Nvidia announces DLSS 5, a new AI model that promises to deliver 'photorealistic' visuals

Talk about a game changer

(Credit: Nvidia)

• 🆕 Nvidia has announced a brand new DLSS upscaler at its annual GTC conference

• 😮 DLSS 5 adds a new AI model that adds new lighting and materials to help make game scenes more “photorealistic”

• 🤖 It does so by tying the color and motion vector data from the game’s engine to the model to create more predictable results

• 📆 Nvidia has only said it’ll be out in “fall 2026” and be supported in games such as Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Resident Evil Requiem from release

Nvidia has surprisingly announced a new variant of DLSS, DLSS 5, at this year’s GTC, which has been described as the “GPT moment for graphics”.

The news comes only a couple of months after Nvidia announced DLSS 4.5, with the features from it, such as 6x Multi Frame Gen and Dynamic Frame Gen, coming at the end of this month.

The original idea of DLSS, when it first launched back in 2018 with the RTX 20-series, was that it would take a game, render it at a lower resolution, and upscale it back to your native resolution using AI.

Since then, DLSS has evolved substantially and taken on features such as Frame Generation and Reflex, Nvidia’s low-latency tool, with subsequent updates. With DLSS 5, it’s adding another new feature.

DLSS 5 is bringing a new AI model that injects new lighting and materials into a game’s scene to make it more “photorealistic”, as Nvidia describes.

In an associated blog post, Nvidia describes that AI video models have been challenged in the past by their own unpredictability in how they handle such scenes. The solution it has used for DLSS 5 is to tie the model to the color and motion vector data it takes from the game engine, just as it does currently with Frame Generation.

As per Nvidia, the new 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.” The model then uses that information to generate images.

The model has been shown off in associated screenshots and a trailer for games such as Resident Evil Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, and EA Sports FC 26. It certainly makes a dramatic difference.

The trailer Nvidia has shown off was captured with the model running on two RTX 5090 GPUs, which evidently makes it quite power hungry, and it remains to be seen how this will run on a more ‘normal’ consumer-grade system.

Nvidia has only said that DLSS 5 will be available in “Fall 2026” at some point, rather than a concrete release date at the moment, with supported games including Aion 2, Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Resident Evil Requiem.

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Reece Bithrey is a journalist with bylines for Trusted Reviews, Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, TechRadar and more. He also has his own blog, UNTITLED, and graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in International History and Politics in 2023.