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DLSS 5 was released earlier this week, shipping with its new neural rendering feature. Just like its initial reveal, there has been a fair amount of backlash, but at the same time, many players are impressed – at least when it comes to serving a hyper-realistic art style. CEO Jensen Huang previously said it can generate “the opposite of photoreal,” but Nvidia now says it’s a limitation.
We should point out that DLSS 5 is only officially available in NBA 2K27 right now, but leaked .dll files from the game’s early access build have allowed modders to apply and adjust neural rendering in any game they like. The leak also gives gamers the opportunity to test it on older hardware, rather than being locked to current-gen RTX 50 series GPUs with a simple on/off setting.
DLSS 5 isn’t suitable for games with a “strongly stylized aesthetic” #
Shortly after the technology was originally revealed back at Nvidia GTC in March, Huang commented that players “want the generative models to generate the opposite of photoreal,” adding “yeah, it’ll do that too.” Fast forward to its official launch this September, Nvidia has admitted to some shortcomings in this regard, at least in the current version of DLSS 5.
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The current objective of DLSS 5 is to produce vivid, photorealistic game imagery by generating realistic lighting, materials, and fine texture details. Therefore, the system is not designed for games whose visual identity depends on a strongly stylized aesthetic. For example, voxel-based, illustrated, and cartoon-like games intentionally use non-photorealistic visual languages. Applying the current DLSS 5 to such content may work against the art direction rather than improve it.
A more general system would allow developers to specify the desired rendering style and transform a game scene accordingly while preserving its geometry, semantics, and temporal consistency. Supporting such arbitrary stylistic direction is an important avenue for future work. The current version of DLSS 5, however, remains limited to photorealistic rendering.
Source:[Nvidia Research Labs]
Nvidia describes DLSS 5 as “3D-guided neural rendering” that “composes with rasterization, ray tracing, and path tracing rather than competing with them.” In other words, it is strictly truthful to the game’s existing geometry and aims to keep visuals consistent from frame to frame. In July, Nvidia showed off DLSS 5 for a second time to explain how it preserves artistic intent.
‘AI slop’ backlash aside, we are genuinely impressed with DLSS 5 in titles like NBA 2K27. The technology makes a lot of sense for a game that focuses on accurately recreating the faces of real-life people, and there’s plenty of light bouncing around in this kind of environment for an AI-based approach to take advantage of. It may not be best suited for stylized titles, but it can look great elsewhere.
Certainly one of the biggest downsides so far is its hit on performance, with performance drops up to 60% – but this is something that should continue to be optimized. Between its initial reveal and its public release, Nvidia says DLSS 5 already performs 5x better – the company was running two RTX 5090 GPUs to make it work during its original announcement; now it runs on a single card.