Nvidia‘s unfinished DLSS 5 filter slipped into the wild this week, and some people are turning beloved game characters into total strangers overnight.
The tech isn’t due until fall, but modders never wait for permission, do they? Gamers already had AI slop on the brain, just ask the developers behind Humankind 2’s live action trailer, who spent last week denying their actors were bots, or Stellar Blade director Kim Hyung-tae, who decided to use a fully AI-generated video to promote his upcoming game. Now, Nvidia’s DLSS 5 leak landed in the middle of that same debate.
DLSS 5 leak melts familiar video game faces into something else entirely #
Modders traced the whole mess back to NBA 2K27’s early access build, where they dug up a file called nvngx_dlssnr.dll, version 310.8.0.0, quietly holding the unreleased runtime for DLSS 5’s neural rendering mode.
Within hours, the RenoDX crew had it running inside Control, and Jesse Faden emerged looking like she’d pulled an all nighter filing FBC paperwork and aged a decade doing it.
Skyrim and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth got the same treatment soon after, with Cloud Strife coming out less spiky haired mercenary and more like he wandered in from an entirely different, much creepier film.
The results are mesmerizing and unsettling, smoothing every face into something waxy, glossy, and strangely ageless, with seven separate neural rendering styles for modders to torture their favorite characters through.
From the looks of it, it’s punishing on hardware too, with one tester clocking a 50 percent frame rate drop on an RTX 5070 Ti, and HDR still refuses to cooperate properly. Worth remembering, though, that this is a rough, unofficial build modders forced into games months ahead of Nvidia’s own rollout, still slated for sometime this fall.
Related #
Nvidia has spent months fighting this exact narrative. Back in March, CEO Jensen Huang insisted he doesn’t love AI slop either, arguing the tech stays faithful to whatever geometry artists originally built. Leaks, funny enough, never wait for PR to catch up.