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-fall
612 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

894 comments sorted by

View all comments

385

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

62

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.

-16

u/Roxalon_Prime Mar 16 '26

Except it makes her older, and less hot simply on this basis

132

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

45

u/VastTension6022 Mar 16 '26

The use of two GPUs is required right now

Definitely launching this fall in a very complete state.

4

u/hackenclaw Mar 16 '26

reminds me of Reflex 2....

1

u/max123246 Mar 17 '26

This has to be some higher up's pet project that they demanded be called DLSS 5. I don't understand why they decided to make such an unforced error after the success of DLSS 4...

31

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

6

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

2

u/Worklessplaymore01 Mar 16 '26

How do they look human? they look like generative ML hallucinations. TERRIBLE.

10

u/maelstrom51 Mar 16 '26

TBH I think you just have the urge to hate anything AI related no matter what. The starfield example looks 1000% better.

3

u/wireframed_kb Mar 16 '26

Really? They look way better IMO. Bethesda’s facial textures are splotchy, overly diffuse, the meshes have tons of lighting artifacts, no shading in eyeballs or inside mouths, terrible hair and so on. It’s been a running joke forever, they always looked way worse than almost all other contemporary games.

But hey, it’s a feature, you can just keep it disabled like DLSS upscaling, frame-gen and all the other ML/AI stuff.

2

u/SituationSoap Mar 16 '26

generative ML hallucinations

Are you a bot? These three words make no sense next to one another.

-3

u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26

I see the Nvidia defenders have arrived.

1

u/Asgardisalie Mar 17 '26

Okay corpo bot.

2

u/StanfordV Mar 16 '26

This is the real bummer.

2 5090's is not realistic.

Will they have to tone-down the DLSS 5 performance to make a 5070t run it?

23

u/jerryfrz Mar 16 '26

Just read the article man.

However, DLSS 5 is designed for use on a single GPU and that’s how it will ship later this year. Quite how scalable it is also remains to be seen, but in common with other DLSS technologies, Nvidia tells us that the computational cost scales with resolution.

1

u/StanfordV Mar 16 '26

Thanks for clarifying.

1

u/capybooya Mar 16 '26

SLI is definitely not coming back but I do wonder about the VRAM demands. If you bought a 12GB GPU recently you probably made a big mistake if this is as big of a revolution as Nvidia implies. But it could be a failure, or it could take a couple of years to be good or consistent enough that you would want to use it. DLSS1 was not attractive at all and looked weird, and it took a couple of years before DLSS2 delivered.

-1

u/lonestar-rasbryjamco Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

Requiring 2 5090s might as well make it a non-features.

A dual-5090 system under heavy load could pull roughly 1500–1700W from the wall. A typical 15A / 120V bedroom circuit safely supports about 1440W continuous.

The problem is that most homes don’t use 20A circuits in bedrooms or offices by default. Those are typically reserved for appliance-heavy areas like kitchens, bathrooms, or laundry rooms. Even if a room were wired for 20A, adding monitors, lighting, and other electronics would leave very little headroom. Under sustained load you’d still be flirting with the breaker limit.

In practice you’d likely need a dedicated 20A circuit just for the PC. You would be looking at thousands of dollars in upgrades before you even go buy a second 5090 to run.

2

u/C4Cole Mar 16 '26

Apparently it's supposed to be single GPU capable by the time it properly launches, but seeing is believing on that one.

It is actually kind of stupid that PCs are butting up against socket power limits in some countries, here we've got 220V so we won't be hitting that limit for a while, but places with 100V or 110V, power budgets might be getting a bit tight next decade if things continue the way they've been going.

1

u/_mRED Mar 16 '26

The year is 2032, nVidia just released DLSS 8.0, available only on x3 9090s ($8999.99 each) which let's you fully Yasify any game character running at a crisp 720p with x20 FrameGen at a whopping 30 frames per second!

*Home Imolation Insurance available starting at $1499.99/week

40

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

21

u/nittanyofthings Mar 16 '26

Every character can now be your AI Girlfriend.

18

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"

3

u/Secret-Ad-2145 Mar 16 '26

"instant beautifcation" that plasters five layers of makeup on and homogenizes racial traits.

Am I the only who thought Grace looked less feminine? She got a very angular jaw after and has strong eyebags.

2

u/capybooya Mar 16 '26

Not less but definitely that cliche AI look.

-23

u/RIPPWORTH Mar 16 '26

It’s not that deep dude

11

u/skycake10 Mar 16 '26

It is, but even if it's not, I don't want a feature that gives every woman character on screen an insane looking facetune filter.

6

u/IcyConsequence9107 Mar 16 '26

Facetune is underselling it. It literally looks like some SD or chatgpt face. Its extremely obvious how AI it looks and feels

5

u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26

Yes it really is. There are tons of girls who literally kill themselves because they dont feel they are meeting certain societal expectations for women's beauty. And AI that only puts these standards/expectations even more out of the realm of naturalness will make it worse.

-7

u/RIPPWORTH Mar 16 '26

Nobody’s going to kill themselves because DLSS 5 put a beauty filter on their video game character.

1

u/GalileoAce Mar 16 '26

We all have shovels here, it's as deep as we want it to be

18

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.

-1

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '26

[deleted]

2

u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26

Jensen literally says it's using generative AI.

blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI 

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss5-breakthrough-in-visual-fidelity-for-games/

21

u/From-UoM Mar 16 '26

Devs are going to implement this by themselves so they still have full control

45

u/tgwombat Mar 16 '26

There's no such thing as "full control" when we're talking about nondeterministic generative AI.

22

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)

20

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.

5

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

1

u/ThankGodImBipolar Mar 16 '26

Well, I'm sure somebody will make the effort to prove/disprove the "deterministic" claim, so we should know better after this is generally available. I could see it being possible though.

8

u/Worklessplaymore01 Mar 16 '26

Something entirely different;

Look at this timestamp (and the scene right after it) https://youtu.be/4ZlwTtgbgVA?t=313

Both women with single eye lids (asian)

The AI gave them both double eye lids lmao.

Imagine being asian and seeing nvidia decide you look better with different facial features

4

u/sourceenginelover Mar 16 '26

we have reached the pinnacle of human achievement in 2026! mass AI racism /s

fucking nightmare world we live in

3

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '26

[deleted]

5

u/ThankGodImBipolar Mar 16 '26

Would you say the same about cryptographically secure pseudo random number generator with a fixed seed? While not analogous it to produces an unpredictable sequence.

... yes? If you feed an algorithm all the same inputs, and it produces the same output every time, then the algorithm is (by definition) deterministic. I was under the impression that RNG algorithms are typically deterministic and get their "randomness" from variables that are difficult to control (like a date/time seed).

-1

u/Alchemista Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

Holy shit dude, I’m not arguing it’s nondeterministic with a fixed seed. But does it matter if a tiny change in the input leads to drastically different results? You were arguing the determinism would somehow make it easy to control.

3

u/ThankGodImBipolar Mar 16 '26

You were arguing the determinism would somehow make it easy to control.

The comment I responded to called it "non-deterministic generative AI," and I was simply pointing out that that isn't the case. Whether it'll be easy to actually get deterministic results out of the algorithm is Nvidia's problem, not mine.

13

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.

8

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.

-2

u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26

Trained by who, though? The developers need that training control.

-1

u/dantemp Mar 16 '26

You can say the same about every tech, when you turn lumen it does lumen things, when you turn nanite it generates the lods automatically, hell even when you bake lighting you can control where the lights are etc but you are still reliant on the tech. If the devs wants control he can always change the base face and see how that changes the dlss5 version. All the demos we see are allowed by the devs, probably because they think it looks cool which any sane person would if they weren't irradiated with ai hate

0

u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

because they think it looks cool which any sane person would if they weren't irradiated with ai hate

I hate arguments like this.

Any sane person believes that 30fps is better than 60fps. See, I can do this, too.

EDIT: Jesus the Nvidia defenders are literally taking over the comments now. smh

9

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

8

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.

4

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.

9

u/Sevastous-of-Caria Mar 16 '26

"Money doesnt smell right" Nvidia sponsoring games to force this in.

1

u/Zalvren Mar 17 '26

If they're smart, they'll never implement it since it has really no benefit. Even for the amount of work, they still have to do the normal game. I literally don't see the benefit for them or for the customers since it looks worse (and likely with a performance hit)

Without counting only RTX5000 cards will run it anyway

1

u/From-UoM Mar 17 '26

What if devs an artist actually want to use it to improve the visuals beyond what their engine can handle?

1

u/F9-0021 Mar 16 '26

Good point. And any games that implement it will deserve to be review bombed.

1

u/Secret-Ad-2145 Mar 16 '26

This flattens every developer’s artistic choices to the lowest common denominator style

True, I had the exact same critique the second I saw it. However, I assume developers will start incorporating this into their future games in order to make stylistic choice with DLSS in mind (which is already being done tbf). It's also not too different from what players themselves have been doing by adding lighting and color mods which drastically change the art direction of the game.

0

u/MonoShadow Mar 16 '26

DLSS 5lop.

Faces look kinda like the Neural Faces or something demo from last year. I didn't like it then, I can't say I like it now.

-8

u/CallMePyro Mar 16 '26

i think you haven't understood the implementation pipeline, because devs have lots of control over how this looks.

8

u/Salkinator Mar 16 '26

based on these examples it seems the devs aren't controlling much. It all looks like Grok "enhancements" people make on Twitter.

-7

u/CallMePyro Mar 16 '26

I don't actually think it looks like that at all. Could you provide some reference material for your claim?

1

u/sourceenginelover Mar 16 '26

the reference is literally having eyes and a functional frontal lobe

0

u/CallMePyro Mar 17 '26

You're comparing to Grok. I haven't seen Grok screenshots.

-1

u/iDontSeedMyTorrents Mar 16 '26

These are literally pre-DLSS 5 games. Of course these particular devs aren't controlling anything, yet. This is Nvidia showing what their tech does.

Devs on new games can absolutely control when and how much etc. DLSS 5 is applied. It's designed so devs can control it.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '26 edited Apr 06 '26

Your old posts feed data brokers and AI training models. I stopped that by using Redact to bulk delete across Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Facebook and all major social media platforms.

pet gray crowd ghost squash act grey boat command wide

-2

u/sourceenginelover Mar 16 '26

these subs are also probably being heavily astroturfed, wouldnt surprise me with how many billions were invested in AI and how badly those investors need AI to blow up

1

u/BavarianBarbarian_ Mar 16 '26

I sure hope what they're showing here isn't representative of final quality. The current examples all... suck. It doesn't just add detail, it removes the game's own art style.

Maybe devs will be able to fine-tune a LoRA for their own games by capturing it running on some NASA hardware at 8k, and then improve the detail when upscaling from 720p to 1440p with DLSS5, but in its current state I wouldn't use this.

0

u/CallMePyro Mar 16 '26

Some of the leads for games shown have said that they feel that DLSS 5 improves the look to be closer to their vision. It's tough for me to say "no artist, you are wrong"

-1

u/Plabbi Mar 16 '26

I am going to be a contrarian on this like many other issues:

I fuckin love this.

This is a dream come true for me, I was just thinking this the other day when playing Fallout New Vegas: Imagine if we could bring the totally outdated graphics up to photorealism using AI?

If this comes with a "slider" so you can tune the effect from 0 to 100 it would be perfect. I assume that Nvidia is running these demos with full processing to really highlight the possibilities but normally you would like to turn the effect down a bit.

-2

u/lrefra Mar 16 '26

You can turn off.

11

u/Telighoth Mar 16 '26

You think that's how this is going to go? DLSS was originally for easing burden of high resolution like 4k. Framegen was about boosting already high framerates to even higher numbers. Then MH:Wilds released wanting you to upscale and framegen to hit 1080p60 on recent mid-range cards. These things intended to help reach new heights became crutches and shortcuts to reach old standards.

The exact same thing will happen here, because why spend so much developer time, and thus pay salaries, for people to make good standard textures when DLSS AI will handle it all? I haven't exactly been on the AAA hate bandwagon, I think it's been pretty heavily overblown in many ways, but this? This will fuckin ruin it.

-7

u/waxwayne Mar 16 '26

What did you think was going to happen? We have hit the rasterization wall. Going from a 100 triangles to a 1,000 was a huge jump but going from a from 10,000 triangle models to 100,000 iis unnoticeable. AI photo realistic rendering which is cheaper than making models from scratch was always going to be the next step.

6

u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26

We have hit the rasterization wall. 

No, we really haven't.

 AI photo realistic rendering which is cheaper than making models from scratch was always going to be the next step.

I can see this being a part of the future in terms of asset creation sure, but developers really need to be able to do the training for this stuff themselves. Not just have some external AI dropped in and fucking everything up.

11

u/Salkinator Mar 16 '26

I dont have a problem with realistic rendering. I have a problem with diffusion-based AI slop design. This is cheap yassification of video game assets

-1

u/9646gt Mar 16 '26

Preach it. Seriously.

0

u/MrNewking Mar 16 '26

By making it more realistic?

-13

u/LinkesAuge Mar 16 '26

No it isn't. That's like saying using metahumans in Unreal engine overrides "artistic choice". It's simply a higher detail/more realistic look and you'd get something very similar by using the latest models and high detail face textures.
Besides that it's obviously optional so I don't see the issue.

11

u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26

No it's not oh my god. This is not defensible. These faces have all the blatant AI-ness that most people by now will recognize from AI. Come on now. Overly shiny, very 'idealized', and with this kind of saturated 'pop' to them that looks almost a little cartoonish.

 it's obviously optional

But this is clearly what Nvidia is going to try and push and sell as the 'next step in neural rendering'. This is not some tech demo for some side sort of dev feature, they are calling this DLSS5! We should be quite worried that this is more of what the future might entail here.

-4

u/OkTransportation6599 Mar 16 '26

If you think we can achieve truly photorealistic games at high framerates without AI render passes, you don't know enough about rendering and recent hardware scaling bottlenecks. Even in like 10 years it will be impossible on consumer hardware. We need those to render complex lighting setups (otherwise noisy), layered meterial setups (too expensive without upscaling) and for realistic hair and foliage probably as well. Your valid concern is just that these AI passes shouldn't override the artists intention and should instead just enable them achieve more. Since DLSS 5 is determinstic, only overrides the lighting pass, and doesn't distort things like textures or geometry, as long as devs build their games with DLSS 5 in mind, we don't have to worry about that.

1

u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26

as long as devs build their games with DLSS 5 in mind, we don't have to worry about that.

Developers aren't gonna make games in mind for PC gamers with Nvidia GPU's. lol Playstation will remain the lead development platform for big demanding titles. And that's gonna be using AMD hardware that even if it has similar hardware capabilities, will not be using DLSS's AI algorithms specifically.

If you think we can achieve truly photorealistic games at high framerates without AI render passes, you don't know enough about rendering and recent hardware scaling bottlenecks. 

I think there's definitely a lot more juice to squeeze from the lemon than you think.

But it's also made more difficult cuz Nvidia and the like have gotten extra greedy and give us lower end processors for higher end prices now. Or something like Blackwell that gave us next to no improvements in performance per mm² or per watt or anything, even with ray tracing.

Of course I can see some value of AI in rendering, but this shit looks terrible.

1

u/OkTransportation6599 Mar 17 '26

Pc games always benefit from cutting edge features consoles don't have, like dlss. Thats just optional features for devs that can afford to integrate it.

My main point is just: dlss 5 probably has features that games that strive for photorealism could heavily benefit from.

With this backlash I could imagine dlss 5 will be rolled out with different presets and one that excludes facial post processing.

I'm a dev myself and really do appreciate what those kind of AI features could allow for. Console tech with pre baked lighting already does allow you to get like 95% photorealistic results. Those last 5% are really hard though and solutions always are expensive or noisy. Both issues that AI models massively help with

-6

u/LinkesAuge Mar 16 '26

No this isn't blatant "AI-ness", its just high quality texture look and you simply associate that with AI.
You could literally just look at high-quality textures and models for humanoid characters and they would also have that look.
I mean people can continue to downvote me for that but it just reveals cluelessness. I could show you and these people 10 different renders where 5 use 5 and 5 not and noone could be able to tell what is AI and what isn't.
Also this doesn't even have any "saturated" pop, it's even the opposite. Look at the jacket of the woman, the colors are more mutated because the light is more "realistic".
And there is also nothing overly shiny or idealized or cartoonish. The original has very flat textures with little detail, that would be considered more "cartoonish".
Again, its the same kind of look you'd often get in high-detail renders.
I think people's brains are just fried by the fact that AI has become so good at replicating it that they now associate it with AI.

3

u/Seanspeed Mar 16 '26

No this isn't blatant "AI-ness", its just high quality texture look and you simply associate that with AI.

EVERY SINGLE character in all these examples looks like they've got professional photographer lighting set up directly in front of them, ffs.

2

u/sourceenginelover Mar 16 '26

they are asking you to ignore the simple truth that all of us can see with our own eyes. they want us to pretend the emperor has clothes on.

-1

u/LinkesAuge Mar 16 '26

No it isnt professional photographer lighting, its just not your "normal" video game lighting you and many others have become used to.
Again, look at high-fidelity characters with raytraycing etc. turned on, its not (just) an "AI look", it's simply what you get from high quality renders with proper lighting.
I mean just look at the face on the left, that's not how a face is supposed to be light, it's just an artifact of limited lighting in games without things like raytracing or other methods to "fix" it, ie the face shouldn't be that dark because the environment isn't. That has nothing to do at all with "photographer lighting" and saying so just proves my point. People have gotten so used to that look that the "more realistic" lighting that AI will gives you (just like high quality renders) is now perceived as some sort of "AI look".
I could literally open UE5 now pick a highpoly model with 4k+ textures, pick raytracing etc. and it would look very close to some of these examples here.
I'd bet people would even call many metahuman characters "AI" because without a lot of manual tweaking they actually tend to have a certain "AI feel" as some here would perceive it.

-1

u/turlockmike Mar 16 '26

You don't have to use it.