Historically, Nvidia DLSS has attempted to improve the performance of your games without excessively degrading visual quality. The latest iteration, DLSS 5, tries to improve the way games look, and fails spectacularly.
DLSS was revealed today by Nvidia, and “introduces a real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials.”
According to the company, the technology “bridges the divide between rendering and reality.”
Here’s a brief explanation of how it works directly from the official announcement post, if you’re interested in word salads.
“DLSS 5 takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input, and uses an AI model to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame. DLSS 5 runs in real time at up to 4K resolution for smooth, interactive gameplay.
The AI model is trained end to end to understand complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast — all by analyzing a single frame. DLSS 5 then uses its deep understanding to generate visually precise images that handle complex elements such as subsurface scattering on skin, the delicate sheen of fabric and light-material interactions on hair, all while retaining the structure and semantics of the original scene.”
While Nvidia hails this as a “breakthrough in visual fidelity,” checking out the video below showing the technology in action shows that DLSS 5 succeeds in turning characters that look rendered into characters that look distinctively like AI “Art” (quotation marks obligatory) or, as some call it, AI sop.
Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Among the developers that announced they will support DLSS 5 are the following: Bethesda, CAPCOM, Hotta Studio, NetEase, NCSOFT, S-GAME, Tencent, Ubisoft, and Warner Bros. Games
We have seen imagery from Resident Evil Requiem, EA Sports FC, Starfield, Hogwarts Legacy, and more.
