I've found a good article by Sean Hollister (The Verge) explaining the new DLSS 5 technology without additional emotions. I can't copy-paste the whole article here (as it's paywalled), but I'll share some things I found most important:
Will gamers be able to tweak DLSS 5 the way they like?
The DLSS 5 mods are so easy to apply, it seems like the cat is out of the bag. But Nvidia’s message is that the developer has full control, and it didn’t answer questions about whether it’ll provide controls to gamers, too.
Is this really an AI filter? It doesn’t use the game engine at all?
Nvidia says that DLSS 5 can take some cues from game engines. But it’s based on the colors and motion vectors that it sees in the flat 2D frames, after they’re rendered and after other techniques like DLSS Super Resolution are applied.
When we asked how DLSS 5 knows the difference between a character model, an object, and a piece of foliage, Liu replied that the model was trained to recognize what it sees. “Just like a person, if you look at anything, you know where things are.”
Is DLSS 5 AI slop?
The critics weren’t wrong: DLSS 5 largely is a generative AI filter for video games. Kind of like a camera filter on your phone, DLSS 5 analyzes and modifies a real-time stream of 2D images after your 3D game engine is done spitting them out. It can indeed make game characters look terrible if applied poorly, like they’ve aged 20 years in a split-second. It uses a
lot of GPU power, and can easily cut framerate in half — even applied well, you could argue that existing games look better without it.
But DLSS 5 isn’t what we typically think of when we think of generative AI. It doesn’t change shapes, or hallucinate words on a sign, or place brand-new fake objects in view. Instead, it imagines light, shadow, color, and detail that make the
same shapes appear differently.
DLSS 5 is also not one-size-fits-all. Despite what it sounds like, “DLSS 5 On” and “DLSS 5 Off” isn’t
just an on-off switch. Developers (and apparently modders) can drag various sliders to change how DLSS 5 plays with color and light, and they have three different AI models to work with at launch, giving your graphics “default,” “natural” or “cinematic” looks.
Plus, developers can decide whether to apply DLSS 5
everything in a scene, just a character’s face and skin, just foliage, just silverware or furniture or even just food.
You’re saying game studios could leave character faces alone?
Yep. The toolset can automatically cut out a mask, like in Photoshop, to isolate a character’s face and skin from everything else.
But what about DLSStelle and all the other horrific AI faces I’ve seen since modders got hold of the tech?
Truly deranged. But these games are supposed to look like animation, and surely their creators would never do anything like this to them, right? Right??
“The soul and goal of GeForce is to achieve photorealism in real-time rendering,” Nvidia’s director of applied deep learning Edward Liu told journalists. And games with more realistic art styles don’t look anywhere near this bad. But even realistic games can look wrong if the sliders are set too aggressively.
What do you mean by “too aggressively?”
I’m willing to bet that if you’ve seen the leaked DLSS 5 modifying an existing game, the unofficial DLSS 5 mod was set to its default level of around 80 percent intensity or even higher. Some creators will even pump it up to 200 percent to make the difference between “DLSS on” and “DLSS off” especially clear.
But I believe even 80 percent is far too aggressive for many existing games. It can feel like you’re artificially aging a character by weathering their skin and deepening the wrinkles and creases in their face.
Then the article shows what Lara Croft looks like with DLSS 5 at 0 percent, 80 percent, and 200 percent intensity.
She seems… weathered, no? But at 40 percent intensity, she still looks like the same video game character to me, only with a bit more life in her eyes.
Similarly, here’s Kazuma Kiryu from
Yakuza Kiwami once more. In this part of the game, he’s supposed to be 27 years old, and nowhere near the grizzled veteran he is by
Yakuza 6. But as I ramp up the intensity from 0 to 40 to 85 percent, you can see his furrowed brow gets more furrowed, his hair lightens, and the increased shadow across his cheeks makes his face appear slightly gaunt.
The article shows what Kazuma Kiryu looks like with DLSS 5 at 0 percent, 40 percent, and 85 percent intensity.
He looks older — even if the underlying geometry of his face hasn’t actually changed. In a cutscene at 85 percent, it even looks like his hair might be tinged with grey.
Will game developers actually buy into DLSS 5? Will they use it well?
That’s one of the big remaining questions — and one that Nvidia left unanswered during and after our briefing.
While Nvidia said in March that DLSS 5 would come to at least 16 different games including
Assassin’s Creed Shadows,
Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, and
Resident Evil Requiem, the company did not answer questions about when DLSS 5 might come to any game beyond
NBA 2K27, nor did it confirm that other titles are still coming following the original backlash. Perhaps Nvidia and its partners will wait and see how reviewers and gamers react first.
It’s worth noting that this may be a niche technology to start: while it no longer requires
two RTX 5090 GPUs to function, it still uses a lot of horsepower. Officially, DLSS 5 is only coming to the latest RTX 50 series GPUs, which have become quite expensive: even a lower-mid-range RTX 5060 retailers for around $470 these days.
Just how much of a performance hit are we talking?
With
NBA 2K27, Nvidia claims the performance hit is 50 to 60 percent on average across all Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs. When I ran the
Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark at 1440p with on an RTX 5090 at Highest spec, DLSS Quality and an unofficial DLSS 5 mod, I saw framerate exactly cut in half — 312fps with DLSS 5 off, 156fps with it on.
https://www.theverge.com/games/986980/nvidias-dlss-5-explained - try the article if you can to see the comparison screenshots and other images.
