DLSS 5 tested in games – results are mixed
Enthusiasts continue to run the leaked version of DLSS 5 in games without official support.
The author of the YouTube channel GamerInVoid demonstrated NVIDIA’s neural rendering in five projects at once: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Death Stranding 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and Star Wars Outlaws.
More beautiful, but not always better
The test was conducted on a GeForce RTX 4070 Super with high neural processing intensity. DLSS 5 noticeably alters lighting and shading, emphasizing materials, skin, clothing, and fine environmental details. In some scenes, the image truly becomes more realistic.
But as detail increases, the neural network also begins to alter the artistic style. In Death Stranding 2, characters appear decades older due to enhanced wrinkles and skin texture. In The Witcher 3, photorealistic faces clash with legacy facial animation, creating a pronounced uncanny valley effect.
Similar early DLSS 5 tests show that the issue is not limited to individual games: at excessively high intensity, the technology can alter faces, materials, and lighting more drastically than the original developers anticipated.
Unofficial version
The displayed result cannot be considered an example of final DLSS 5 quality. Games are not adapted for the technology, and modders are effectively applying neural rendering over a pre-rendered image.
In the official implementation, developers can choose the processing model, adjust its intensity, and use masks to apply the effect only to specific objects or exclude them, such as character faces.
DLSS 5 works alongside other technologies in the DLSS family, including Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Multi Frame Generation. The foundation of the new version is 3D-Guided Neural Rendering: a neural network uses data from a three-dimensional scene to adjust lighting, materials, and other elements of an already rendered frame.
Performance and Graphics Cards
Early unofficial implementations of DLSS 5 require significant resources. In some tests, frame rates dropped by approximately 40-60% without compensation from Multi Frame Generation.
NVIDIA officially announces DLSS 5 for desktop and mobile GeForce RTX 50 graphics cards. Enthusiasts have already run the leaked model on RTX 40, RTX 30, and even RTX 20, but performance on older GPU may be too low for practical use.
Official launch
The first game with official DLSS 5 support will be NBA 2K27. It is expected to demonstrate how significantly the results differ from current experiments, where neural networks face virtually no obstacles in transforming familiar characters into their versions after twenty years of hard life.
NVIDIA plans to enable DLSS 5 support on September 3 at 9:00 PM Pacific Time alongside a new GeForce Game Ready driver.
