After spending a full two weeks injecting DLSS 5’s Neural Rendering into every game on my PC and even into my PS2 titles, I know exactly what Nvidia’s latest tech can do, and just how ridiculous it can get.
The obvious next step felt like firing up RPCS3 on my RTX 4070 Ti, so I threw the neural rendering tech at some of the PlayStation 3’s most iconic games. I wanted to see just how far I could push these old games with technology that didn’t even exist when the console launched and faded into obscurity.
It’s no spoiler to tell you, right out of the gate, that DLSS 5 was impressive on RPCS3, but I didn’t expect to be more impressed by something else entirely. The more PS3 games I ran through DLSS 5, the more I noticed something that completely changed how I viewed this experiment.
Only dump games and system files you legally own, and check your local laws before using them with an emulator.
DLSS 5 makes the PS3 look genuinely ridiculous
Some of my favorite classics had my jaw on the floor
Getting DLSS 5 working on a PlayStation 3 emulator like RPCS3 wasn’t as simple as ticking a box. I used ReShade, RenoDX, DeepFriedChicken, and ReShade’s Vulkan implementation, with RPCS3 itself running through Vulkan. Another crucial part of this puzzle was the iMMERSE mod by martymcmodding, which recreates and simulates motion vectors on-screen, giving DLSS 5 the information it needs to work its magic — much like Lossless Scaling does to whatever it sees on your screen.
With DLSS 5, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 had astonishingly clean character models, with skin textures that looked almost a generation ahead. It did occasionally wander into hyperrealism, but in a world with devil genes fighting lava-surviving geriatrics, realism has never really been the selling point.
Then I moved to Silent Hill: Downpour, where things got even stranger. DLSS 5 made the original PS3 look remarkably close to a PS4 title, with character models gaining so much more detail while emoting. The greatest beneficiaries, of course, were the environments, which took on a whole new layer of detail I couldn’t help but be impressed by. At this point, I was thoroughly convinced I’d found DLSS 5’s perfect playground.
I remember being immensely amazed by how “real” Demon’s Souls looked on the PS3, and I’ve had a ball of a time playing its PS5 remake over the past few years. With DLSS 5, though, the PS3 version, too, looked exactly as I remembered — which is perhaps the tallest compliment I can give a fifteen-year-old game.
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RPCS3 was doing a lot of the work, too
DLSS is incredibly fun, but RPCS deserves its due credit, too
The more I played, the more an uncomfortable thought started creeping in: how much of what I was seeing was actually DLSS 5? Sure, I could clearly see the neural rendering layer on top of every character, texture, and motion vector, but every time I turned it off through ReShade, the image never went back to some unbearable, mangled mess. Instead, it stayed remarkably sharp and detailed, and that’s when I realized RPCS3 wasn’t simply pretending to be a PS3.
Almost a decade and a half after the PS3 was sunsetted, RPCS3 gives its games access to rendering settings the original console could never dream of — dramatically higher internal resolutions, improved filtering, widescreen support, unlocked framerates, and, of course, community-made patches.
Games designed around the PS3’s limitations can suddenly run at 60fps, provided the game and patch cooperate. Texture packs can replace assets entirely, while resolution patches push the underlying image far beyond what Sony’s hardware could produce. The most important thing to remember is that none of this requires Nvidia’s latest neural rendering wizardry.
In fact, even before DLSS 5 ever touched the image while playing Tekken Tag Tournament 2, RPCS3 had already removed much of the PS3’s visual baggage. The higher internal resolution alone did a lot of work, which I pushed from the original 720p all the way up to 4K. Admittedly, this made my initial conclusion of “DLSS 5 remastered this game” look a little premature.
I realized I hadn’t really taken a PS3 game and handed it over to DLSS 5. In truth, I took a heavily enhanced PS3 game and rendered it through modern PC hardware. From there, DLSS 5 made an already improved image even better.
I still can’t stop using DLSS 5
It’s free remasters all around
By the end of this experiment, I realized that while the emulator provided the high-resolution foundation, DLSS 5 took that foundation and created something new on screen that was far more interesting.
The difference was particularly obvious in the places I kept staring at anyway: faces, skin, foliage, distant geometry, and environmental surfaces. Silent Hill: Downpour could look remarkably clean without DLSS 5, but with it, character detail and environmental definition took another step forward. Demon’s Souls was even more fascinating, with foliage and lighting taking on a life of their own that would’ve had no business running on a PlayStation 3.
That is what ultimately won me over. RPCS3 had already given these games a second life, but DLSS 5 gave me another reason to keep staring at them. The neural rendering here wasn’t rescuing these games from bad graphics, per se, because they are already undeniably gorgeous. Somehow, though, DLSS made me want to keep pushing them further, and every step I took was more rewarding than the last.
I don’t think every game needs neural rendering, but PS3 emulation has given me a place where all that ridiculous technology is simply fun to use, which I’ll take in a heartbeat any day of the week.
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Sometimes the overkill is the point
When you hear someone on the internet say that “DLSS 5 is a free remaster for any game you want,” they’re not half-wrong. It’s wonderful to use the most advanced rendering technology available somehow today to revisit games we grew up on, emulating hardware that struggled to keep up with itself. We spend so much time chasing the next graphical breakthrough that it is easy to forget how much life remains in games that were considered technologically obsolete years ago.
That’s what made this rabbit hole worthwhile for me. I went in expecting another excuse to stare at DLSS 5 doing increasingly ridiculous things, but I came out appreciating the sheer amount of work that enthusiasts have already poured into preserving and improving these games.