DLSS 5 has been a contentious ol' bit of tech, but with it launching in NBA 2K27, it's finally in actual games and not just in a ton of ReShade modded games. If, for some reason, you just really love the look, it turns out you can apply it to your entire desktop too, with a little bit of modding help.

Posted to GitHub by Perseval BLR, DLSS 5 NeuralScreen is free to download, and it has customisation features to change intensity and swap resolution on the fly (Via TweakTown). Interestingly, it works with RTX 30-series cards and up. To get it running, you simply have to download the latest version of the app via the GitHub releases tab and run the exe file.

You may be wondering why you would bother applying DLSS Neural Rendering to your entire desktop, especially when you consider that a screenshot of a DLSS 5 game as your wallpaper would be less intensive than running an app on it, and the answer is: for everyday use. You can apply DLSS NR while watching videos if you want to, you can apply it to any pictures you open up, and it will even run on any games that you run in borderless or windowed mode.

As well as this, the fact that it's a separate app that you can adjust and turn on or off in just a few moments means it's more efficient than going into the graphics settings of a game, changing them, and then waiting for them to save.

Now for the downsides. Other than the love it or hate it look of DLSS 5, NeuralScreen does not support HDR, cannot be run on fullscreen games, is locked to a max resolution of 2560 x 1440, and adds 40-60 ms of latency. That means you are probably better off not running DLSS on any competitive games, but Github page itself reckons running it on online competitive games could trigger anti-cheat software due to the software's nvngx.dll process and the fullscreen overlay anyway.

But in single-player games, or when watching movies, that added latency is theoretically fine. Though that's before mentioning the performance hit of actually running the app.

DLSS 5 off vs DLSS 5 on

This is on the most recent GTA 6 extended gameplay trailer

Off

On

I gave it a try on my personal rig with an RTX 4070 Super, and though the app itself is quite slow, it is super easy to implement.

I don't really like the DLSS NR look and don't particularly like generative AI's effect on the games industry thus far (like the proliferation of AI-generated assets in games), so I won't be keeping the app, but if you're hungry for DLSS 5, you can get up and running in just a few moments.

If you were hoping it would make your email inbox look really realistic, you're out of luck, as it just sort of washed out the colours on mine. But if you're sent any pictures, you can bet DLSS 5 will work on those.

A developer has vibe-coded a new ReShade add-on file that offloads the DLSS Neural Rendering workloads to a second GPU, almost negating the otherwise massive DLSS NR performance hit. Given the original DLSS 5 shots we saw when Jen-Hsun first showed off the feature around GDC and GTC in the Spring were running on two graphics cards, that's not wholly surprising, but this mod certainly does open the the potential for keeping your old GPU around for neural coprocessing in the future.

Like almost all of the current DLSS 5/Neural Rendering implementations we've seen where the user gets to pick the game, the model, and the weight of the effects, the Neural Coprocessor add-on file—mgpu_bridge—is designed for ReShade, an app used to inject different visual effects into PC games. The files exist on Github, can be downloaded and added into a game that's already been modded with DLSS 5 support, and could dramatically improve the performance.

This is, for me, the biggest issue with both the homebrew mods for DLSS Neural Rendering and the only release implementation we've seen from Nvidia and the developers themselves: the hefty performance penalty from turning it on.

Nvidia itself has touted a 50 - 60% frame rate hit as a blanket figure—regardless of game and how much AI filtering it's doing—as what it is expecting to see from enabling DLSS NR. Andy benchmarked NBA 2K27 ahead of launch and found that sometimes the frame rate impact can be even higher than that.

I mean, it's not as bad as when you try and run DLSS NR on AMD GPUs, but I've noted these kinds of performance hits when you run the new feature through ReShade, too. But Marcelo Guibout has coded a ReShade add-on file that allows a second GPU—here an RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB—to take the final finished frame and perform the neural rendering pass on that GPU and output on its own monitor. That means it doesn't have to hand the frame back, which adds its own performance hit and latency.

They initially used a local model—Qwen3.8-27B-Q6_K—running on LM Studio using the same pair of RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB cards they eventually tested the feature on. This created the "initial add-on scaffold" which they then took into Claude to write most of the C++ core, though Anthropic's AI "also produced several confident, well-formatted, wrong diagnoses along the way."

Looking through the Github documentation Guibout makes it clear this is not a production-ready add-on, and is mostly presented for further research and development. They note it has been run on exactly one machine with three games, and encourage everyone to read the source code before running the files. But it's still a really interesting development in the DLSS 5 modding story.

"The reason it is worth doing: neural post-processing saturates whatever device it runs on," writes Guibout. "Run it on the render GPU and lowering your render resolution just frees capacity the neural stage immediately eats, so upscaling stops paying for itself. Move it to a second GPU and the render GPU is genuinely freed."

DLSS NR on AMD

AMD GPUs running DLSS 5 looks great, but runs horribly.

DLSS NR Off

DLSS NR On

This is almost certainly the reason behind Nvidia originally running the feature on two GPUs for the original demos, and the fact that it can get it running on a single GPU is still impressive from a technical perspective, but having a coprocessor handling the load should give you the best of both worlds.

Though there are obvious caveats to this.

The first being that it's expensive enough to buy one graphics card right now. You look at this mod and the fact it's been created and tested on a pair of RTX 5060 Ti cards and think that's kinda mid-range. They are the fifth-tier cards of Nvidia's RTX Blackwell stack. But those are two GPUs that now cost something around $800 apiece, so we're still talking about needing $1,600 worth of graphics silicon to get this working.

The other caveat is that we're running on with two monitors here as a necessity. Guibout notes in the Github readme file that, "The second monitor is a requirement, not a nicety - the neural output is displayed by the card that produced it. Headless works and is meaningfully slower."

The third caveat here is that this ReShade implementation is a final step process. It is handled after the final frame has been rendered and works with none of the depth and motion vector information the official Nvidia implementation runs with. That means the second-GPU is going to have to be more tightly integrated into the actual rendering process. Not quite as tightly bound as with SLI, perhaps, but it will surely still need to get involved before the final post-processing is done.

But I could potentially see this as a way to do something useful with your current-gen card when you next upgrade. And, on a purely mercenary level, it might be a smart thing for Nvidia to actually make as a feature as it would have the effect of locking someone into the GeForce ecosystem even more securely.

Though times have changed and SLI and CrossFire have died, and so motherboards are even less likely today to have multiple PCIe x16 sockets available to stick secondary GPUs into. Especially if you've got multiple NVMe SSDs taking up precious PCIe lanes.

I'm loving the rate of development happening outside of Nvidia now that the feature has fallen into the hands of the community at large. And regardless of how you feel about the technology, I would encourage you, if you have the hardware, to take a look at how even just the ReShade implementation looks, and how you can alter it. It gives a fascinating insight into the technology, into its limitations as well as its unwelcome excesses.

Though it's not always easy. I've spent the morning trying to get this ReShade add-on working with the test rig, because I was interested to see if it could be run asymmetrically, as I don't have a pair of RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB cards. Sadly, with an RTX 5080 and RTX 5060 Ti as the neural coprocessor, I could not get the add-on to arm when in Cyberpunk 2077. So, I've got more work to do to get this thing running.

Another day, another DLSS 5 story that actually kinda doesn't involve Nvidia itself doing anything, because it seems now AMD GPU owners can get in on the act. A new homebrew app has been released on Github that will allow you to run the DLSS Neural Rendering feature on a Radeon GPU. I've tried it and it works, but damn does it hurt the poor Radeon silicon.

From having DLSS 5 .dll files plucked from an early access version of NBA 2K27, we've had modders working hard to create surprisingly polished ways to essentially get the tech working in practically any game, even if it doesn't natively support traditional DLSS itself.

I've been playing around with it a lot this past week, even to the point of jamming it into Football Manager 26 just to see what would happen. And, y'know what, I kinda like the result so I'm keeping it. I wasn't expecting that, and I also wasn't expecting this technology, created by Nvidia, to appear so quickly on AMD GPUs. Historically we've found that where Nvidia goes, so AMD follows, at least in the GPU feature space, but it seems like AMD might not actually have to do much this time. Well, apart from actually make the silicon a little more tensor-friendly.

Because I have spent the afternoon trying to get the new app from user danielblnc on Github to work on my Radeon RX 9070 XT in Cyberpunk 2077. Essentially you download the DLSS-NR-on-AMD file, drop it into the relevant folder (the bin/x64 folder in the Cyberpunk 2077 directory in Steam, for example) and run it. So long as you have the necessary nvngx_dlssnr.dll file that's been doing the rounds installed in the same place it ought to work.

It didn't.

Initially Windows flagged it as containing a virus, but I did some checking around with VirusTotal and seemingly the Defender flag is a machine learning false positive. Probably. But even then I still struggled to have it running happily.

I am not entirely sure what I did wrong, but when I enabled the feature in-game all I got was a black output where the 3D world ought to be, even though the HUD and game kept on running. After some file deletion, redownloading, verifying of integrity (mine and Cyberpunk's), and a rollback of my AMD Adrenalin drivers, I finally got it working. Kinda. I mean it's still kinda crashy, and I can only now launch Cyberpunk 2077 directly from the .exe file rather than from Steam, but it works.

But my poor GPU wished I hadn't. Now, we know that DLSS 5 is a hell of a resource hog on an RTX 50-series GPU that it's designed for, with a touted 50 - 60% performance hit officially noted by Nvidia, so I should have known it would trouble the AMD GPU.

DLSS NR on Nvidia

DLSS 5 was designed for GeForce GPUs, so is a little more capable, but still a massive resource hog.

DLSS NR Off

DLSS NR On

Still… running at 4K RT Ultra settings is tough enough, and I was getting just 61 fps on the RX 9070 XT even with FSR 4 set to Balanced. And then flicking the DLSS Neural Rendering toggle to 'on' made that figure drop to just 9 fps.

And I thought the 73% drop Andy found with NBA 2K27 was rough.

DLSS NR on AMD

AMD GPUs running DLSS 5 looks great, but runs horribly.

DLSS NR Off

DLSS NR On

Now it's worth noting that the fact it is running at all on AMD GPUs is impressive on its own, but it's not going to make any Radeon graphics card owners any happier about it when they're getting unplayable frame rates out of their new ill-gotten pretties. An 85% performance drop is not sustainable. Nice for screenshots though, eh?

The issue is that AMD's RDNA 4 doesn't have the level of dedicated silicon for the sort of matrix calculations the feature is running… in the same way that RTX 20-series chips don't.

The Turing architecture does have Tensor Cores, but they're far weaker compared to those in the RTX 40- or RTX 50-series, and the shared resources AMD plucks from the standard RDNA 4 Compute Units for these sorts of calculations aren't as robust either. Hence the weaker performance.

Will they be able to squeeze more performance out of this feature on AMD chips? I don't know, but YouTuber Ancient Gameplays noted the app in a recent video, and states that performance has gone up 12% since the first version of the DLSS-NR-on-AMD software first hit Github, so maybe there's a chance. But, realistically, I think there's a hard hardware limit in there which is going to stop DLSS Neural Rendering from being a realistic part of AMD's armoury in this generation.

If you happen to pick up a copy of NBA 2K27, in your eagerness to try out the first official implementation of Nvidia's DLSS 5 AI image tech, you won't find it labelled as such in the settings menu. Instead, it appears as a simple on/off toggle under the label "DLSS Neural Rendering." And while that might seem like a small change, I think it makes a huge amount of difference in terms of public perception.

Calling it DLSS 5 in the first place was, at best, confusing. Traditional DLSS, as in the upscaling/super sampling technology, is well established at this point. While some still refuse to get on board, many have become accustomed to the idea that it works well at its primary task, running your games at lower resolutions to achieve better frame rates while outputting a high-resolution image.

So much so, that DLSS updates are usually pretty well received. Slightly better image quality, slightly better performance. Ray Reconstruction niceties. That sort of thing. Given that DLSS is now a near requirement for smooth performance in many games (and I'm not opening that can of worms any further right now, believe me), the gradual, iterative improvements have been pleasing to see.

But DLSS 5 changes things. Quite literally. And while Nvidia has gone to great pains in recent months to point out that it's both developer controlled, and a toggled option that can be safely ignored if you don't like the imagery, shoving the tech underneath the DLSS iterative umbrella felt like a poor move.

Something in the association inferred, even if it was later made clear that it wasn't the case, that AI image alteration tech was just how games were going to be going forward, and you were going to have to get on board if you wanted to keep using DLSS in future.

And what happens to DLSS 4.5, the current version of the upscaling tech? Does it simply update to DLSS 4.6, 4.7, etc, until we start getting into more and more decimals to avoid the big 5.0?

I asked this exact question to several Nvidia staff at my Gamescom visit, and received little in the way of a satisfying answer. It was made clear, however, that regular DLSS upscaling will continue to receive consistent updates, separate from DLSS 5.

Now it seems like we might have a clue to the solution of this branding mess. In NBA 2K27, it's been labelled as DLSS Neural Rendering, and it's an on/off switch that can be used independently of the upscaling, or ignored entirely for those who don't want to get on the AI image alteration train.

Our Dave first noticed this change in the leaked DLL files last week, which refer to it as "Nvidia DLSSNR." But the fact it appears in an official game settings menu under the "Neural Rendering" title feels like a step in the right direction. Nvidia seems painfully aware that it needs to rehabilitate its new tech, and separating the nomenclature would be a good start.

Of course, the naming scheme is only part of the story when it comes to the controversy. There are many who are dead set against the idea of any sort of AI generation tech entering their games, amid a wider AI backlash. Nothing's changed there, I would wager.

Separate from that, whether you like the look of the AI-altered imagery is still a matter of taste. It's developer controlled, as Nvidia has repeatedly pointed out—though if you start modding it into games yourself, like Dave has, you do get your own sliders to play with.

DLSS 5 in Cyberpunk 2077

The effect on the lighting of the character model is impressive and easy to mod in. Just computationally expensive...

DLSS 5 off

DLSS 5 on

Still, I've got a feeling we're going to see some relatively subtle implementations to start with—and inevitably, some goppingly ugly, AI beauty filter-like imagery as time goes on. There's no accounting for taste in a general sense, and there's certainly no accounting for taste when it comes to graphics.

It's also, in its current iteration, a massive performance hog. Nvidia claimed a 50-60% performance hit, but my early testing in NBA 2K27 shows it can hamstring an RTX 5080 by up to 73% at certain settings. That's a very powerful (and expensive) graphics card, held back significantly by Nvidia's new toy.

All of which means the DLSS 5/DLSS Neural Rendering controversy is likely far from over. But I can't help but feel that if the tech was unveiled as "DLSS Neural Rendering" in the first place, as just a new optional feature and not presented as the entirety of DLSS 5, a fair amount of the confusion—and perhaps even initial backlash—could have been avoided.

DLSS 5 is finally here. Well, its been officially released in one game, anyway, after modders got their hands on it last week and made the actual launch somewhat redundant. Still, I've been testing Nvidia's new AI image-enhancing tech in NBA 2K27, the latest hoop-shooting game in the long-running series, and I have bad news: even on a high-end RTX 5080 rig, it's seriously punishing when it comes to performance.

Which isn't a huge surprise, given that Nvidia itself estimated a 50-60% DLSS 5 performance hit in the briefings last week. Still, my early testing shows it can tank your frame rate considerably harder than that, even on a PC that costs well over $3,000 in 2026.

I threw a pre-release version of NBA 2K27 at one of our benchmarking rigs, an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5080-equipped, 32 GB DDR5 behemoth. And while this particular PC can make mincemeat of the game's relatively lightweight hardware needs overall, turning on DLSS 5 can drop the average frame rate by up to 73% in certain scenarios.

It's capable of looking very pretty in this particular game, that's for sure. But my jaw has dropped several times during my testing, and not always for the reasons Nvidia may have hoped for. To the benchmarks, then.

DLSS 5: 1440p NBA 2K27 benchmarks

Given the RTX 5080 is Nvidia's second-fastest consumer graphics card, I had no qualms about turning up the settings to Ultra, including enabling ray tracing. I recorded my results during actual gameplay within NBA 2K27's quick match mode, making sure to play for long enough that cutaway shots to the player's celebrations and the crowd triggered several times.

It's worth mentioning, however, that given the lack of repeatability within this mode, these results are potentially more representative of the DLSS 5 average frame rate hit, rather than game performance overall.

DLSS 5 | RTX 5080 | 1440p gaming benchmarks

Results recorded during gameplay in NBA 2K27 at Ultra settings, ray tracing enabled, using an RTX 5080.

NBA 2K27 (Ultra preset)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Native

230

93

Native + DLSS 5

93

37

Quality upscaling + 2x FG

363

153

Quality upscaling + 2x FG + DLSS 5

168

75

0100200300400

NBA 2K27 (Ultra preset) Data

Product	Value
Native	230 Avg FPS, 93 1% Low FPS
Native + DLSS 5	93 Avg FPS, 37 1% Low FPS
Quality upscaling + 2x FG	363 Avg FPS, 153 1% Low FPS
Quality upscaling + 2x FG + DLSS 5	168 Avg FPS, 75 1% Low FPS

And my goodness, what a performance hit it is. The difference between the Native 1440p average frame rate and the average rate with DLSS enabled is a whole 137 frames. A 93 fps average still results in very smooth gameplay overall, but the drop to just 37 fps in terms of 1% lows is very troubling.

This is an RTX 5080 running at 1440p, after all. A 4K-capable graphics card that will currently cost you $1,550 thanks to the ongoing memory/component pricing crisis. And that figure is based on the cheapest we can find—I've seen them listed for $2,000+ in the past month or two.

Of course, Nvidia will tell you that upscaling and frame generation are here to save the day when it comes to smooth performance, and that proves to be the case. Still, watching a 363 fps average result plummet to 168 fps at the push of a DLSS 5 button is pretty jaw dropping.

Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 5 performance improvements are coming in future, and by the looks of it, it's in desperate need of some. It's often very pretty at these settings, though, as I'll go into below. So... that's something, I guess?

DLSS 5: 4K NBA 2K27 benchmarks

There are no awards for guessing that, at 4K, the effect is even more pronounced. At Native resolution with no upscaling or frame gen assistance, the RTX 5080 spits out an admirable 183 fps average (still at Ultra with ray tracing enabled, no less), which duly plummets to 49 fps as soon as DLSS 5 is enabled.

That represents a staggering 73% decrease in average frames, and an instantly crunchy experience. Sure, 49 fps is perfectly playable, but with the knowledge that NBA 2K27 would be capable of so many more frames with the AI-enhanced pretties turned off, I'm not sure I could grin and bear it.

DLSS 5 | RTX 5080 | 4K gaming benchmarks

Results recorded during gameplay in NBA 2K27 at Ultra settings, ray tracing enabled, using an RTX 5080.

NBA 2K27 (Ultra preset)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Native

183

91

Native + DLSS 5

49

31

Quality upscaling + 2x FG

255

118

Quality upscaling + 2x FG + DLSS 5

92

53

075150225300

NBA 2K27 (Ultra preset) Data

Product	Value
Native	183 Avg FPS, 91 1% Low FPS
Native + DLSS 5	49 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS
Quality upscaling + 2x FG	255 Avg FPS, 118 1% Low FPS
Quality upscaling + 2x FG + DLSS 5	92 Avg FPS, 53 1% Low FPS

What I would do, however, is turn upscaling and frame generation on to compensate. And here, the news is slightly better. A 92 fps average is more like it, with regular old DLSS set to Quality, and 2x frame gen enabled. I feel better already.

That was until I realised that, with DLSS 5 turned off, I'd be getting a 255 fps average at the same settings. That's a 163 fps drop with DLSS 5 enabled, for those counting. Which is a lot of frames to come tumbling out the bottom of your very expensive graphics card.

Given all of Nvidia's benchmarks are with a lower resolution DLSS setting and the full 6x Multi Frame Generation bean, on the one hand I expected DLSS 5 to actually need MFGto achieve smooth frame rates at all, or require Ultra Performance-level upscaling. So, the fact that I can achieve very playable frame rates with just 2x frame gen and upscaling set to Quality is still pretty impressive. But on the other, NBA 2K27 runs so well without DLSS 5 enhancement, the thought of slashing my frame rate by such a huge amount for some prettier, AI-assisted graphics stops me in my tracks. Speaking of which...

DLSS5: Image quality comparison

There's one thing I will say for DLSS 5: it looks pretty great in this game. I spent a good hour or two zipping around in the photo mode, marvelling at the visages of my ill-fated basketball team.

The photo mode, however, is where you'll see most of the benefits of Nvidia's new toy. In terms of actual gameplay, you'll spend most of your time in NBA 2K27 in a zoomed out perspective, cursing loudly at the fact you can't time a well-placed three-pointer for toffee.

Sure, there are cuts to player celebrations, slow motion replays, and half-time team talks. But it's when things are paused that you'll see most of the DLSS 5 difference—so that's exactly what I've done for the comparisons below.

NBA 2K27

A comparison of two screenshots in NBA 2K27 photo mode, one with DLSS 5 on, and one with DLSS 5 off.

DLSS 5 on

DLSS 5 off

My early concern about DLSS 5 was that it seemed to produce overblown, AI beauty filter-like imagery, which I personally find very ugly. However, as I pointed out in my DLSS 5 sneak peak, the implementation in this particular game is often much more tasteful.

The player above looks more realistic with DLSS 5 turned on. The highlights on the nose and forehead are shinier without looking completely blown out, which, combined with the more realistic shadowing on the facial features overall, creates a very pleasant image.

His beard looks a little more lifelike, as does his hair. And I'd pay special attention to his jersey, which has extra wrinkles in the fabric in the DLSS 5-ified image that give it a more 3D-like effect. Because you'll be paying attention to your team's ironing mishaps in your new basketball game, obviously.

NBA 2K27

A comparison of two screenshots in NBA 2K27, one with DLSS 5 turned on, and one with DLSS 5 turned off.

DLSS 5 on

DLSS 5 off

Switching over to two players together, I think this particular comparison shows off DLSS 5 at its best. Both of their faces look muted and poorly shaded in the non-DLSS 5 version, but swing the slider over and they suddenly come to life.

As your graphics card screams bloody murder, perhaps. But as much of a cynic as I am regarding the idea of AI "enhancement" of any sort, I can't deny that DLSS 5 in close up is capable of producing some lifelike human beings.

Once game developers have tweaked it for themselves, of course, and those settings sliders have been reined in from some of the horrors we saw in the earlier demo footage.

It's far from flawless, though. While some character models look noticeably more realistic, others get some heavy-handed AI treatment that isn't quite so seamless.

Above: NBA 2K27's photo mode, with DLSS 5 turned off to start, and then on and off again in sequence.

Take the footage above, for instance. While I would say there are some definite shading improvements once DLSS 5 is turned on, there's also a kind of overblown, over-contrasted effect to some of the facial features in this particular example that looks slightly off to my eyes.

NBA 2K27

Two screenshots showing the crowd in NBA 2K27, with DLSS 5 turned on and off.

DLSS 5 on

DLSS 5 off

And finally, here's a comparison between the crowds. You're going to need to fullscreen and zoom in on this one, but it's fairly representative of how you'll see the match attendees when you're actually playing the game. Aside from the odd camera cut, they're mostly there for background atmosphere.

And yes, the folks in the cheap seats get a miniature dose of DLSS 5 image enhancement, too. The effect here is very subtle, but it's probably most noticeable on the courtside commentator's face. Which will go past in a flash as you actually play, but hey—check out that ever-so-slightly more chiselled jawline.

So, is DLSS 5 actually worth turning on in this game? Well, I can't help but be impressed by the imagery (for the most part), and this relatively light-touch implementation adds a lot of character to individual members of your team. They're also noticeably sweatier, too, if that's your sort of thing.

But you're going to want plenty of frame rate headroom before you even think of touching the DLSS Neural Rendering checkbox, and that means running a very powerful rig—or cranking up the DLSS upscaling and frame generation to compensate. NBA 2K27 is a very fast-paced game, and the experience suffers quite badly when things get crunchy. You'll want smooth frames for this one, believe me—and if that means turning off DLSS 5, I say go for it.

Still, I can absolutely see why Nvidia picked this game for DLSS 5's first official outing. NBA 2K27 feels well optimised with the AI frippery turned off, and it's not the sort of thing that would otherwise be bothering most modern rigs.

But if my testing is any indication, DLSS 5 can look really good, but still be a massive drain on performance even in a properly optimised game. And I really question who among us will be prepared to make the frame rate trade off, even in a relatively lightweight game like this.

The real test will be in something properly demanding, and it's there where I think the wheels will come off. Better image and lighting quality is all very well, but for this sort of performance cost? I dread to think what it'll do to the already-addled frame rate of something like Borderlands 4, for example.

DLSS 5 is capable of looking much better than I expected, which is something of a relief. But when it tanks the frame rate this heavily, I can't help but feel that it's a technology designed for the next generation of graphics cards, and not the versions we're running today. Even the $1,500+ ones—and how many of us have the spare cash right now for another one of those?

Ever since the Control mod appeared I've been enjoying jamming the released DLSS 5 .dll files into a bunch of different games, to greater or lesser effect. Some games it works well in, some it doesn't quite take and you end up with visuals that look a lot like the characters have worms writhing around under their skin.

Though, I have to say when I stuck it into the review version of The Blood of Dawnwalker and it failed to hook the DLSS pipeline that look kinda worked for my semi-Vrakhiri. Bit of extra undead chic with the game failing to run the DLSS neural rendering feature with actual motion vectors or scene depth.

With the necessary files being released in the early access version of NBA 2K27, they've now been unleashed across the internet and modders have been busy getting game-agnostic versions ready for people to squeeze into any title they fancy. And while the first iteration was focused on Control and then games running DLSS already, there have been mods released—particularly the RenoDX and specifically the ShortFuse mods—which allow you to experiment with pushing DLSS 5 into practically any game you like.

And it's surprisingly easy to do, though not without its awkwardness, too. Well, such is the way with unreleased features shoehorned into games they're not meant to be in, but also such is the way with PC gaming.

The thing that has stood out to me—and something that Andy first noted in his hands-on look at the official technology at Gamescom—is that DLSS 5 really can produce some outstanding visual effects… if used sparingly. Pick the right model of the three (for me, that's Model C) and drop the intensity of the effect down to around 60 - 70% and you end up with scenes and character models that look better than the originals, but without the over-saturated, overblown very AI look of it dialed up to 11, nor without it looking like it's grinding away or adding its own geometry.

But it's also clear it's one hell of a resource hog. Nvidia has been very clear about this from its recent presentations at Gamescom and a briefing I had at the end of last week; DLSS 5 represents about a 50 - 60% drop in frame rate regardless of the game. Though, sometimes we've seen that performance hit be even greater, especially at 4K.

Running the Control mod on an RTX 5090 I was seeing DLSS Balanced 4K Ultra Ray Tracing running at around 110 fps in standard mode, which then dropped to under 50 fps as soon as DLSS 5 was brought to bear on the game, which is about where Nvidia is pitching the performance hit.

That, in all honesty, is to be expected. When Nvidia first showed off the tech around GDC it was running on a pair of RTX 5090s, so the fact that it can be run at all on single lower-spec GPUs is impressive. But it was also going to be punitive for current generation hardware, which only have tensor cores enough for standard DLSS upscaling.

DLSS 5 in FM26

Okay, it's not photorealism, but I think it looks better.

DLSS 5 off

DLSS 5 on

What I wasn't expecting, though, was to be able to stick DLSS 5 into any game, regardless of whether it had DLSS in there in the first place. Which meant that I, with my 33 year Football Manager addiction, had to see what it does to FM26.

And, well, I'm going to be leaving it enabled. It's not that it suddenly makes the game look photorealistic—as Nvidia itself has said, you need a really good input source to get a really good output from DLSS 5—but on its own it adds in a bunch of things that you otherwise have to mod in yourself from a bunch of other places. And because it's just added in last, and FM isn't hugely demanding, I'm still happily locked to 60 fps anyways.

Those little computer people don't need a whole lot of processing.

But it does improve the environmental lighting of the matches. It makes the pitches look better, there's a tiny amount more detail on the tiny people, on the pitch and in the crowd, and it adds in some improved shadows. But it's not just in the 3D engine, because it also works its neural rendering magic on the player profile pics, too. Which is especially helpful for making the regenerated players look less like plastic Action Man figures (or GI Joes, for my American cousins).

DLSS 5 in FM26

You're getting better regen faces without copy/paste mods.

DLSS 5 off

DLSS 5 on

Normally you'd have to use a mod to get more realistic player faces, and even then they're still just a bunch of AI generated profile pics which get disseminated among the database so you still get identical twins from different parts of the game world. With DLSS 5 I'm just getting a little extra facial detail and realism for my new potato-faced folk.

They're still not exactly photorealistic, but I'll take it.

How to enable DLSS 5

DLSS 5 in Cyberpunk 2077

The effect on the lighting of the character model is impressive and easy to mod in. Just computationally expensive...

DLSS 5 off

DLSS 5 on

To begin with it was all a case of finding a Discord invite to the RenoDX channel, finding the right .dll files and downloading the necessary RenoDX DLSS 5 mod. Then you had to play around with getting it and Reshade installed in the right directories and crossing your fingers.

Now, it's far more straightforward. The cleanest installation method I've found is to use the ReShade HDR Installer (RHI) from Github. This does all the hard work for you—run it as Administrator and you can just pick from a list of installed games on the left hand side of the UI, install ReShade, and then pick one of the DLSS Tools from the Shaders/Addon button at the top, or from sliding over to the specific Neural Rendering section that has just been added. This should install the necessary .dll files in the right places for your game to work.

But, it must be noted, that this is all predicated on an as yet officially unreleased feature being jammed into unsupporting games. So you might find your mileage varies on just how much messing around you might need to do to get it running perfectly. If at all.

When you boot into the game you can then hit 'Home' to bring up the ReShade in-game menu and slide over to the RenoDX tab to access the DLSS 5 options. Now, these are options and sliders that aren't going to be available in the release versions of DLSS 5. That's something important to note, as officially DLSS 5 is going to be an on/off toggle switch so that you just get the version of DLSS 5 the game devs themselves have tuned.

The ReShade option puts those sliders in your hands, but with less fine grain control over where it's deployed and how intensely. Which is going to make the whole maintaining artisitic intent thing a tricky argument. There has been resistance to DLSS 5's AI filtering, with some folk suggesting that it tramples on the original artistic intent of the developers. So Nvidia has spent a lot of time since its announcement talking about the level of control devs will have themselves, and that it will only be in their hands with no sliders for us gamers. These mods, however, change that giving users a level of control not officially sanctioned, which means gamers themselves will get to choose how much of the devs artistic intent they want to retain.

Anyways, you ideally want to use the Upscaled or DLSS version of DLSS-NR rather than the 'Present' method (if you're using the ShortFuse mod). Present is the version that runs when the game frames are presented rather than inside the actual graphics pipeline. That means you lack the motion and depth information DLSS 5 relies on to be effective. If it's saying 'Waiting' then something's gone wrong.

I had this with a couple of games—it allows you to test the overall look, but it's terrible in motion—and had to mess around putting files in different places to get the mod hooking in properly. Switching between the two different RenoDX DLSS 5 tools generally helped.

I walked into Nvidia's DLSS 5 demo last week with some preconceptions, I'll be honest. I hadn't enjoyed the images it had produced to date, and I was sceptical about the benefits it could bring to our beloved games. Not to mention the troubling notion of AI-altered images entering into our hobby, even if you can turn them off with a simple checkbox.

The good news is, DLSS 5 is capable of looking pretty good once the settings have been tweaked by actual game developers. The very bad news is, Nvidia says turning DLSS 5 on will currently reduce performance by 50-60%. And that's across the board—no matter the game.

Nvidia was keen to point out that, just six months ago, DLSS 5 required two RTX 5090s to run. So, a 5x improvement since then is something to hold within our collective hats. But tanking frame rates is very unlikely to improve DLSS 5's perception within the PC gaming community, that's for certain.

Looking at the basic performance charts Nvidia has provided us so far, the ultra-high frame rate figures are based on 6x Multi Frame Generation. So, while the little RTX 5060 can churn out a 258 fps result in NBA 2K27 at 1080p Ultra settings with ray tracing and DLSS 5 enabled, the game underneath will actually be running at around 43 fps.

At 4K, the same game settings result in a 370 fps average on an RTX 5090, or a 233 fps average on an RTX 5080. That's with Performance-level upscaling, though, and with 6x MFG doing some seriously heavy lifting once more.

If you've spent thousands of bucks on a high-end graphics card, I'd imagine that running games with the upscaling and frame generation settings near their limits to achieve high frame rates is probably not what you had in mind.

All of which makes me wonder if the AI-ification of DLSS 5 is really the biggest barrier to its acceptance. I have my own deep, dark concerns about DLSS 5, AI in general, and its hooks making their way into our hobby. But if the tech is capable of slicing the frame rate in half, all of this might be a moot point.

The Nvidia folk I spoke to were keen to point out that performance improvements are already on the way. But given that so many gamers are stuck with older graphics cards, thanks to the ongoing pricing crisis that seems destined to become much worse before it gets better, I do wonder who the tech is currently for.

When ray tracing first arrived on the scene, its performance-tanking qualities were at least (partially) offset by the introduction of upscaling. But all these years later, I still debate for myself whether it's worth turning on when I play games on my own, relatively high-end gaming PC. Our rigs might be better equipped on average, but ray tracing is still a performance hog in 2026—and many gamers I speak to still turn it off for smoother frames.

And while DLSS 5 is certainly more... transformative than ray tracing in terms of the images it creates, it's also far more controversial. Even if you're prepared to make the jump into AI-enhanced games (and it's quite the leap, let's be honest), putting those concerns in tandem with massively compromised frame rates is a seriously big ask for even the most curious of gamers.

I expected to be writing about the controversy surrounding Nvidia's new tech in terms of the wider atmosphere of AI discontent. But here I am getting down to brass tacks. In its current form, DLSS 5 seems to hit your graphics card like a freight train—and whatever your opinion on AI in gaming, nobody wants that.

I think it's fair to say that DLSS 5 is the most controversial Nvidia creation… well, ever. After the huge amounts of backlash it received in reaction to its unveiling earlier this year, Nvidia's AI image enhancing tech has been mostly kept under lock and key.

However, myself and a select group of journalists were ushered into a small room in the Nvidia booth at Gamescom last week, amid some furtive glances and hushed whispering. As the lights went down, it became obvious as to why. Here was the latest version of DLSS 5 running in front of us, the controversial graphics tech in the flesh. And the message Nvidia wanted to get across was deliberate, and strongly put: It's all about developer control.

I was shown a character sitting within the Nvidia Zorah demo, the same shown at SIGGRAPH 2026 earlier this year. As he sat, looking around at his environment in a bored fashion, I leaned forward in my chair. DLSS 5 was obviously altering the image to a significant degree, but seeing the results in person, it was clear this was nowhere near the "yassified Grace" level of AI enhancement shown in the first reveal.

Our digital example, casually inspecting the back of his hand, looked a lot like the original character model—but with more photorealistic lighting, and plenty of finer details that seemed fitting for the scene. It was nowhere near as brash an image as I was expecting, I'll say that much for free.

At the side of the screen was the DLSS 5 developer control menu. Two sliders, marked "structure intensity" and "tone intensity" were set somewhere around the midway mark—and at these settings, the character looked pretty damn good.

There are more tools for developers to play with, too. The masking feature allows devs to select individual items in a scene (say, a fruit bowl on a table) and give it the AI-enhanced treatment, while leaving everything else DLSS 5-free. The varying AI models can also be switched in and out (or on and off) on a whim.

According to Nvidia, the fine-tuning abilities of DLSS 5 are designed to be as developer-friendly as possible, allowing them to dip in and out of its features on a model-per-model basis to suit their artistic intent. Seeing the demo running in front of me with my own eyes, I could feel myself coming around to the idea. My arms uncrossed.

And then my hosts began messing with the sliders and the model presets, and an essential truth emerged. While a light dusting of DLSS 5 can cause a substantial visual leap in terms of photorealism, turning it up to 11 can still provoke an unwanted, gut-level reaction.

There are three image-transforming AI models for devs to choose from (at least in the demo I was shown): A, B, and C. While models A and C looked pretty good to me at various settings, model B made me wince when both sliders were pushed up. The HDR-like shadows became overblown, the skin textures too shiny, the facial features too keenly drawn.

To my eyes, characters with model B turned up can look substantially different from the model underneath, in a way that's reminiscent of the AI beauty filters we've all become far too familiar with. In short, it's still capable of giving me the ick.

I'll call it as I see it: DLSS 5 turned up to the guns, particularly using model B, can look downright ugly. But Nvidia's point makes a whole lot of sense. It's the developers, the artists behind the game, that choose how far to push the technology. If it oversteps the mark? Devs can adjust the settings and rein it back in, and you can turn it off entirely (separate from regular DLSS upscaling) if you disagree with their choices.

On that note, some Nvidia staff members I spoke to took issue with the idea that DLSS 5, even in the experimental version shown earlier this year, is capable of transforming the facial geometry of a character model. I argued the contrary, because well, look at the screenshots below.

Apparently, this is more of a perceived effect created by the lighting than an actual, DLSS 5-induced facelift. This eventually turned into a philosophical debate, where I argued that, even if it simply looks like the model is creating markedly different facial geometry from the original character models, the end result is functionally the same.

Because that's what it looks like, and what it looks like is the whole point. This argument resulted in a stalemate, so I'll let you be the judge for yourselves.

Anyway, the longer the demos continued, the clearer it became that DLSS 5 is capable of creating some stunning imagery when handled with a delicate touch, and some seriously overblown results when pushed to the limit. DLSS 5 can enhance—but it can also alter an image with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

The example above shows a DLSS 5-enhanced scene of some foliage against a building, with ray tracing turned on and off. It's supposed to demonstrate that the more lighting information you give the models to work with, the better the visual result. The DLSS 5 and ray-traced image combined, though, looks seriously oversaturated to my eyes. Realism has gone out of the window, and the end result is… lurid, to say the least.

What is beautiful to some is garish to others, but all I'll say is that the term "better" is far from my mind. There's no accounting for taste, is there?

What we're going to be relying on for the most part, though, are the tastes of the game developers themselves. I was taken into a separate room to try out NBA 2K27, the first game you'll be able to play with DLSS 5 enabled. Officially, at least, as it can apparently be modded into any game.

This was a very locked down session, in which the devs refused to be drawn in on the details of exactly what sort of DLSS 5 implementation I was looking at. However, I'd guess that, by Nvidia's standards, everything I saw was achieved by using the lower end of the DLSS 5 spectrum.

The sweat running down the players' arms looked… sweatier. More glistening. The facial features looked more realistic, with better lighting in the nooks and crannies of their various mugs, and less of the "uncanny valley" effect I'd seen at higher settings. The crowd in the background transformed from low-poly models into a more passable depiction of basketball match attendees, without straying too far from the look of the original assets.

To my surprise, I didn't experience the AI image ick. It looked more like the difference between a game running on a console, and one running on PC with a ton of extra graphics options added on top. DLSS 5 doesn't look quite so revolutionary at these settings, perhaps—but the results impressed me more than I expected.

I was careful to look for signs of ghosting, or any morphing AI faces under fast motion. One of my critiques of the previous DLSS 5 footage was the temporal handling, which looked a little blurred and smeared to my eyes. However, there was no hint of that here. I played virtual basketball, I sucked at it, and I enjoyed the look of the game overall.

In all honesty, it felt like playing a next-gen game with cutting-edge graphics technology, and not an ill-advised AI gaming revolution. This, beyond anything else, was perhaps the best demonstration that DLSS 5 can be used to genuinely enhance the look of our games, rather than turning them into an AI-slathered mess. If developers tune it wisely, there are real visual benefits to be seen.

All of this might be a moot point, though, if performance is a concern. The Nvidia devs I spoke to estimated a 50-60% performance hit with DLSS 5 turned on, which doesn't vary on a game-by-game basis. Essentially, it's still a massive resource hog as things stand, although it no longer requires two RTX 5090s just to run. Goodie.

Further performance improvements are forthcoming, says Nvidia, but my eyebrows jumped so high at this news I'm surprised they didn't shoot off the top of my head. Graphics card prices are outrageous right now, and I can't help wondering who's going to want to slice their frame rate in half in return for some AI-enhanced imagery, good-looking or otherwise.

All of the performance charts I was shown used a combination of 6x Multi Frame Generation and various levels of upscaling to bump up the numbers. And while I'm not as much of a frame generation sceptic as some, I doubt this will come as good news to those curious to try out the tech.

If the performance impact was minimal, I could see some gamers experimenting with DLSS 5 for themselves and potentially changing their minds. With this sort of massive dip, though, I think DLSS 5's GPU-hogging ways are a much bigger issue for adoption than the AI-ified nature of the tech itself.

What's left, then, is the thorny issue of the ethical debate. The elephant in the room, and there's no getting around it, is that generative AI usage in games is a massive hot topic at the moment. In fact, AI usage in general is causing all sorts of debates in all sorts of arenas, from the potential effects on the job market, to ecological concerns, to discussions around the very nature of truth.

And this, I feel, is the real hurdle Nvidia is trying to jump. While it's clear that DLSS 5 can be beneficial to the image quality of our games in the right hands, whether we, as gamers, want to participate in the AI-ification of everything in this way is much more doubtful. And it's on this level where I feel far more conflicted about the tech.

My criticisms of the AI revolution, in a general sense, are well documented. And while I can absolutely see the potential benefits of DLSS 5, I left the demo booth with mixed feelings. Is this where the games industry is heading? Will I be spending most of my gaming time looking at more AI-enhanced imagery in the future?

Will developers make use of the tech wisely, or will major releases eventually go for the full yassified approach, transforming our games into something unrecognisable from what they are today? Will devs jump in with both feet, or will they be more cautious? And crucially, is AI-enhanced imagery really what we want, even if it's capable of looking nice?

In principle, the demos I was shown should have me jumping up and down with excitement at the potential of better gaming graphics. But the AI association, perhaps even infiltration, into a form of media I truly adore is enough to keep me awake at night. In practice, DLSS 5 is certainly capable of creating some good-looking imagery in the right hands.

But it also represents a major leap towards an AI-enhanced gaming future, and one that still makes me, in the depths of my bones, more than a little uncomfortable. Whatever the case, DLSS 5 will be launching on September 3—and we're going to have to decide for ourselves if we want to engage with it.

We know that DLSS 5 is due to arrive with us in the autumn time, but that release date feels a lot closer, with specific files being picked out of an early access version of NBA2K27 and dropped into Remedy's Control (via Notebookcheck). The files in question have been found in the 2K ball-tossing title's PC version—which is currently playable for gamers who purchased the Deluxe or Ultra editions—and a modder from the RenoDX team has managed to inject it into Control with sliders.

And, while I'm likely to be pilloried for saying so, I'm kinda impressed with the changes and the level of… ahem… control you have over the visuals with the number of sliders at play in the mod. It's also impressive that this has been knocked together using an early DLL file from a completely different game and dropped into Control.

The mod has been released in the RenoDX Discord channel and offers up seven different styles, which seem to range from conservative to full-on yasification. So far it's just aimed at the character models, but given the suggested performance hit from enabling it, you are going to want to limit its reach.

Looking into the Reddit chats about it, people are suggesting drops on an RTX 5070 Ti that take Control from 71 fps to 35 fps. That's a big hit, though we are talking about a pre-release feature in a game that it's not (yet?) designed for. When ray tracing still gets a lukewarm reception due to its performance impact, yet another resource-hogging feature will likely struggle for traction even outside the AI antipathy in gaming.

And that's without taking into account the current ludicrous pricing situation for every Nvidia GPU from the fifth tier of its RTX 50-series and up.

There are various images of the lead character, Jesse Faden, but I think one of the most interesting is linked in the original X post, where the conservative preset is seemingly being used. The character model doesn't look markedly different, but as the sliders are adjusted, you can see how the filter is layered on without negatively impacting the original design or geometry.

Then there's another uploaded image where you can slide between the DLSS 5 on and off versions of the character model, where it's far more extreme. But still, I don't think it looks bad. If you'd given me that Faden model from the outset natively, I'd have marvelled at Remedy making such a detailed character, especially given the company's obvious desire for photorealism in its characters. It still obviously retains the geometry, but this is far more of the AI beauty filter fear that large parts of the gaming community are concerned about with this feature's release.

I think the fact this has all been pulled together from one DLL file taken out of an early access game is impressive, and makes me think that the instant DLSS 5 gets released, we're going to see a whole lot of these mods out there giving gamers access to all the controls for a whole bunch of games… whether those game developers like it or not.

And that's going to be a whole other debate.

One final thing to note is that the DLL file in question is noted as DLSSNR in the description, which suggests that DLSS 5 as the catch-all name for this AI game filter is going to change. Rebranding it as DLSS Neural Rendering feels far more suited to this feature, and might have led to less of a backlash at the start, where calling it DLSS 5 from the outset made it feel like this is just what the next version of DLSS is in its entirety.

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.

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?

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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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?

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.

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.

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."