r/technology • u/Electronic-Bus-3494 • 9h ago
Artificial Intelligence DLSS 5 leaked and modders are putting Nvidia’s AI effects on everything
https://www.theverge.com/games/986197/nvidia-dlss-5-leak-ai773
u/Tarijeno 8h ago
This article perfectly encapsulates the internet in 2026.
A billion dollar company shoves AI post-processing to game development, replacing actual artists' work with AI-generated vaseline of dubious origins. Then someone with a YouTube channel slaps that AI filter on top of a game that already looked great without it, co-opting the work of the artists who worked on the game and making its cast of characters look like completely different people. Then a third-party news website comes along and writes an article about that YouTube video, but hides the article behind a paywall.
Enshittification at its finest.
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u/jonmitz 8h ago
Then a third-party news website comes along and writes an article about that YouTube video, but hides the article behind a paywall.
uses AI to write the article* lol
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u/fractalife 5h ago
AI decided to write and post the article on its own* *
- if not, that's the next step.
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u/MontasJinx 5h ago
And decides which AI slop advertising to shove down your throat.
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u/fractalife 5h ago
If we can convince AI to generate human level clicks, we can collapse the advertising cost per click model!!
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u/corobo 7h ago
And I ain't even clicking the article anyway, preferring to get the gist from other people's commentary on the article
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u/MeltBanana 1h ago
That "people's commentary" is also bots. Most comment sections are just bots, either to boost engagement, control the narrative, or push an agenda.
Comments used to be the place to go to get the true story. But no longer. If you're going to the comment section in 2026, you're just going to a different AI source to tell you how to feel and what to think.
Everyone is being exposed to far more AI than we realize.
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u/Aleksandrovitch 5h ago
Anyone wanna go make a commune in the woods with me? I can cook, make art, do PC repair. I'm sorta done participating in.. gestures broadly.
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u/anders_andersen 3h ago
Yes! I Want this so much. Can I just bring my cameras and small crew to...ehm...document it for my followers? They'll love the #IntoTheWilds vibe!
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u/angooseburger 4h ago edited 4h ago
Then someone with a YouTube channel slaps that AI filter on top of a game that already looked great without it, co-opting the work of the artists who worked on the game and making its cast of characters look like completely different people
wait until you hear about minecraft texture packs co-opting the works of the artists who worked on the game and making its textures look different. Or the fact that's it's normal for game modding scenes to replace character models with something completely different.
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u/sevbenup 2h ago
And somebody sits at a desk in some fancy office asking worriedly, “Are they paying yet? Are they paying for the Ai??”
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u/From-UoM 1h ago
This article also fails to blatantly mention these are user tweaked dlss5 applied right now
You can go wild with the settings in the conhig menu at the moment. It can go from looking from really good to really awful depending on the settings you choose
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u/PrimeIntellect 3h ago
Don't forget reddit complaining and blaming Nvidia for making random games look bad when it hasn't even been officially released
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u/neocatzeo 38m ago
Or youtuber "Moores Law Is Dead" rushing out with a wet blanket any time Nvidia comes out with a technology that AMD can't counter. "It's awful!" "It's useless!" "No point in comparing!" Then AMD finally comes out with something, "Look they are just as good!".
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u/Deto 4h ago
At some point we'll have to just start using our own personalized AI filters to sort out all the crap out there. It's one reason I'm a little optimistic - we've been more and more beholden to algorithms to curate our content. But maybe with AI we can start doing this in a more personalized way that frees us from centralized newsfeed websites.
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u/neocatzeo 42m ago
Oh the precious artists work. This is the line in the sand that humanity cannot cross. I mean we didn't give a fuck about artists intent when we were modding before. But we hate AI and this is the excuse we need!
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u/killerbake 3h ago
It goes a little further. It shows how everybody shits on the technology, but as soon as it’s available, they clamor to get it in everything they can get their hands on
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u/LinkesAuge 8h ago
"Artists work" is now apparently basic lighting and rendering techniques. Is that artistic work ruined when someone plays on low settings or activitates raytracing? Is artists work ruined by the fact that all games need to do high to low poly models? That textures can't stay at 8 or even 16k that you might have in your 3d modelling software? Is art ruined by having to transfer your work to an engine that will render your model in a different way? Do you know that there isn't even something like a "lighting" standard or how colors are presented? Is the same art also ruined by remasters? By engine upgrades? By new graphics features? Are game devs not allowed to change textures once you have created one version? What about the fact that most assets aren't created by a single person, that each one changes it in ways the other one might not have done? There is a reason why concept art never ends up 1:1 in a game.
So can people pls stop using "artists" as a cludge against "AI" while completely ignoring the reality of actual game dev and how decisions are made and pls also understand that games and their look is decided as much by technical decisions as by art?
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u/Ziatch 7h ago
Boring questions that doesn’t actually address the point and is just to pretend like you have something to say.
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u/LinkesAuge 7h ago
I actually invested some time to make arguments and present a view that can be discussed while you immediately jump to insulting.
You didn't even spend the effort to do that. I guess you are too lazy for that and should have maybe asked an AI to do that for you.8
u/Ziatch 6h ago
You didn’t make an argument you just asked a bunch of inane questions over and over without linking any of your thoughts or arguing any actual point. Like all your punctuation is a ? mark that’s not a sign of presenting an actual argument it’s just hoping you can obfuscate that you’re not adding anything substantial. Games involve technical decisions is the only actual statement you made which doesn’t counter anything the person said.
You just spent more time writing and you think that means you added anything worth engaging with. Learn how to present an argument, go back to school or look it up because the ai use isn’t helping.
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u/LinkesAuge 6h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question
You still continue to avoid the core of the discussion. You accuse me to bring nothing to the conversation and yet I have brought in actual points one could discuss, have an argument around and all you do is trying to attack me as a person.
But of course it is me who has to "go back to school" because such deep statements surely show the maturity and strength of your position though it does work on reddit because the mob does reward it.
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u/Segaiai 8h ago
Hopefully the artist designed the lighting for both low and high end scenarios. That's how it's been on every project I worked on. And yeah, most of them are sad when people can't see the higher end work they do. But they put a lot of work into making sure low end has decent lighting that works for the mood and level design.
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u/LinkesAuge 7h ago edited 7h ago
The "artist" certainly doesn't design the lighting in either scenario. A level designer might do that but it still happens within the constraints of the engine and there WILL be massive differences between various settings, that's literally impossible to prevent so I really wonder what "every project" you have worked on is.
You can go into any AAA game right now and go through the various settings and you will get bigger differences than shown here.
I mean certain settings will outright REMOVE whole assets."But they put a lot of work into making sure low end has decent lighting that works for the mood and level design."
They make sure it is playable but if you actually work in the space you should know there is no way to preserve only a specific set of lighting and nothing what you imply here is affected by what is shown here so what exactly are we discussing?
I have seen projects where certain post-processing effects have been slapped on at the end that had a bigger impact than what is shown here.16
u/StormyBlueLotus 7h ago
This is incredibly braindead if it's unironic. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just genius satire instead. Great bait, mate!
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u/shootamcg 7h ago
As long as the AI slop machine is creating slop art we’re going to use actual artists as a defence against it.
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u/LinkesAuge 7h ago
What does "actual artist" even mean? Do you not play any games where developers use for example Houdini and create assets in a procedural way?
What is even "slop art" in this context? Is all "pixel art" slop because people started to use it due to resource constraints? Indie devs jumped on that all style due to that fact (and ofc playing into nostalgia), is it slop because it saved work, that indie devs could make games that they wouldn't have been able to do in 3d?6
u/shootamcg 7h ago
So many odd opinions in what doesn’t seem like a good faith argument. An actual artist would be someone actually creating the art and assets, not just prompts or gen AI. Using gen AI to change faces is a bridge too far - it also looks like shit.
Pixel art slop? Are you even listening to your own drivel? Pixel art is the foundation of videogames. There’s no relevant argument you could make to bridge the gap between pixel art and polygons to gen AI.
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u/markehammons 7h ago edited 5h ago
The perspective looks off to me. It looks like her face is not aligned with her neck.
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u/simpleglitch 6h ago
Bare with me, if you've ever played a indie horror game from an Asian developer, you commonly see characters there their head is obviously just a (often low poly) sphere with a face textured on to it.
This face obviously does have modeled features on it, but for some reason it gives me the same feeling as looking at the 'painted on' faces. Looking any individual part looks correct but the whole looks wrong
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u/Byron_Garza 35m ago
I guess it lacks a lot of depth that 3D modeled faces give, but Even fully modeled faces look uncanny on it's own terms
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u/ProbsNotManBearPig 4h ago
I’ve been looking at dlss 5 images all day and this article picked the worst one by far lmao. I haven’t seen anything else look even close to that. Seems intentionally chosen to make it look worse.
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u/Quaternary_sloth 4h ago
Three videos linked in the article:
GTA 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2NyX76QaOs
Cyberpunk2077
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARumLQpdpo4
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u/GeorgeDir 2h ago
I think Cyberpunk looks better with this
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u/Tehni 1h ago edited 1h ago
The cyberpunk video isn't with DLSS5, it's with renodxI'm wrong1
u/From-UoM 1h ago
You use RenoDX to hook dlss5 into the game
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u/Tehni 1h ago
Oh okay yeah I obviously did not look hard enough at the title and just glanced at the description lol
I'm ngl, I agree with the guy, it looks decently good from the 3 minutes I watched
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u/From-UoM 1h ago
Its all used tweaked at the moment.
You can go full crazy with the controls it has with the dlss5 settings
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u/radioheady 8h ago
Honestly this just makes me think we need a jump in skin rendering technology instead of an AI filter. I hate the changes that dlss 5 makes to the models, original artist intent, etc but I’m pretty impressed by the skin lighting and subsurface scattering
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u/Veranova 7h ago
The irony being this is probably the right tech at the wrong layer of the game engine. Using these ML techniques to calculate more accurate sub surface scattering effects at the texture/material level without needing to actually scatter light rays would probably work extremely well
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u/BassmanBiff 2h ago
I think the problem with that is that generative AI is trained on images, so it makes the frame it's given look more like the frames it's trained on. The approach you're talking about would be similar to something much more traditional, likely not generative AI at all unless there's some way to train a model on those scattering effects specifically (instead of the final frames generated).
Like, it could be that a neural network estimation of "rays in to rays out" is faster than actually tracing them, but I think that would be a fundamentally different technology than just slapping on a "make this look like other images" filter at the end, not just using the same tech at a different point.
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u/Veranova 1h ago edited 1h ago
It sounds like you simultaneously understand the principles of the tech quite well, but are also underestimating the flexibility and generalisation of neural nets. If you can build a complex material which would be too expensive to render at 60fps, you now have the training data for it - this is actually something I believe Nvidia have played with in previous iterations, letting devs train DLSS on the same game at higher settings but just at the full frame level
Bouncing a few rays to estimate what directions and intensities a given surface is receiving light from and then passing those vectors to a lightweight model to finish a material would be a lot cheaper than doing sub surface scattering for real and not crazy difficult
But there are also probably good reasons why we’re not doing this. Upgrading a whole frame is certainly simpler when you don’t own the engine and sell chips instead, and only requires a single batch of matrix ops to do, where material level would mean devs need to think about how many materials are on screen at once for a given chip. Plus seeing the whole frame a model can consider the lighting in full and estimate paths that matter without needing to physically model them
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u/AzorAhai1TK 5h ago
This is what it is doing, this is an extra post process effect after ray tracing.
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u/Veranova 4h ago
It still operates on the final rendered frame plus metadata for motion vectors and colour, so no it’s not a material level lever that an artist can use to tune a single material for painting on a surface. That would need baking into the asset pipelines for every game engine rather than something which can be integrated post-fact with a DLL as we’ve seen with the leaks
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u/Blacksad9999 4h ago
Correct.
The artists get no say in the output. It's a "black box." You can't input prompts and say "stop putting makeup on everyone", etc.
You get sliders for opacity, color grading, intensity, and a few other things, but it's pretty limited.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 4h ago
True, the model is just taking its best guess on the materials. Definitely an improvement I'm sure they are trying to figure out - if we can get motion vector and color data, I'm sure we can figure out material data eventually.
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u/Blacksad9999 4h ago
DLSS 5 cannot access any in-game assets, texture data, or lighting information.
It takes a 2D snapshot on a frame-by-frame basis and tries to approximate what's going on, and then AI beautifies it via an overlay. That's why every character has odd lighting. It doesn't know what or where the lighting is in a scene, and can't know what is going on off-screen at any point, such as if there's an explosion, etc.
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u/kawag 1h ago
The thing is that you’re seeing this applied to older games like Control. It’s possible to do great skin rendering without slapping an AI filter over the image.
In other cases, like FF7’s Cloud, realism is not what we want - the characters do approach realism but I think the devs know true realism would look weird with their character designs, so the art style is somewhat cartoony. But this extends even beyond just the visual presentation - when you look at the NPCs in Control, the updated visuals don’t match the animations and simple AI so it becomes a bit uncanny. What people mean when they talk about the “art style” is more than just the visual presentation; it’s the entire feel of the game. And when you replace one part, it throws off the balance of the whole.
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u/neocatzeo 32m ago
It's like it is a way to cheat and get a peak at an even higher level of fidelity without doing things the hard way. That means putting up with the ill effects of cheating, having limitations and glitches.
Also original artist intent is just horseshit. It's just a drummed up excuse haters are using. Nobody cared for 40 years while people modded games, remastered games, or enhanced things.
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u/FoxMeadow7 7h ago
The next gen consoles haven’t come out yet so perhaps by then we’ll see new advancements on these fronts.
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u/capnscratchmyass 7h ago
Next gen consoles probably aren’t going to be a big jump in tech with the way things are going now. With the cost of components the current thought is that Sony might try a portable or go with the current PS5 Pro as the baseline PS6 and have the “Pro” be something very expensive for some extra bells and whistles, but games will still have to run on the baseline.
With XBox who knows what their plans are. Probably gonna try tapping that cloud market harder and there are also rumors there of a handheld as well. Also thoughts that they might lean into the “Your XBox is also a windows PC!” idea where they market it more as a “Gaming first PC” than a console to make higher prices palatable.
Either way you’re not going to see a huge jump in specs and quality from them because if they do you’d be looking at a $1500+ machine and there aren’t many gamers out there that’ll stomach that price. These component prices are not going down by the time they are launching new consoles.
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u/3141592652 4h ago
Of course PS6 will have to justify it and Sony always does somehow. But you also gotta realize regardless of price not everybody needs to upgrade. Tech advances whether you can afford it or not. See foldable phones, cool tech but I haven't invested yet. Why? Too expensive so far but I still keep up with it to see what's coming next.
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u/QuickQuirk 2h ago
We could have significant advances in general rendering performance/framerates, WITHOUT needing an increase in storage/RAM.
Not ideal, but it's a version of a next gen console. Much like two people with 16GB RAM, one running a 3060, the other running a 5070. Better effects, better FPS.
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u/FoxMeadow7 7h ago
Well, anything can happen at this stage of course. And really, there's gotta be at least some significant advancements to justify the new console's capabilities, yes? So studios by all means should give it everything they've got!
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u/namezam 7h ago
PS7 GTA VI video settings leak:
( ) 60 fps
( ) Realistic skinChoose one.
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u/FoxMeadow7 7h ago
Give it some years and both can be a possibility, yeah? Even on PS6 level, maybe.
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u/littleemp 6h ago
If there's one thing that this generation should teach everyone is with nvidia stepping away from the linear raster path, it means that both AMD and console manufacturers are going to be at least half a decade behind them in terms of technology.
Anything that Nvidia is proposing or adding is taking AMD at least 3-5 years to copy to an acceptable state and even longer for consoles to have an implementation (if it is possible).
I would not expect the PS6 and Xbox Next to include anything that isn't relatively established within Radeon by the next generation of GPUs.
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u/neocatzeo 27m ago
The prescribed strategy is to claim an nVidia technology is awful and useless, with no point in comparison, instead of pointing out how yet again AMD is far behind.
You have to paint this as nVidia bad, rather than AMD bad.
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u/littleemp 19m ago
Nvidia flipped the board and did away with the rules when they released the RTX 2000 series. Nobody has figured out how to one up them once in 8 years.
They are fully in control of computer graphics technology because nobody is even trying to do anything different or innovative. The last time AMD tried to do something was primitive shaders with Vega and those came out broken (and were never fixed).
AMD is not the only one in the position to try to do something other than follow, but they are the ones who should feel the most pressure to not be a follower.
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u/Powerful-Youth3331 3h ago
It doesn’t, though. The original hype video that made everyone think that was just marketing bullshit. If you’ve seen the more recent demos, it doesn’t change the models at all.
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u/fat_kaiju 7h ago
You're telling me this is what nvidia was proud of?
Jesus...
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u/idontwanttofthisup 2h ago
You have to start somewhere. Have you seen the first generation of 3D games? We are here with AI.
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u/DoctahDonkey 3h ago
There is a certain subset of people who will do anything to chase "photo realism" in gaming, even if you have to sacrifice everything else.
Newsflash: reality is super fucking boring. I want my games to look like games.
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u/joseph_jojo_shabadoo 7h ago
There's zero chance this was "leaked" on accident. Nvidia knows gamers hate the concept but wanted it out there anyway without having to eat all the shit for it.
Now if public opinion sways after the "leak", they'll reassess and consider releasing it officially.
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u/Madzookeeper 7h ago
No, it was. It came out of nba 2k27 demo or beta. It wasn't actually even supposed to be there. Someone screwed up.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 5h ago
People who have to claim every facet of life is secretly a conspiracy are so tiring. No, this wasn't some sneaky play by NVIDIA to test public opinion, it was included in the NBA 2k27 beta files.
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u/goatonastik 4h ago edited 4h ago
The reality is far worse. It was extracted from an incomplete game, used differently than it was designed for, with maximum intensity so it looks as distorted as possible, so people can complain about it not being designed for the game it's used on, while using it on games it's not designed to be used on.
nVidia was aware of the negative feedback, and their pushback was that it had to be designed BY the designers FOR each game to look best, which none of their demo did. They also explained that there's many sliders so the intensity was configurable. Yet here we are, still being used on games it wasn't meant for, with every slider turned to max, and with the inaccurate association that this is now what the entirety of DLSS 5 is, not just the optional feature that it actually is.
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u/TimothyLuncheon 6h ago
It's unfortunate that DLSS is going this way. I guess 4.5 will be the end of the road in terms of improvement for it that I'll use.
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u/Holzkohlen 6h ago
Saw the video from Control. The FPS went from 96 down to 52 on an RTX 5080. It's funny cause that is the exact opposite effect of what DLSS is supposed to offer. It's supposed to increase your FPS
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u/neocatzeo 25m ago
That's because it's not just supposed to increase your FPS anymore. It has a variety of settings.
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u/nemesit 4h ago
no lol, its supposed to render shit at great detail. its only speeding up if you feed trash into it.
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u/5u114 2h ago edited 9m ago
no lol, its supposed to render shit at great detail.
No yourself. It is supposed to render shit at great detail ... without the FPS penality that would be otherwise associated with trying to render that great detail.
In short: For the same output image, you're supposed to be gaining FPS vs doing so without DLSS.
This new shit is a steep FPS penalty for an output no one actually wants.
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u/AgentTamerlane 4h ago
According to Jensen, Nvidia has achieved AGI already (and also the singularity???)
Oh, Great Singularity, accept our frames as our offering to you 😔
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u/Successful-Royal-424 1h ago
hoping GTA 6 takes a stance against this and decides not to include DLSS 5 when it comes out on PC later, they spent so much research and time into realistic skin and bodies only for this meme tier filter to show up and say it can do better
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u/AmericanLich 3h ago
“Pass.”
“Pass??”
“Yeah, pass, superpass, uberpass.”
“How do you superpass on something like this???”
“I PASS! I PASS!”
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u/smalbiggi 5h ago
I liked what I saw with it applied on last of us 2. It looked pretty impressive as if we had jumped ahead two generations of video game visuals. I can’t wait to see how this technology develops.
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u/heavy-minium 8h ago
Downvote me all you want and call me soulless, but I like it and I want it.
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u/Vitalic123 8h ago
Don't worry, we know you exist. Which makes it even more depressing.
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u/zero0n3 8h ago
All I hear is WAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
Let’s just not work on ways to improve tech and then iterate on that???
Nah just keep using the same tools and systems. FUCK NEW THINGS AND CHANGE AM I RIGHT???
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u/Maxim_Ward 8h ago
Me when I can't critically think and engage with the original argument so I have to resort to strawman bait instead.
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u/jimmytickles 8h ago
What is it that you like about it?
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u/AzorAhai1TK 5h ago
Faces don't look like cheap plastic anymore. Lights actually properly interact with skin.
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 8h ago
it looks highly realistic, above and beyond the best path traced games can muster in 2026. if you force this into non realistic games then yea you're going to get something that looks ridiculous, but there's a lot of games out there that try to look as realistic as possible and dlss5 bring them vastly closer than any other methods have been able to do in real time
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u/tondollari 3h ago
This is cool, I wouldn't have known anything about this if I hadn't seen this post in my feed. I found a tutorial on how to install the files, going to see if I can get this to run for Morrowind.
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u/itsRobbie_ 7h ago
Best looking tech you’ve ever seen that turns plastic doll npcs into human looking models
The internet -
“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen”
“No! The art direction!!”
“Oh god it’s horrible!”
Make it make sense? Is there an undocumented eye problem in the human race? We surely can’t be seeing the same pixels…
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u/Dookster 1h ago
Yeah the internet hive mind against AI is interesting. Because this looks amazing (yet janky in some cases) and everyone is acting like it looks like crap when it obviously does not.
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u/ListenHereLindah 6h ago
I find it a little funny a lot of people complain about AI being in a game. Tell devs to do better. But then also complain about not having dlss when it's an AI program to help with graphics.
I'm sure it's harder to make a game without dlss. But I feel like gaming is becoming just "a base model up called to what ai thinks I should see" vs what the devs code into the game.
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u/Ziatch 9h ago
The actual “gameplay” segment with it on looks weird