Nvidia DLSS 5: Everything You Need To Know

At GTC 2026 (that's Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference, in case you were wondering), Jensen took to the stage to announce a few things, including DLSS 5, the newest iteration of Nvidia’s deep learning technology. DLSS 5 was demonstrated on a few games such as Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield, and Hogwarts Legacy.

Since the announcement and demonstration, there’s been a lot of chatter about how DLSS 5 works, its implementation in future games, and the effect it will have on the games that use it and on the industry as a whole. We’re going to break it down for you here and we will include some of the examples that Nvidia used in it's blog post on the subject.

DLSS 5 is the latest version of DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) which is a technology that’s been evolving since 2018. With DLSS 4 and DLSS 4.5, we got a load of performance-improving features, most notably AI-based frame generation, which created new frames on the fly to significantly boost the user’s FPS.

DLSS 5 is not simply an improved version of this though, it’s a totally different approach, and it’s resulted in a lot of pushback from the PC gaming community.

DLSS 5 uses an AI model to take the original frame’s color and motion vectors and create additional lighting and textures on top of the native frame. This results in what Nvidia is calling “a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

It also apparently understands the semantics of the scene so it will be able to keep lighting conditions consistent, while implementing graphical features absent from the original frame like subsurface scattering and light-material interactions on hair.

According to Nvidia, DLSS 5 provides developers a level of control over how intense the effect is, the color grading, and the ability to mask off certain parts of the game which would leave those areas unaffected by DLSS 5.

A big part of this new version of DLSS is the 3D-Guided Neural Rendering which is a whole new AI model designed to deal with three core needs.

• Preserving Artistic intent
• Guaranteeing Temporal Stability
• Speed (gotta go fast)

If we break this down we get a better understanding of how it works. Firstly in an effort to preserve the artistic intent, DLSS 5 uses the original frame from the game engine and analyses what is on screen So it looks at objects, people, and so on, determining the spatial relationships and the light sources to create life like material interactions. This means more natural skin subsurface scattering, better light though foliage, which results in more realistic shadows.

The second part of this is that DLSS 5 delivers a massive improvement in temporal stability, while previous models generated small batches of frames before rendering, DLSS 5 does this strictly one frame at a time and refers to the previous frame in each instance. The result being far greater consistency meaning no more random shimmering and lighting effects remain stable and more lifelike

The last part here is speed, it can do all of this in milliseconds which, when you consider how complex some scenes can be, is frankly mind melting. To do this, a specialized AI model was created with the sole purpose of managing 3D rendering pipelines. This dedicated network makes use of Nvidia's Tensor Cores within the 50-Series GPUs to allow real time rendering on a single frame in real time.

Currently NVIDIA are listing most of the 50-Series as compatible. The only two missing are the 5060 and 5060ti. While both have the 5th Generation Tensor Cores it’s likely due to the lower overall processing power they did not make the cut, but they may still be added down the line.

For those using NVIDIA 40-Series and below, unfortunately at present DLSS 5 is exclusively to the NVIDIA 50-Series, this may change in future but at the time of writing, there is nothing from NVIDIA on this.

Yes is the simple answer here. We are looking at a heavy performance impact across the supported hardware which is why NVIDIA are strongly recommending enabling other features such as Multi Frame Generation (MFG) and making use of Super Resolution in quality mode.

Enabling these will help recover the frame rate, bringing it back in some cases into triple figures. The message here is: yes, on its own it will hurt, but if you enable the other tools designed to compliment it, you may not even notice the performance impact.

Yes. The features of DLSS 5, like the versions before it, will appear as an option in the graphics settings of supported games. It is not a filter that is automatically and unilaterally applied to games. This means that if you dislike the AI vibe it brings, you won’t be forced to enable it.

DLSS 5 released on September 3rd. Initially, it is exclusive to NBA 2K27 but later this fall we expect this to be available on many more titles so we can expect large regular driver updates soon as this will be a considerable change to from the current drivers.

As mentioned above, DLSS 5 is very resource intensive. The demos you can see here from Digital Foundry were powered using a pair of RTX 5090s, one doing the standard rendering up to DLSS 4.5, and DLSS 5 requiring a GPU all its own.

Thankfully, this has improved to the point it can run on a single 5070, but despite the clear leap in improvement, DLSS 5 is not a free boost and like many other features it is a trade off for which you will need to find the balance which suits your individual setup.

According to Nvidia, the following games are confirmed to receive DLSS 5 functionality at some point:

• NBA 2K27
• Assassin’s Creed Shadows
• Black State
• CINDER CITY
• Delta Force
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Justice
• NARAKA: BLADEPOINT
• NTE: Neverness to Everness
• Phantom Blade Zero
• Resident Evil Requiem
• Sea of Remnants
• Starfield
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• Where Winds Meet
• AION 2

Additionally, Nvidia says that DLSS 5 will be supported by Bethesda, CAPCOM, Hotta Studio, NetEase, NCSOFT, S-GAME, Tencent, Ubisoft, and Warner Bros. Games. This means that theoretically any game from these companies could receive DLSS 5 implementation.

Of course, these are just the companies that have agreed to support it right now. Other companies may follow suit, but given the negative reactions from the community, DLSS 5 probably won’t become quite as ubiquitous as the previous versions of DLSS have.