By Devindra Hardawar
Publication Date: 2026-03-16 19:34:00
Just a few months after announcing DLSS 4.5 at CES, NVIDIA has unveiled its next big upscaling technology, DLSS 5. The company is putting more emphasis on AI in this next iteration, claiming that DLSS 5 will “imbue pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials” using a real-time neural rendering model when it launches this fall.
So what does this mean in practice? In an onstage demo at NVIDIA’s GTC 2026 keynote, CEO Jensen Huang introduced the technology Resident Evil: Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy And Starfield. DLSS 5 adds significantly more detail to characters’ hair and skin tone, but also appears to be compared to games without DLSS features enabled. It’s unclear how much of a difference it makes compared to DLSS 4.5 with path tracing and all of its features enabled.
“DLSS 5 takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input and uses an AI model to fill the scene with photorealistic lighting and materials anchored in the source of 3D content…
