THE CRUNCH
NVIDIA is bringing DLSS 5, its neural rendering technology, to three more games this month. Hogwarts Legacy gets it first on 5 November, War Thunder follows in mid-November, and Where Winds Meet is scheduled for 23 November.
DLSS 5 introduces what NVIDIA calls 3D-Guided Neural Rendering, using AI to enhance lighting, shadows and material details based on information from the game engine. It runs as a final rendering stage, taking the original frame, geometry, textures and lighting data as its foundation. NVIDIA says this lets developers add more realistic lighting and materials without explicitly modelling and rendering all the extra detail.
Developers get controls to tune the effect per scene, object and character, using different AI models, intensity settings and semantic masking to preserve the original artistic direction. That flexibility may matter: when NVIDIA first showed DLSS 5 earlier in 2026, the face transformations drew criticism, with a Hogwarts Legacy student looking noticeably older. By October, new comparison screenshots showed the changes toned down to subtle levels, closer to what shipped in NBA 2K27, where DLSS 5 first launched on 3 September.
NVIDIA is also rolling out DLSS 4.5 to several games and has updated its DLSS 4.5 Unreal Engine plugin. The company says its October 2026 update significantly reduced the technology's footprint, cut VRAM usage and increased performance.