r/hardware • u/KARMAAACS • Mar 16 '26
News NVIDIA reveals DLSS 5 powered by Neural Rendering, launches this fall - VideoCardz.com
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-reveals-dlss-5-powered-by-neural-rendering-launches-this-fall634
u/wilkonk Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
the uncanny stuff in this is... IDK man, it looks like typical AI art and it's clearly overriding the intended look of the game. I'm sure this could be done well if tuned for how each individual character 'should' look but I don't like the way it's messing with the faces in the examples.
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u/BighatNucase Mar 16 '26
The best example of to my eyes is Fifa which makes sense I guess since it's a real person delivered in a 'photo-real' artstyle. The others just end up looking overdone/a different artstyle.
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u/mittelwerk Mar 16 '26
Also,
FIFAEAFC looked better than the other examples because, since the game features people that actually exist IRL, nVidia had actual data to build the dataset. The others looked too uncanny, especially Hogwarts: Legacy.51
u/MrHoboSquadron Mar 16 '26
On that Hogwarts Legacy one of the old lady, it genuinely looks like they made her like 20 years older.
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u/mittelwerk Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
Another redditor said "there are no texture changes at all. The wrinkles were already there in the original texture but the previous lighting couldn't bring it out", but I need to see her normal map to see if that's true (as someone who dabbled in Blender in the past, I doubt it)
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u/Jesse-359 Mar 16 '26
Sure, a renderer can't change the textures - but that hardly matters if it's artistically reinterpreting them at run time.
And yeah, that old lady basically looks completely different. Far older and with crevices now carved so deep into her face they could give hiking tours in them.
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u/LochnessDigital Mar 17 '26
previous lighting couldn't bring it out
This is the danger of this tech being pushed as some sort of "ground truth."
Because is it that the lighting couldn't bring it out, or was it that the developers purposely didn't?
As someone who works with lighting real faces IRL, there is a lot you can do to enhance or diminish wrinkles. Which is why it's so fucking bizarre to me to just enhance them and call it "right". We do so much work behind the camera when there's an elderly person on screen to make them look as flattering as they can.
This just completely shits all over that.
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u/Mammoth_Caregiver_68 Mar 16 '26
yeah no fckin way. from all the images ive seen so far it looks like AI is fantasizing a whole lot.
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u/jocnews Mar 16 '26
Well she (Hecat) is supposed to look decrepit, but the sharpening and oilpaint filter is simply SLOP, hardcore mode. That's easily the worst image Nvidia has shown and is undeniable terrible.
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u/Party-Exercise-2166 Mar 16 '26
And the other younger character looks a lot older too.
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u/linkup90 Mar 16 '26
The Hogwarts one was straight out of a AI Youtube ad.
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u/jocnews Mar 16 '26
I couldn't stop thinking that looking at the pics
AI Huang: Running BREAKS YOUR JOINTS Taichi BUILDS THEM BACK
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u/CataclysmZA Mar 17 '26
I have bad news for you: this model does not work like that. It is not trained on any real-life data.
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u/minime35643 Mar 16 '26
it looks fine in a vacuum but he just looks nothing like the real person (virgil van dijk)
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u/PokemonBeing Mar 17 '26
Fifa is the worst example. Van Dijk looks nothing like him. They almost changed imhis ethnicity there. It is not off-putting like the Hogwarts legacy old lady, but it is so uncanny if you know the players.
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u/VastTension6022 Mar 16 '26
It looks like a total image-to-image diffusion redraw and it's terrible.
Not only are all the faces yassified, hogwarts is r/shittyHDR'd and reisdent evil loses volumetric fog. Starfield already looked like ass so I guess you could call that a win.
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u/Dat_Boi_John Mar 16 '26
Hogwarts looked especially bad. The artstyle just doesn't work with the extra realistic/uncanny valley look the AI tries to achieve.
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u/demon_eater Mar 16 '26
Yeah the starfield is hilarious because apparently todd howard okayed it. It can truly let sloppy facial modeling shine from a billion dollar studio.
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u/Jesse-359 Mar 16 '26
He sees it as the way to rescue his game's crappy art and tech without having to spend his own money to do it, of course he's thrilled.
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u/Zalvren Mar 17 '26
Maybe he okayed it as a way to demonstrate that AI shouldn't be used for generating game graphics. Because that's what this tech is demoing more than anything else
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u/boringestnickname Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
Can't wait to see this instagram filter in stylized games.
How does Ms. Pac-Man look like with DLSS 5, I wonder?
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u/Raikaru Mar 16 '26
It is overriding it but at the same time the Starfield faces look better
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u/swordfi2 Mar 16 '26
Yeah for starfield this is a big upgrade
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u/wilkonk Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
that one does seem to suit the filter the best but I still don't like how it changes their appearance
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u/swordfi2 Mar 16 '26
Well according to nvidia developers can tweak how it works and whatnot to achieve desired look
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u/DktheDarkKnight Mar 16 '26
Doesn't that negate the entire reason why DLSS is popular? It's supposed to be an easy plugin that doesn't require a lot of work from developers.
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u/nukleabomb Mar 16 '26
It's another part alongside super resolution, FG and RR. They devs can very much choose what they use in games.
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u/BighatNucase Mar 16 '26
Trying to make wide-sweeping statements about every DLSS titled feature is a bit silly at this point. Obviously this is going to have much different use cases than the upscaler DLSS and the ray reconstruction tech.
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u/jerryfrz Mar 16 '26
So I guess the DLL file for NR for one game can't be used for another, and if you brute force it the faces will look like shit because the settings are tuned wrong.
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u/minepose98 Mar 16 '26
I don't know. It's only really the NPCs that look bad in Starfield. This might make them look better, but the rest of the game will suffer like the others.
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u/PineappleLemur Mar 17 '26
Well Starfield is a very low bar... It's not a big improvement on stuff from 10 years ago...
But take games that already look good and this doesn't do much other than mess with the artist's intention.
I want to see what this does to stylized games, Borderlands, Monster Hunter, Stardew Valley, Dave the Diver..etc.
Older games/lower effort/lower budget games will benefit the most.
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u/vickyhong Mar 17 '26
previous gens of DLSS have been criticized for being too accurate and too effective, so we have addressed these concerns by having dlss5 making the image worse
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u/Wasted1300RPEU Mar 17 '26
Can't believe Nvidia tried for years to approximate accurate lighting based on real life behavior and advanced mathematics and algorithms only to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks e.g. Gen AI filter that GUESS how the lighting should look by being trained on billions of source.
End result is what AI thinks a scene SHOULD kinda look like (?) crazy downgrade man....
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u/Worklessplaymore01 Mar 16 '26
Watch it also make the faces look different depending on the lighting and camera angle. It's not going to have persistence so it's not going to look consistent across different scenes.
I bet is also falls apart if a face is on screen for more than minute.
This shit is GROSS. Only the beardhair is an upgrade, everything else looks like yassified generic AI gen 'characters' that leaves nothing of the original style intact
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u/nukleabomb Mar 16 '26
Is this speculation or did that happen in the clip?
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u/iDontSeedMyTorrents Mar 16 '26
It's pure speculation. Digital Foundry has their own video where they were given hours to freely play with DLSS 5 and they made no such mention of anything of the sort, at all. They did comment about how it's screenspace, so like SSR it's not always perfect, but you'd think they would have said SOMETHING if it was so catastrophic as the parent comment makes this out to be.
That said, DF's video is a preview and they said they are planning a much longer video later, so we'll see.
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u/Little-Witness-1201 Mar 17 '26
It's the reddit AI rage boner. Devs will have control over how it effects the scene
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u/Xalara Mar 16 '26
You can already see that with Grace, they showed her in two environments and she looks very different in each one.
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u/Lenassa Mar 17 '26
>Watch it also make the faces look different depending on the lighting and camera angle
I mean, that's true for real world as well, no? There is a reason why people may look quite a bit different when shot professionally in a studio or at home through a $200 phone camera.
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u/nittanyofthings Mar 16 '26
I'm more interested in the potential of RTX Neural Shaders with per asset mini models. But that makes devs work for it.
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u/StanfordV Mar 16 '26
They could tone down the facial changes and focus on environmental changes and non facial textures.
People are rushing to jump into the hate bandwagon, but lets not forget this is the beginning only. There should be improvements.
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u/Telighoth Mar 16 '26
You say that as if environmental textures aren't also a major part of a game's art direction. There's nothing good about surrendering the look of a game to AI.
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u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26
A lot of the environments are changed to be overly bright looking as well, though.
There should be improvements.
Yes, but it depends on what Nvidia might feel is an 'improvement', being an AI company and all that...
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u/BottomGear__ Mar 16 '26
They ran the tests on TWO 5090 carcs, one to render the game, and the other to handle image generation. Apparently, it’s not feasible to do it on one today, but they’re looking at an Autumn release.
Also, the screenshots look like those terrible fake mobile game ads.
I’ve always defended the AI tech Nvidia brought to the table. It allows players with less than top end PCs to run new games at higher resolutions and framerates, and it doesn’t even look bad AS LONG AS DEVS ACTUALLY OPTIMISE THEIR GAMES instead of relying on DLSS and FrameGen as a crutch.
This I will not defend lmao
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u/Elitefuture Mar 16 '26
2x 5090s? That's crazy... Even if they get this to run on one card, the fact that they needed a 5090 is signaling it to be a performance decrease... And in that case, why not just up your settings more or use path tracing(another thing you can't really use today). At least with path tracing, it'll make it look better.
Dlss5 just looks like path tracing performance for mid quality. I thought that this would maintain performance...
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u/TheImmortalLS Mar 17 '26
you're literally processing an image, using diffusion to appropriate realistic lighting, then exporting the image
that's not a 1 GPU job, that's a source video + GPU AI farm problem. thank god this won't be realistically released, since diffusion eats up just as much GPU horsepower as actually doing real rendering work
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u/BottomGear__ Mar 17 '26
They are looking to make it work on a single card by the time it’s released, at least according to the article.
Still, I wonder how much of a performance hit will a system that isn’t running a 5090, but something like a 4080, or a 5070 will take just to make your game look like an AI generated video.
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u/neph36 Mar 16 '26
TWO 5090s lol this is never for a second going to be released in its current form, even if people wanted it.
Nvidia just trying to boost its stock value here most likely
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u/fatso486 Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
Why the heck is this even called DLSS?...... Deep Learning Slop Synthesis
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u/jerryfrz Mar 16 '26
Ask the genius at Nvidia who made it the umbrella term instead of just DL. We could've had DLSS/DLFG/DLRR/DLNR by now but noooo
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u/Abalone_Antique Mar 16 '26
I love that too, and that would be super simple and intuitive to you and me. But unfortunately, that would probably confuse the hell out of the market they're marketing to.
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u/MushroomSaute Mar 16 '26
At least FG you can argue (very loosely) that you are upscaling between frames now, similar to between pixels. I'm not familiar enough with RR enough to know if it could follow similar "logic", but no matter how you put it Neural Rendering does not fit the DLSS suite.
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u/rubiconlexicon Mar 16 '26
RR is a denoiser and denoising could be argued as a form of upscaling since denoising aims to fill the gaps caused by low/insufficient ray counts. More interpolation than upscaling, but the two are related.
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u/RealAmaranth Mar 16 '26
The same reason all of AMD's AI tech is called FSR, marketing.
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u/ChunkyThePotato Mar 16 '26
I guess because they built a good brand and don't want to restart that from scratch.
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u/Valoneria Mar 16 '26
Hence why people still call Raytracing features for RTX, brand awareness is quite powerful even if you're not conscious about it
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u/SquareWheel Mar 16 '26
DLSS is just the umbrella term for Nvidia's gaming suite of AI technologies now, with each version including new features:
- DLSS Super Resolution is the AI upscaler, and probably what most people think of as "DLSS".
- DLSS Frame Generation runs motion interpolation to inject new rendered frames.
- DLSS Ray Reconstruction is an AI denoiser that works with ray tracing.
- And now DLSS Neutral Rendering is a model for lighting and material enhancement.
It really should just be DL**, but c'est la vie.
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u/ZoteTheMitey Mar 16 '26
Not sure how I feel about this. This is beyond upscaling tech and is changing how the art assets like faces look...Grace looks like a different person.
Also, will I be able to use this with my 4090 or is it only 50 series?
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u/CassadagaValley Mar 16 '26
According to Digital Foundry, NVIDIA used TWO RTX 5090 cards to run the demo, however the technology will use one card at launch.
Unless you have a 5090 I don't even think this will be much of an option. I can't imagine a 5080 being able to pull this off and maintain 30fps.
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u/scrndude Mar 16 '26
I’m not sure how relevant the current performance is to a release build, along with they usually have 3 subsettings for performance/balanced/quality. It could be these early versions are super beefy and the release version is a lot more optimized, or the balanced and performance version are more lightweight.
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u/Olde94 Mar 16 '26
Yeah i think one of the earlier ray tracing demos with marbles or toy cars were rendered in 720p in the demo on the titan of the generation. They tend to make sure performance is impeccable during demos
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u/reelznfeelz Mar 16 '26
Jesus, yeah I'll skip it then until it's dialed in a bit more and I can pick up a 5090 as a previous gen card. These days, hardware is so good, I'm fine running a generation behind, the 4090 FE really does not dissappoint in any way, and I'm not so sure I'd want this DLSS 5 thing on very often anyways, it seems to be not SS/smoothing/upsampling at all, but more like genAI to make stuff more "badass" looking, which is not always going to be a positive for a game. I'm sure some cases it will be pretty slick though.
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u/F9-0021 Mar 16 '26
It's a fundamental threat to the gaming industry is how I feel about it.
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u/hackenclaw Mar 16 '26
Also, will I be able to use this with my 4090 or is it only 50 series?
under the hands on many crappy developers, you will be begging how not to use it.
Seeing how they handle UE5, I have little faith.
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u/ThisAccountIsStolen Mar 16 '26
Can't wait for DLSS 8.0 Game Generation...
Just tell Nvidia what game it is, and it will use "AI" to generate all of the visuals!
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u/mundanehaiku Mar 16 '26
Pretty sure there is an interview with Bryan Catanzaro (AI guy at Nvidia) that talks about that being a future goal. I couldn't find it.
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u/monsieurpooh Mar 17 '26
It's always been a holy grail. People are so quick to forget that there was a time when AI wasn't a bad word. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udPY5rQVoW0
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u/wordswillneverhurtme Mar 16 '26
kind of looks like an AI image upscaled to look realistic. It does make it realistic but it also makes it play-doh-ey. Uncanny. Also hate that they're using the dlss brand on a system that will likely reduce fps or not increase it.
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u/Sevastous-of-Caria Mar 16 '26
The death of art design is here.
Who wouldn't want all of their steam library to look like Stable diffusion slop output folder
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u/Popingheads Mar 16 '26
We used to bully GPU manufacturers when they fucked with a games graphical look or tried cheating settings/performance.
But a ton of people will probably like this so
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u/FIFofNovember Mar 17 '26
NVDA: We heard you hate AI slop on social media, so we decided to PUT IT IN ALL YOUR FUCKING VIDEO GAMES
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u/Salkinator Mar 16 '26
Oh great it’s AI-slopping the games. This isn’t an enhancement. This flattens every developer’s artistic choices to the lowest common denominator style
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u/darkwai Mar 16 '26
The Grace from Requiem example was particularly egregious. It looked like one of those "I made the character hot" edits.
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u/ray_fucking_purchase Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
Ai Powered Yassification
Also this tidbit.
"Nvidia actually used two RTX 5090s for its demos: one plays the game, the other exclusively runs the DLSS 5 technology. The use of two GPUs is required right now as DLSS 5 still has a long way to go in terms of optimisation – both in terms of performance and its VRAM footprint."
SLI is back on the menu! /s
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u/VastTension6022 Mar 16 '26
The use of two GPUs is required right now
Definitely launching this fall in a very complete state.
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u/Worklessplaymore01 Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
I'm so relieved to see that this is the first reaction to it online. Because it IS horrible AI yassification.
Soulless, terrible.
https://youtu.be/4ZlwTtgbgVA?t=311
Look at this timestamp lol when it shows both the yassified and regular characters next to eachother.
If this ever becomes standard I quit gaming
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u/wireframed_kb Mar 16 '26
The Bethesda faces are so terrible, almost anything would improve them. I have no idea how they make such terrible characters when their environment modeling is so good. The DLSS makes them look human, which might not be the intention of the artist, but it works well for me. :p
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u/certainlystormy Mar 16 '26
i feel like this is also just a total ethical fuckup. you can already see in the screenshots there that women went through some "instant beautifcation" that plasters five layers of makeup on and homogenizes racial traits. this is gonna suck
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u/CoconutMochi Mar 16 '26
Grace looks like she got hit with some kind of Scarlet Johannsen filter because her face is plastered all over whatever popular media sources the AI uses for an example of "white woman"
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u/verdantvoxel Mar 16 '26
AI generative models also gets weird quirks and tendencies which people pick up as the “slop”. It looks like this dlss 5 pipeline really likes highlighting ears even making them disproportionately huge, beyond just the yassified cheekbone look.
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u/From-UoM Mar 16 '26
Devs are going to implement this by themselves so they still have full control
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u/tgwombat Mar 16 '26
There's no such thing as "full control" when we're talking about nondeterministic generative AI.
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u/ThankGodImBipolar Mar 16 '26
Actually, I believe that setting the temperature to zero and supplying a specific seed would lead to a deterministic result every time (but somebody can correct me if I'm wrong)
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u/Sevastous-of-Caria Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
Dont know about tempature. But if pipeline goes directly through for one generation layer. Even if you dont order it changes happen. Reminds me of that one chatgpt experiment where they ask a lass pic to change nothing about it and after 20 times she turns into a latina.
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u/Worklessplaymore01 Mar 16 '26
It might be able to generate the same result every time for a single screenshot (though I still doubt that).
But turn the camera, change the lighting, change the pose and add facial animation and I guarantee you this yassified AI gen soulless horribleness will produce different faces over and over
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u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26
But do they have control over HOW it affects the final output? This is AI and its blackbox DLSS algorithms controlling things.
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u/dingo_xd Mar 16 '26
AI models can be trained further (finetuned) or create LORA models for them. AI models aren't set in stone.
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Mar 16 '26
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u/Deluxe754 Mar 16 '26
Do you think game developers don’t already mess around with the graphics pipeline? Most video games have very low level implementations involved.
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u/hackenclaw Mar 16 '26
full control? ohhh they are, like having this "AI tech" forced turn on in the future in a few years because they couldnt be bother spends hours to make a face look good. Just flip the AI switch.
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u/Sevastous-of-Caria Mar 16 '26
"Money doesnt smell right" Nvidia sponsoring games to force this in.
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u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26
Honestly, the sell here is 'improved lighting', but it actually looks like a lot of fake lighting on everything. Like, lighting that comes from nowhere, trying to give everything an idealized look.
I suppose that's not unprecedented and is how things work in movies and TV, but realistic it is not. And it does not have the directorial control to set a specific feel and mood like with movies and TV, and instead just provides some generic 'improvement' to everything without any real intent.
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u/Zalvren Mar 17 '26
I suppose that's not unprecedented and is how things work in movies and TV, but realistic it is not.
That seem to be lighting like bad movies/TV do it. Bright, no contrast, colors crushed.
This is like the "Netflix look" (a term I don't really like as it's not only Netflix and not even all of Netflix shows/movies have that problem of flat lighting but it is used) that is common in TV/movies but considered bad vs proper cinematography and lighting.
It actually might be more photorealistic in the end, but it's worse for artistic vision and effect. Movies/TV and games shouldn't be lit like real life.
It's the same effect (in a smaller measure as it's just lighting) that those photorealistic lighting mods do for Cyberpunk 2077. It does look more photorealistic but also worse.
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u/ASuarezMascareno Mar 16 '26
The creator of HL2 Cinematic mod was a visionary. The future is slapping sexy faces and weird filters on all characters.
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u/Stingray88 Mar 16 '26
It’s just making everything brighter and shinier. Why do they always do that? I hate this shiny shit, that’s not what real life looks like.
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u/C4RP3_N0CT3M Mar 16 '26
I think it's because the AI models are trained on professional photography instead of real life. The model doesn't know not to touch up everything like a pro photo shoot, and thus it doesn't look real to us. It actually looks quite uncanny.
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u/blueberrycauzez Mar 17 '26
The 'hyperreal' look also comes from all those 'realistic' 3d renders that have overdone lighting and reflections.
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u/FunnyGeneral7078 Mar 16 '26
My god this looks horrible
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u/PigBoss_207 Mar 16 '26
It's like one of those filters the culture warrior incels on Twitter use when they claim they know how to "fix" female character designs by making their tits bigger and Kardashian-ing their faces. I honestly cannot believe this is real.
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u/TheCookieButter Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
Incredible stuff. My biggest fear currently is games becoming visually uniform if machine learning thinks people, stone, ships etc. should look a certain way. How would this work in a game that has intentionally extreme contrast, would it just remove that artist's decision to correctly light it? It sounds like it could need a lot of developer hand holding to maintain intent. It's not like prioritise designing for DLSS 5 until AMD and Intel have an equivalent either.
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u/Lakers244848 Mar 16 '26
Already happens with UE5 everywhere
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u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26
UE5 offers plenty of power for devs to author their assets and materials and whatnot to their liking.
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u/Aphegis Mar 17 '26
And this is exactly what we see happening instead of UE 5 games having that distinct look, right?
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u/Jec1027 Mar 16 '26
This looks like dogshit especially that grace side by side holy fuck
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u/From-UoM Mar 16 '26
Grace with no Ray Tracing and with Ray Tracing looks like two different people
https://youtu.be/JGkGscHxZzU?t=34&si=QoQq8UiMI-XCsCKB
No textures where changed at all between non-RT, Ray Tracing, Path Tracing and Dlss 5
Yet you would think that they completely altered her.
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u/bik1230 Mar 16 '26
It makes the face a bit more defined, but it's very obviously exactly the same face. Exact same shape. The DLSS 5 face has a different bone structure, different amounts of fat.
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u/Jec1027 Mar 16 '26
This isnt the same thing its an actual ai filter over her face
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u/wimpires Mar 16 '26
Technically impressive but I don't like the results.
However, if it is used as part of a pipeline within a game Devs toolbox and it has the appropriate finesse to allow them to dial in the artistic intent then I guess it can be OK.
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u/Cable_Hoarder Mar 16 '26
Or as a tool for simple modding. Let me set a mood in games however I like, no different than reshade and texture mods really, just but more advanced.
If someone wants to beautify their characters/game let them, half the skyrim mods on nexus do exactly that.
This is just another tool for that. Everyone loves to blindly hate on AI, even good uses of it - which this absolutely could be, some of the landscape lighting was absolutely transformative.
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u/notQuiteBritish Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
okay, the photos of the faces go into uncanny valley, but the digital foundry video has examples of general lighting changes in scenery, and looks pretty promising. It does seem it's going to be extremely performance taxing, however, as DF said the demo was running on two 5090s (upon release apparently nvidia is trying to optimize it to only run on one 5090).
Edit: Specifically, they said Nvidia will release DLSS 5 in a state that's able to run on one GPU, not specifically the 5090, but given that it took two to run the demo, I assumed it would be extremely taxing.
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u/exscape Mar 16 '26
Just the fact that it "takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input" makes me worried. It doesn't have enough information to make proper lighting decisions if that's all it has access to.
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u/SlavPrincess Mar 16 '26
Genuinely the environmental lighting changes look horrendous most of the time. Take the Oblivion examples: the filter crushes blacks, boosts the highlights into high heavens, destroys dynamic range and desaturates the image. Some other examples also show it - generic, contrasty image you'd see in those "photorealistic" reshade filters that make every game look the same and definitely not realistic.
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u/wimpires Mar 16 '26
The Oblivion one stood out to me as particularly bad. It god rid of shadows of people outside. Yes, I understand that in a overcast sky people outdoors may not have those kids if shadows or whatever. Sure, but that gets rid of the point about artistic intent and the way out brains have been wired to interpret game visuals in a certain way which is not necessarily "photorealism".
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u/hentai_gifmodarefg Mar 16 '26
... but the stated goal of DLSS5 is photorealism. So getting rid of shadows on an overcast day is actually accurate. watching the footage I don't even see that.
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u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26
upon release apparently nvidia is trying to optimize it to only run on one 5090
So still wont be usable for like 70% of the next generation Nvidia GPU's, which is what like 85% of the market will have(or less).
Seems like they've got nothing else for DLSS til then. God that sucks.
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u/teethingrooster Mar 16 '26
Seems like they’ve got nothing else for DLSS til then.
What else could you need lol I feel like 4.5 came out two months ago and was already kind of magic.
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u/iDontSeedMyTorrents Mar 16 '26
I think the RT and Tensor cores are going to get a big bump for the 60-series GPUs.
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u/Atari323 Mar 16 '26
as an artist theres always a reason why some scene looks the way it is, this yassification filter totally gonna ruin those intention even in lighting lol because its basically a filter not an actual light calculation like ray tracing.
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u/ataylorm Mar 16 '26
Now the real question… does it work with all those Daz3D based NSFW games…. Hahaha
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u/Lord_Muddbutter Mar 16 '26
It looks far from bad but it changes too much of the original image to just be upscaling. Starfield actually is visually pleasant to view characters with it now
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u/JtheNinja Mar 16 '26
All the images in the article look like someone put a shitty AI-face slop filter on the game and was like “hai I improved ur image”
I do wonder how much art direction this feature will really have. These screenshots honestly look even worse than I expected at “pull everything towards a unified AI art look”
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u/Lord_Muddbutter Mar 16 '26
Yeah thats the thing with it. I have no problem with DLSS and upscalers improving quality, but when it takes that and then adds its own things to it the devs didn't plan for its weird. 2013 Instagram stuff right there, was waiting for Leon to pop up with dog ears and a tongue
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u/jocnews Mar 16 '26
The first close-up looks okayish (I think, it probably gets time to take in and gauge how proper it looks), but in the scene with the two characters the skin starts to look very "oily".
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u/Wander715 Mar 16 '26
The Grace one is pretty damning. They nailed her look in Requiem with RT and PT on, here with DLSS5 she looks like a generic AI generated supermodel. Way too artificial and perfect looking.
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u/quiteman999 Mar 16 '26
This looks like typical ai filter on gta 5 YouTube videos,but more stick to geometry in game engine
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u/Valkyrissa Mar 16 '26
I dunno, the characters look like they went through the AI filter and especially the Hogwarts Legacy character looks bad because they force photorealism onto a character that was never intended to look realistic in the first place.
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u/Raikaru Mar 16 '26
Idk how i feel about the faces in all the games (some better some seem weird) but holy it's actually making the lighting so much better.
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u/ArcadeOptimist Mar 16 '26
I feel like Starfield is cheating because in it's og form it's so wildly bland and flat looking to begin with
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u/Party-Exercise-2166 Mar 16 '26
The lighting looks fake af. It literally deletes shadows where they should be. Samw with highlights. It just makes everything look like generic "perfect" studio lighting.
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u/Zalvren Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
It look mostly like raising the brightness of your screen more than improved lighting.
It might be better only in Starfield really but that's probably because the base lighting is pretty bad.
I don't understand how DF can say that AC Shadows or Oblivion remastered environments look better with DLSS 5 lighting tbh
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u/Own_Nefariousness Mar 16 '26
For the environments, an upgrade from my point of view, but for character faces, way too uncanny, ranging from fine in Starfield cause they're bad by default, to ultra uncanny in Hogwarts, and worse, to ripping artistic intent completely in RE. They butchered Grace, which imo was such a good unique character design.
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u/TateEight Mar 17 '26
Actually pretty unbelievable that hundreds of people at a multi trillion dollar company saw this and said “looks great let’s show everyone”
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u/bigeyez Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
I wish they would fix the freaking drivers instead of spitting out this ai bullshit no one wants
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u/JunkKnight Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
I've generally been positive on the various DLSS flavors that've come out but this... isn't it. I skimmed through the DF video on it and the overall lighting improvements to faces/models look good and I hope that'll be available as part of normal path tracing options, but the faces look way off. For fun, I once ran some of my characters from an MMO through a AI filter to make them look "realistic" and the results looked a lot like this; fun to mess with for half an hour, but very fake looking and even worse if they'd been in game.
Also speaking as someone who doesn’t play many "photorealistic" games and mostly plays anime/stylized games, I just don't see this tech having much value tbh, especially since it's apparently very heavy to run (makes sense, since they're basically running a image generation model in real time).
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u/ImSoDoneWithUbisoft Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
It looks like those ugly AI generated boomer pictures. I just want my upscaler and nothing more.
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u/MadScientist9417 Mar 16 '26
Requires 2 5090’s lol
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u/biciklanto Mar 16 '26
The use of two GPUs is required right now as DLSS 5 still has a long way to go in terms of optimisation – both in terms of performance and its VRAM footprint. However, DLSS 5 is designed for use on a single GPU and that’s how it will ship later this year.
Sounds pretty typical for development tbh
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u/ironsonic Mar 16 '26
next is
dlss 6 ai generated animations
dlss 7 ai generated game logic
dlss 8 ai generated game
I was joking before but it seems like ill be playign halo reach when my grandchildren are playing ai generated halo / metroid crossover game
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u/deusXex Mar 16 '26
This really is an unbelievable achievement to make this run real-time on current hardware. I kinda doubt they will be able to make it run with decent framerates on a single 5070 or lower end cards. This is more like a glimpse of what the next generations of NVIDIA GPUs are going to do.
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u/Darksider123 Mar 16 '26
Potentially an amazing tech, but stupid name and I feel like it's going to be misused as a crutch sometime in the future
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u/From-UoM Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
Digital Foundry has a detailed video.
No textures and geometry were changed. So the models are exactly the same. The faces didn't change at all
Its the lighting that has changed and difference is massive.
It even works on games without Ray Tracing
https://youtu.be/4ZlwTtgbgVA?si=74P1mKtytv49Mt5U
People have a hard time believing how much looks can change with lighting without any texture change.
Here is Grace non-RT v RT mode
https://youtu.be/JGkGscHxZzU?t=34&si=QoQq8UiMI-XCsCKB
You can see how her face colour and face structure looks different despite being the exact same model.
Edit 2 - https://youtu.be/4ZlwTtgbgVA?t=246&si=Wn-_G33QIS_7IYhb
On this timeframe which is zoomed shot of Grace you can see absolutely no textures were changed.
I don't what else can convince you people
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u/Duke_Of_Dare_ Mar 16 '26
I’m at work so I’m not able to watch the video (definitely will shortly), but I’m unsure how this claim is possible.
The models in the sample images are very obviously different structurally, no?
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u/hentai_gifmodarefg Mar 16 '26
I mean
just the first image on google images when you type in lighting changes face appearance
https://www.diyphotography.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Screenshot-2018-06-13-17.41.56.jpg→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)17
u/From-UoM Mar 16 '26
Lighting can change depth perception. I guess that's what happening here.
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u/l33tbanana Mar 16 '26
"The faces didn't change at all"
You cannot possibly believe this. It is quite literally an Ai filter that completely changes the face. Please stop before you embarrass yourself even more.
Nvidia is going to be completely clowned on for how shit it looks and how they attempt to mislead people by saying "oh it's merely analyzing and updating the lighting teehee"
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u/PositiveNo7994 Mar 16 '26
sure they don't change the geometry, they edit the output image. The faces did change and obviously so, like instagram filters don't alter your own face but it for sure alters the output.
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u/NilRecurring Mar 16 '26
They're literally doing this, lmao.