THE CRUNCH
DLSS 5 will debut in Hogwarts Legacy on November 5th, and Nvidia's new comparison screenshots suggest the controversial feature has been seriously toned down. When Nvidia showed off the technology earlier this year, it was quickly branded as gen AI for video games, with critics noting that faces were transformed in unsettling ways: a 15-year-old Hogwarts Legacy student suddenly looked much older, and Resident Evil Requiem's Grace looked, as one reviewer put it, yassified.
The new screenshots show face changes as subtle as those in NBA 2K27, the game where DLSS 5 first launched back on September 3rd, with teenagers no longer looking like middle-aged men and environmental changes also more restrained. Nvidia has consistently maintained that developers have "detailed artistic control" over DLSS 5 and choose how to implement it in their games.
Alongside the toned-down rollout, an October update to the neural rendering system shrinks the model's footprint by 24 percent to roughly 118 million parameters and cuts 4K VRAM usage by 20 percent, according to Nvidia's Andrew Burnes. Nvidia says the update should make DLSS 5 twice as fast on RTX 50-series GPUs and the upcoming RTX Spark laptops. This new model debuts first in NBA 2K27 on October 16th and will ship by default with future DLSS 5 games. DLSS 5 is also coming to Where Winds Meet late next month.
Separately, a new Nvidia app beta adds a faster performance mode for Frame Generation on RTX 40- and 50-series GPUs, using a lighter algorithm for Frame Gen, Multi Frame Gen and Dynamic Multi Frame Gen. Nvidia acknowledges "minor trade-offs in image quality" and says the mode can be up to 35 percent faster.