware and sacrifices visual quality for performance.

Hardware-mode does the opposite: the GPU running the game needs to have dedicated components and driver support for ray tracing, as offered by AMD's RX 6000-series, Intel's Arc series, and Nvidia's RTX 20-series, or newer. Hardware Lumen can produce better quality ray tracing, at the expense of performance, and this is why so many ray-traced games also support upscaling and frame generation to counter this.

To adjust this, head over to the following location on your PC's Windows installation:

C:\Users\[...]\AppData\Local\MGSDelta\Saved\Config\Windows

Look for a file labelled engine.ini and open it in Notepad. Scroll all the way to the bottom and then add the following lines of text:

[SystemSettings]r.Lumen.HardwareRayTracing=0r.Lumen.Reflections.HardwareRayTracing=0r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.HardwareRayTracing=0r.LumenScene.DirectLighting.HardwareRayTracing=0r.NGX.DLSS.denoisermode=0r.Streamline.DLSSG.Enable=0t.Streamline.Reflex.Enable=0t.Streamline.Reflex.Mode=0

The first four are for hardware RT Lumen, the fifth one is for Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction, and the final three are for DLSS frame generation. MGS Delta doesn't have any kind of frame generation setting in its menus and, if I'm to be honest, is pretty barebones in terms of graphics options full stop.

So applying the config file adjustment won't make anything appear in the setting menu, but having stared at my screen for a while (and measured performance), it definitely seems to be enabling hardware Lumen.

I say 'seems' because the difference in visual quality is very slight, or at least it is in the area I've checked out so far, as you can see in the video. The first half is a short run of the game without any of the tweaks added, whereas the second half is applying hardware RT Lumen, Nvidia Ray Reconstruction, and DLSS frame generation.

The footage was captured off a GeForce RTX 5090, in a Core Ultra 9 285K, 48 GB DDR5-8400 test rig. I suspect that while you've possibly struggled to notice the difference that the change in Lumen is supposed to have, you'll almost certainly notice the jump in performance caused by the frame generation. I haven't figured out how to change what level of frame gen is used, but it's enough of a boost for my tastes, as is.

MGS Delta with Lumen and Ray Reconstruction tweaks only

Just a word of caution, if you plan on using these config tweaks yourself, especially frame generation: Metal Gear Solid Delta is, for some unfathomable reason, capped to 60 fps on PCs, so I strongly suggest that you first install Better Uncap FPS v1.4 on Nexus Mods. That requires you to put a bunch of things in one of the game's sub-folders and copy an engine.ini file to the same location as above.

If you've already applied the config tweaks, this new file will override them, so what I did was just copy the relevant parts from the Better Uncap mod and add them to the very bottom of the normal engine.ini file:

[SystemSettings]t.AllowFrameRateSmoothing=0rhi.SyncInterval=0rhi.PresentInterval=0[RenderingThread]bAllowThreadedRendering=TruebAllowAsyncRenderThreadUpdates=True[/Script/Engine.RendererSettings]r.GraphicsAdapter=0r.VSync=1r.OneFrameThreadLag=0rhi.PresentInterval=0rhi.SyncInterval=0r.Streamline.DLSSG.Enable=1t.Streamline.Reflex.Enable=1r.Streamline.DilateMotionVectors=0[/Script/Engine.Engine]bSmoothFrameRate=FalseMinSmoothedFrameRate=0MaxSmoothedFrameRate=100bLimitFrameRateToRefreshRate=False

Stick those in the game's engine file, then add the Lumen, RR, and DLSS tweaks to the SystemSettings section and it'll all work peachy. By default, the mod fully removes the frame rate cap, so it can make the game feel a bit stuttery and induce a spot of tearing, but the instructions on Nexus Mods will tell you how to set your own limit.

MGS Delta with original 60 fps limit and RT Lumen, Ray Reconstruction, DLSS frame gen

At this point, you might wonder why Konami didn't choose to use hardware Lumen or offer frame generation. I suspect it was a choice based on simplicity, ie, have every platform version of the game look the same. With a 60 fps cap, there's no point in offering frame generation, and ray reconstruction can only be applied if you use an RTX GPU's ray tracing hardware.

To my old eyes, there isn't a great deal of difference between software and hardware Lumen modes in Metal Gear Solid Delta, but perhaps there is in other sections of the game. Better lighting and reflections are all very nice, of course, but the textures are quite rough-looking and very old-school in places. No amount of ray tracing wizardry is going to fix that, I'm afraid.

With the launch of its RDNA 4 GPU architecture and FSR 4, AMD leveraged the power of machine learning to improve its upscale and frame generator. However, even if you rushed out to buy a new RX 9070 graphics card, your chance at checking out FSR 4 depended entirely on devs adding it to their games. With the release of the latest FidelityFX SDK, though, it appears that you can just do it yourself, by using one little app and a spot of file renaming.

That's according to the developer of DLSS Swapper, who remarked that a visitor to the app's GitHub stated that they managed to swap the FSR 3 files in a game and have it use FSR 4 instead. DLSS Swapper is a neat little tool that lets you change the DLL (dynamic linked library) files in a game's folders, so you can test out different versions of DLSS, FSR, and XeSS to your heart's content.

If you fancy giving it a go yourself, here's what you need to do (as instructed by beerdamore, DLSS Swapper's creator):

1. Download and install DLSS Swapper
2. Download AMD's latest FidelityFX SDK
3. Extract the archive into a new folder
4. Navigate to the Kits\FidelityFX\signedbin\ folder
5. Rename amd_fidelityfx_upscaler_dx12.dll to amd_fidelityfx_dx12.dll
6. Fire up DLSS Swapper, then click on the Library icon, and select FSR 3.1 DirectX 12 at the top
7. Click the Import button in the top corner
8. Navigate to the folder that has your newly renamed amd_fidelityfx_dx12.dll in it and import it
9. You should now see v4.0.2.44888 in the list of FSR options

The latter might be in parentheses because if you don't have a Radeon RX 9000-series graphics card, the best version of FSR your GPU is likely to support will be FSR 3.1.5. After all that, it's then a question of selecting the game you want to apply the new DLL to, and in the options for FSR, click the version number and select 4.0.2 in the long menu. Once you've swapped the DLLs, you're done, and in theory, the game will fire up and show FSR 4 in its upscaling options.

However, one thing that I'm not certain about is whether the game is actually running FSR 4 or just displaying the DLL version. It's also important to note that none of this will force your GPU to use FSR 4 if it's not physically capable of running it. Oh, and so far, this has only been verified on a handful of FSR 3.1 games.

The good thing about all of this is that DLL swapping is easy to do, and as long as you source the files directly from AMD, Nvidia, etc, it's perfectly safe to do. If it turns out that the game isn't running FSR 4 or you just don't like how the new FSR upscaling looks in action, you can just swap back to whatever it was using before.

With luck, this all works as hoped, and RDNA 4 GPU owners can now enjoy FSR 4 in a lot more games than those that officially do support it. We're going to explore this ourselves in more depth with some RX 9000 cards and various FSR 3.1 games, and we'll be sure to let you know how we get on.

Ah modders, is there anything they can't do?

The last time graphics technology really knocked my socks off was the advent of DLSS, Nvidia's supersampling tech that lets you boost performance by rendering games at lower resolutions and upscaling them in real time.

DLSS, and to a lesser extent AMD's FSR, still feel like a magic trick, but it's not without sacrifice: Despite years of version upgrades and AI bolstering, upscaling can still produce muddy shadows, ghosting artifacts, and introduce noticeable latency in many games. Increasingly, big-budget games are not treating upscaling as an option, but an expectation in system requirements. Battlefield 6 is a notable exception.

"We want Battlefield 6 to run great without [DLSS], and we want to give you the option to use it if you want," Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl told PC Gamer in an interview. "I believe all of our default performance targets are not with [upscaling] on.

"There are pros and cons to a lot of those different technologies … Our goal is for everything to be performant without a lot of extra stuff."

That's in keeping with Battlefield Studios' stated mission of optimizing Battlefield 6 for a comfortable range of PC hardware and consoles at launch, something that the Battlefield series, with its huge scale and dynamic destruction, is not known for. And it's not just talk: Performance, if still imperfect in spots, was a big win for Battlefield 6 coming out of the August beta.

"For open beta, we set our targets for performance and stability just barely lower than where we wanted to be for launch. I was super happy to hear people positively received the stability and performance of the game," Buhl said.

Surprisingly, Battlefield 6's system requirements (seen below) are modest for a 2025 game, recommending the five-year-old RTX 3060Ti to hit 60 fps. That's about what my increasingly mediocre 2080 Super machine accomplished without upscaling, but I found it still felt snappy with DLSS on. The requirements have barely increased from what Battlefield 2042 called for in 2021.

You can see its relative graphical modesty on screen: Battlefield 6 looked great in the beta, but it's not as photoreal as other major studio games that demand gluttonous VRAM and enforce always-on raytracing. Performance comes first, and for an FPS, that's exactly what I like to hear.