DLSS 5 has been the hot topic lately, and the initial reception of Nvidia's latest upscaling technology (even though it's not really upscaling anymore) has been far from positive. It ruins the game's original art style, does more than just repaint lighting, and makes characters look noticeably different in a way that feels worse.

However, DLSS 5 works in certain places, and when it does, the output looks great. For older titles, DLSS 5 is a free remaster button that improves textures and lighting and completely overhauls the visuals, making decades-old titles feel like newer releases.

It's confusing; I get it. Over the course of eight years, DLSS has become a name for too many things, and DLSS 5 is the first of its kind not to bring new upscaling features and instead works as an image filter.

Now, Nvidia claims DLSS 5 uses 3D-guided neural rendering to dynamically repaint lighting, contact shadows, and material details onto assets the game engine itself doesn't handle, ultimately delivering better image quality. It's not a new rendering pipeline, but a filtering/computation process that runs after the image is generated, not before.

However, the results seem to do far more than adjust lighting and textures. The generative AI used in the process has a strong effect that works detrimentally in certain games, where it completely alters the intended art style and hurts performance because the neural rendering model is so demanding.

DLSS 5 is only available in one game so far, and whatever you're seeing applied to other games is a leaked version of the library from NBA 2K27's early access build.

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