After its controversial reveal earlier in the year, DLSS 5 will launch later this week, on September 3rd. At Gamescom last week, I got invited to a behind-closed-doors look at the latest Nvidia upscaling tech. During the session, Nvidia lifted the lid on various aspects of it, revealing how its developer tools work, how it'll impact indie games with different art styles, and allowing me to ask my own questions about it. Before it arrives on your gaming PCs at the end of this week, I've tried to round up everything I learned.
If you're not up to speed, DLSS 5 came under a lot of scrutiny when it was revealed because it takes a very different approach to AI upscaling than previous versions. Instead of rendering an image at a lower resolution and then polishing it up to run better using AI transformer models, DLSS 5 is all about helping the best graphics cards to achieve "true photorealism".
The way it does this, however, is by using a 2D, generative AI layer on top of a game's rendered frames, which Nvidia is calling 3D-guided Neural Rendering, as we suspected after its initial reveal. In other words, it isn't remodelling the rendered frames to seek better performance and higher frame rates; it produces a generative layer over a rendered frame that changes or, depending on who you talk to, "enhances" its quality.
This is controversial for many reasons, not least of which because it looks as though it's running games through a ChatGPT filter, or otherwise "yassifying" characters like Grace and Leon from Resident Evil Requiem. The first game launching with support for the new version of DLSS 5 will be NBA 2K27, which arrives on PC this Friday, so all 50 Series laptops and graphics cards will be able to utilize it.
For me, one of the main concerns about DLSS 5 wasn't even about making everything look like AI slop (although that is certainly a concern); it's that a tool like this undoubtedly seeks to standardize what so much of video game art looks like, and detracts from individual games having their own, hand-crafted approaches to graphical styles. Artistic intent is a thing, and I don't know about you, but I have never toggled some DLSS settings before now and thought I was so overtly stepping away from the visuals that developers had intended me to see.
That brings me onto the first thing Nvidia showed me during the demo at Gamescom:
Thankfully, one of the first things that calmed my nerves a bit is that developer tools do exist. One of the Nvidia engineers in my demonstration was an artist in their earlier career, working in animation and game development on multiple projects. He ran me through a suite of developer tools that artists and game devs will have on their end when they add DLSS 5 support to their game.
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/hardware/desktop-pc/nvidia-dlss-5-is-launching-on-september-3-heres-everything-i-learned-about-it-from-a-private-gamescom-demo
