DLSS 5 has been impossible to escape lately. It’s in my Instagram Reels, all over my YouTube homepage, and seemingly every other gaming creator has been feeding old games into it to see how close they can get to hyperrealism. None of those clips use the official DLSS 5, though. They use an unfinished DLSS 5 build that leaked with NBA 2K27’s game files in late August, which the modders were quick to wire into ReShade through a RenoDX add-on.
The DLSS 5 Swapper takes it a little further, using its Feeder component to push DLSS 5 into emulators like Dolphin, and that’s where curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to see how far I could push it before photorealistic turned into trippy, so I threw some of my favorite titles from the Wii, which is a console that never rendered above 480p. Here’s how it turned out.
Need for Speed: The Run
It’s like a cursed Forza Horizon 3
By the choice of the first game I picked, you can probably tell I was obsessed with racers as an 11-year-old. If Hot Wheels Velocity X had ever come out on the Wii, it would’ve taken this spot instead. But I’ll reserve that one for another day, because it’d be heartbreaking to watch one of my childhood favorites get its memory desecrated like this.
I ran The Run at a 4x internal resolution in Dolphin and parked my Lotus Exige close to the starting line. Right off the bat, as you can see, Model A made the strongest first impression. The car picked up crispier panel lines and sported a glossier finish, and the fog that the game used to hide the Wii’s short draw distance thinned out enough to reveal what a mess the game is without it.
If that wasn’t enough, Models B and C wiped out almost all the shadows under the car and the road texture crept into the space it had left behind. All three models added a thin, pale outline around the car, making it seem less like it was on the road and more like someone had badly Photoshopped it onto the scene. At this point, I’d decided I had seen enough.
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The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Stylized faces with DLSS 5 gives you pure nightmare fuel
I had even lower expectations for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess than I did for NFS: The Run. The reasoning is quite simple, and it’s the fact that some art styles don’t agree with neural rendering at all, no matter how much the structural intensity or any other toggle you find is fine-tuned. I was happy to see my hypothesis validated, but also a little horrified at the visuals on my screen.
This game’s warm, painted look wasn’t something that ever needed fixing, but DLSS 5 doesn’t know that. It sees soft edges and muted textures, and takes visual optimization in its hands. The close-up screenshot of Link gets away relatively unharmed, though. His hair loses some of its painted sheen, but for the most part, Model A only exaggerates the colors that were provided by imparting further depth, but that brings me back to my earlier argument about how this particular art-style doesn’t intersect with the kind of reconstruction DLSS 5 is imparting onto it.
What did have some promise, though, was the world around it. The trees, moss, wooden buildings, and other environmental details responded much more favorably to the extra structure, giving the world an amount of depth without completely annihilating the original look.
I then decided to do something that I wouldn’t recommend, and that’s running a few additional neural passes. DLSS 5 has a strong prior for what human faces are, likely being trained on photorealistic modern games. Stylized faces like Link’s sit far, far outside that prior, so unless you’re interested in a jump scare, I’d steer clear.
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Resident Evil 4
I hate to say this but… it’s actually impressive
What I absolutely did not expect going into Resident Evil 4 after the two failed experiments, is that it was always a perfect candidate for neural rendering, and almost nothing about the title that I could think of would make me believe so. It came out in 2007, existed before DLSS, and the Wii was barely doing any rendering, let alone neural rendering. And yet somehow, the grimy village looked as if it was made for this sort of enhancement.
The textures that the Wii had to flatten suddenly had somewhere to go, and just like that, the three models managed to conjure an impressive amount of detail out of them. Leon’s leather jacket picked up its weave, the cabin’s wood grain stopped looking like brown stripes, branches gained a new dimension, and the dead leaves on the ground also stopped collapsing into mush.
Perhaps what benefited the most was the darker areas. Porch shadows gained depth and recessed doorways finally looked recessed instead of resembling a painting on the wall. In a close-up shot that I took of Leon, you can see his hair resolve into individual strands and the jacket looks more defined, all of that without a hint of imperfection to be found as far as the visuals were concerned. Model A was the one that made this title from 2007 look like something that would genuinely rival Metro Exodus, and that’s a game that came out twelve years after.
DLSS 5 is only for the games that meet it halfway
After three tests, it became somewhat clear that DLSS 5’s hyperrealistic glow isn’t on offer to every game, no matter what the viral clips on YouTube keep suggesting. It seems to have a clear preference for art styles that were already chasing photorealism to begin with, and it begins to fall apart the moment anything stylized gets in its way. For it to universally enhance every title, it would take a significant amount of developer oversight, which, for now, doesn’t seem to be on the cards.