DLSS 5 isn’t due for an official release until sometime later this year, but an unfinished version that slipped out with NBA 2K27 has allowed the RenoDX modding community to get it running with dozens of games.
I spent an evening trying it out on as many games as possible, including one from 2003. Even in its unfinished state, DLSS 5 is impressive.
DLSS 5 aims to revolutionize game graphics
How does DLSS 5 even work?
The DLSS 5 reads scene semantics—things like skin, hair, and fabric—and adds lighting and material detail that the engine never actually rendered.
DLSS 5’s output is based on the game’s actual geometry and motion vectors, so you aren’t flooded with the weird hallucinations that are often common in AI-generated video.
The result is nearly photorealistic gameplay that doesn’t reduce your gameplay to single-digit FPS.
Cyberpunk 2077 looks spectacular
In Cyberpunk 2077, DLSS 5 makes skin, wet streets, and neon light interactions appear almost like something out of a film. It also does wonders for the random NPCs you encounter as you move through Night City.
NPCs that were previously dull and forgettable pick up an exceptional amount of detail in their faces and clothing. I could imagine a well-framed screenshot passing as a photograph.
Baldur’s Gate 3 looks good, but the style doesn’t quite match
The environment in Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t seem to benefit from DLSS 5 as much as games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Grand Theft Auto V did. There were even a few unique bugs, like glowing butterflies.
However, where DLSS 5 does shine is the characters. It does a good job changing the appearance of the characters without losing the qualities that define them. I was concerned that non-human characters like Lae’zel would become human-looking, but DLSS 5 actually handled it quite well. The human characters all looked great.
However, Baldur’s Gate 3 also has a lot of fantastical elements that DLSS 5 just doesn’t seem to address.
It still has problems—the biggest one is “sameness”
This accidental release isn’t perfect. In my testing, I noticed that some objects are shimmering or flickering when they shouldn’t, and faces sometimes do subtly shift, which is more than a little creepy.
The broader issue is how similar everything looks. Photorealism is a fine look for some games, like Cyberpunk, Death Stranding 2, and Grand Theft Auto V, but it is often conspicuously out of place in games like Baldur’s Gate 3.
NVIDIA has stated that there will be tools that give developers control over intensity, color grading, and masking. That is certainly a step in the right direction, but highly-stylized genres will only benefit if developers (or players) get the ability to tweak the DLSS 5’s art style more specifically.
DLSS 5 reminds me of DLSS 1
The original DLSS was rough; DLSS 4 is incredible
Credit: NVIDIA
Critics of DLSS 5 have been quick to point out that this technology often produces results that are firmly in uncanny valley territory. Some of the faces it creates are just subtly wrong in a way that is unsettling. It’s a valid complaint for now, but if history can teach us anything, it’s that DLSS 5 won’t remain uncanny for long.
Consider the original DLSS. DLSS 1 launched in 2018 and was blurry, game-specific, and widely decried. I certainly didn’t make use of it, and I wasn’t alone. Since then, however, things have changed enormously. Each subsequent release has improved fidelity and performance. These days, the first thing I do when I fire up a new game is check the DLSS and frame gen settings.
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DLSS 5 is the future of gaming whether you like it or not
The flaws with DLSS 5 are probably going to follow the same pattern. The first generation of new technology is almost always a little clunky. A few iterations down the road, we could plausibly expect per-art-style training, better temporal stability, and better performance.
AI progress isn’t slowing down for anyone
That optimism isn’t just based on the trajectory of DLSS either. Just a few short years ago, AI video generators couldn’t even create a stable 5-second video of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
Winding back the clock further, Google’s DeepDream was conjuring up psychedelic horrors with dog noses embedded in every dark swirl.
Today, you can generate a 10-second, 1080p video of Will Smith eating spaghetti and speaking on a mid-range gaming PC that would pass for real unless you looked at it very carefully.
The “realism gap” has been rapidly narrowing in all fields related to AI image and video generation. DLSS 5 might not be perfect right now, but it seems unlikely that it is fundamentally unfixable given the improvements we’ve seen elsewhere. We just need to wait for DLSS 5.5 and the right supporting software.
You need seriously powerful hardware
My RTX 5070 Ti took a real performance hit
Credit: Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek
The only real catch I encountered was performance: DLSS 5 caused a pretty significant performance hit. My average FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 dropped from about 170FPS (with frame gen on) to around 115FPS. With my specific card, that isn’t a deal-breaker, but it is going to be a significant problem on less powerful or older GPUs.
Anyone using an older GPU, or anything other than a 5080 or 5090 really, is going to have to make concessions. In some cases, I expect they’ll be well worth it.
True DLSS 5 will probably be restricted to 50-series GPUs.
If you’re going to try to use DLSS 5 today, make sure to toggle on frame gen and upscaling to keep your game playable.
DLSS 5 makes me miss SLI and Crossfire
Gamers haven’t used multiple GPUs for gaming in a long time, but my time spent experimenting with DLSS 5 really made me want to use a second GPU.
Neural Rendering doesn’t have to run on the same GPU that is handling your native rasterization, you can actually split those two jobs across two GPUs. In theory, that could yield significant performance gains.
AI in gaming seems to be begging for a return to the era of specialized accelerator cards, like we used to have for PhysX.
DLSS 5 is the future, and that’s probably a good thing
DLSS 5 reached gamers before it was ready. It is unpolished and resource-hungry, but the core technology is extremely impressive.
Equating it with garden-variety AI slop misses the point. DLSS 5 is not designed to replace thoughtful art direction or an inspired design—it is just going to change how developers approach implementing their vision going forward. Developers that produce great games will continue to produce great games; developers that produce terrible games will just produce terrible photorealistic games instead.