By Michael Kan
Publication Date: 2026-03-24 12:13:00
Moving from one console generation to the next, we used to see huge graphical leaps. Remember those days? We thought that kind of epic bump was a thing of the past.
Now, we’re not so sure. Nvidia’s newly announced DLSS 5 may be the kind of single-generation graphics jump that gamers haven’t seen in some time. To be sure, it’s already raising hackles and courting controversy—so much so that CEO Jensen Huang had to give it a quick defense out of the gate in the court of public opinion. It goes well beyond the image-upscaling efforts of earlier versions of DLSS, and beyond the frame-generation efforts of later ones.
At Nvidia’s GTC event last week, I was given the chance to try a short series of demos of DLSS 5. Yes, it’s early. No, it’s not realistically optimized for existing hardware (yet). Even so, the technology wowed me several times, making me wonder: If Nvidia can make it work, is this the future of gaming graphics?
DLSS 5: The Promise, and the Controversy
DLSS is best known for using AI models to increase a PC game’s frame rate for smoother gameplay, whether via upscaling (rendering a game at a lower resolution, then upticking it to a higher one) or frame generation (using AI to splice in additional frames between classically rendered ones). But last week, Nvidia introduced DLSS 5, which uses a “neural rendering” model to add photorealistic effects. It’s a whole new layer to the DLSS game.
The company has been quietly developing the…
