Nvidia has announced its next addition to the growing suite of DLSS options, which already includes impressive upscaling, ray reconstruction for ray-traced workloads, and frame generation. DLSS 5 is being teased as the biggest leap forward yet, with Nvidia introducing an AI-powered model that changes lighting and material properties at a per-pixel level. However, the response to the announcement has been overwhelmingly negative so far.
Equated to the introduction of a programmable graphical shader in 2001, Nvidia is leveraging a real-time neural rendering model that takes in color and motion vectors from a single in-game frame and generates a wholly new one with photorealistic lighting and material changes. Nvidia notes that these changes are anchored to a game’s assets, indicating that the model doesn’t inherently change the geometry of a character’s facial model, for example, but instead just reshapes the lighting that around it, providing a new level of detail.
The technology was predominantly showcased using character models from games such as Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. The results are striking, but for polarizing reasons. Lighting is indeed photorealistic, but seems to also drastically alter the look of some characters to a point where they look entirely different. This is very obvious when looking at the difference between Grace Ashcroft in Resident Evil Requiem, where the DLSS 5 altered model exhibits properties that her look like she’s been passed through a beautification filter.
The effect is far more impressive when applied to scene geometry, like a cobblestone road featured in the demo above. The ambient occlusion gives the road far more depth, in a way that even path tracing might struggle to match in real-time. Other large swatches of scenery, such as the forests in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, also can look drastically improved in isolation, but the lighting changes to an overall environment do drastically alter the original mood of the scene, both in terms of color reproduction and light levels.
These changes have landed with praise and criticism in equal measure. Digital Foundry, who had hands-on sessions at an Nvidia-hosted event, came away impressed with the potential of the technology. “There’s a lot to process here – and there’s the sense that we’re still not fully aware of the full implications of this technology – but the bottom line is that this is big,” the hands-on preview reads. “Bigger than the last big jump we saw in gaming graphics with the arrival of path tracing in triple-A games, kicking off with Cyberpunk 2077.”
Others have been more critical. Steve Karolewics, a rendering engineer at Respawn, shot down the supposed advancements in favor of original creator intent. “DLSS 5 looks like an overbearing contrast, sharpness, and airbrush filter,” Karolewics wrote, via VGC. “Remarkably different frames with the rationale of photo-real lighting? Nah, I think I’ll stick with the original artistic intent.” There have been numerous memes regarding the announcement too, from players, studios, and publishers alike, showcasing a genuine division in opinion over the potential visual enhancements.
Performance is also another aspect that Nvidia only lightly touches on, but is extrapolated further in Digital Foundry’s preview. At the event, the demo was running across two RTX 5090 graphics cards, with one handling game rendering while the other was completely dedicated to the DLSS 5 model. This per-pixel transformation reportedly requires an abnormally large amount of VRAM currently, with the RTX 5090 featuring the most in a consumer gaming graphics card at 32GB, double the amount present in a RTX 5080.
Nvidia has also noted that developers will have the option to tweak the model’s output, which was further emphasized by Bethesda in a reply to the original announcement. It’s one of many studios that have already pledged to make use of the new DLSS suite, including Capcom, Hotta Studio, NetEase, NCSoft, S-GAME, Tencent, Ubisoft and Warner Bros. Games. Developers are also not forced to include DLSS 5 support in their games, and can continue including the latest versions of the rest of the suite without issue.
Nvidia plans to launch DLSS 5 later this year, hopefully with drastically better performance. There is currently no mention of support outside the 50-series family of GPUs.