Nvidia’s hotly debated DLSS 5 tech, which uses generative AI to apply graphical filters to existing games, arrives this week, albeit only in one game. The game is NBA 2K7, and the GeForce drivers for DLSS 5 arrive Thursday night in the US (9pm PDT) and early Friday morning here (5am BST). This is only available for GeForce 50-series graphics cards, laptops and GeForce Now.
The big, controversial part of DLSS 5 is “neural rendering”, which goes beyond DLSS’s previous remit of improving game performance “to transform visual fidelity as well”, Nvidia wrote in a blog post. “While previous DLSS technologies focused on reconstructing existing scene data to deliver higher-resolution images, additional frames, or cleaner ray-traced lighting, DLSS 5 with 3D-Guided Neural Rendering takes the next step by using AI to generate the rich lighting and material details that real-time performance constraints once forced developers to strip away, allowing them to realise their original artistic vision.
“Instead of generating frames from text prompts, 3D-Guided Neural Rendering uses the game engine’s rendered frame, complete with its artist-designed geometry, textures, and lighting buffers, as an unyielding foundation. DLSS 5 becomes the final rendering stage of the graphics pipeline, infusing scenes with lifelike lighting and materials while ensuring the engine frame defines what must remain, and the artist directs what may change.”
It was examples of DLSS 5 helping developers “realise their original artistic vision” that were widely criticised earlier this year, when Nvidia shared images of Resident Evil Requiem main character Grace Ashcroft altered by neural rendering in DLSS 5. Her face appeared noticeably changed, and not necessarily in a good way; calls of “yassifying” her face – or artificially beautifying it according to skewed social media-filtered standards – were rife.
A slew of DLSS 5-altered game characters’ faces also appeared this past weekend as the technology leaked ahead of release. Modders tried the technology in Remedy’s Control, and also experimented with DLSS 5 in GTA 5, Cyberpunk 2077, and The Witcher 3. Geralt certainly looks a lot older.
Nvidia’s latest blog explained the neural rendering process in more detail, using subtler example images this time, while also underlining issues such as ‘preserving artistic intent’ and the control developers and players have to use DLSS 5 a little or a lot, or not at all. You can simply turn it off. A couple of ‘before and after’ screenshots of NBA 2K7 show basketball players Cade Cunningham and Tyrese Haliburton lit with, what appears to me, more realistic lighting.
But there’s not only an ethical gen-AI-related concern to turning this on but, reportedly, a performance one as well. DLSS 5 – ironically for what was previously a performance-enhancing technology – seems to drastically affect frame-rates. It might not look like it in the blog, because the graphs there boast high frame rates, but as PC Gamer pointed out, they are based on 6x multi-frame generation numbers – ie. they’ve been multiplied by six. Reverse that and it’s a different story.
Suddenly, a GeForce RTX 5060 card in a good machine only runs NBA 2K7 in 1080p on Ultra settings at 43 FPS, and a shiny GeForce RTX 5090 just breaks 60 FPS in 4K on Ultra. Still, it’s better than the two 5090s the blog says it took to run DLSS 5 back in March, when it was announced. “Since the initial announcement of DLSS 5 in March, our progress has been rapid: from running on dual GeForce RTX 5090s to now a single graphics card, we’ve achieved a 5X performance gain in just six months,” Nvidia wrote, “making DLSS 5 available for all GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs and Laptop GPUs.
“Our optimisation curve isn’t flattening out, and we have further optimisations in active development. We expect upcoming model updates coming in the [autumn] to boost performance beyond today’s baseline. Backed by over a decade of DLSS expertise, we remain committed to continuously pushing the boundaries of performance and image quality, and this is only the beginning.
“Together, these innovations mark the beginning of a transformative era which blends hand-crafted rendering with neural graphics to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”
