If you’ve spent any time on gaming social media this week, you’ll see a lot of comparison screenshots of video games. The most common ones you’ll see are split-screen comparisons between an OG shot of the game and one that’s slightly more detailed, with a promise that this will be the “future” of gaming.
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That’s DLSS 5, NVIDIA’s latest and most ambitious version of its AI upscaling technology, officially launching Sept. 3. It’s exclusive to the company’s RTX 50-series graphics cards and arrives with just one game: NBA 2K27.
It’s also become one of the more divisive pieces of gaming tech in recent memory, centered around whether AI should be allowed to redraw what a game looks like at all.
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What is DLSS?
DLSS has existed for years as a way to boost frame rates by having an AI model fill in detail rather than rendering every pixel natively. The new version goes further.
As we reported when it was first announced, DLSS 5 aims to use AI to add more realistic lighting and materials to a scene in real-time. That means it can actively repaint lighting, textures, and even character faces on the fly. When NVIDIA first unveiled the tech back in March, the company called it a landmark moment, framed as its biggest graphics breakthrough since real-time ray tracing debuted in 2018.
NVIDIA also claims that the system hands creative control back to developers, who get sliders to dial in exactly how aggressive the AI’s changes are, down to leaving character faces untouched or enhancing only background details.
The DLSS 5 controversy on social media
Backlash towards DLSS 5 has been around since it was first revealed in a tech demo for Resident Evil: Requiem. The AI-enhanced version of the protagonist, Grace Ashcroft, looked so different from the original that it sparked its own meme cycle online, with critics describing the change as a “yassification” of the character.
DLSS 5 believers see a legitimate leap in both performance and visual fidelity, especially for sports and photorealistic titles, where the tech seems to deliver on its promises. Proponents say that DLSS 5 looks as good as you make it, and that the “bad” images of the tech are aggressively pushing the sliders and not using it properly.
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Critics argue that letting an AI model reinterpret a character’s face or a room’s lighting overrides decisions the actual artists made — without much visible input from the games’ creators. For a lot of gamers, nobody asked the AI to redesign the art direction. However, does it actually look bad? In some instances, yes. Very much so.
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Performance-wise, it’s not free, either.
NVIDIA itself estimates DLSS 5 costs 50 to 60 percent of your performance, offset by aggressive frame generation. NVIDIA further claims that even a mid-range RTX 5060 can run NBA 2K27 at 1080p with ray tracing and DLSS 5 maxed out, but only with a top-tier CPU and 6x frame generation enabled, meaning the GPU is inventing five out of every six frames you see rather than rendering them directly.
That’s fine, if you ignore the ongoing memory crisis that’s been squeezing the consumer PC market for the last few years. The RTX 5090 that NVIDIA’s original DLSS 5 demos leaned on can be bought brand-new for $2,000, but it’s also reselling for two to three times that on the secondary market, per market trackers following the shortage. That’s most people’s monthly rent for just one graphics card, and NVIDIA’s demo used two.
Even the lower-end RTX 5060 is a victim of price creep, with some of the cheaper ones out there still priced over $400. So while NVIDIA’s pitch is that DLSS 5 makes ray-traced, high-frame-rate gaming reachable on mid-range cards, the mid-range itself has gotten much less affordable — meaning the fully loaded version of this “future of graphics” pitch is, for now, mostly a luxury good.
Whether DLSS 5 becomes standard across PC gaming or ends up a niche feature for realism-focused titles will depend on whether NVIDIA can get more developers on board, and whether those developers use the granular controls to keep the AI from overriding their own art direction.
For now, the only way to actually judge it yourself is to boot up NBA 2K27 on Sept. 3 and toggle the setting. Or you can experience the elderitch horros being created on social media right now.
Source: https://mashable.com/tech/what-is-dlss-5-controversy
