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Nvidia presents DLSS 5, which is primarily AI-generated lighting for games. Digital Foundry saw it on four titles – and calls it the biggest leap in graphics since pathtracing.
The Nvidia keynote at GTC 2026 had the official launch of DLSS 5 up its sleeve: the new upscaling generation is set to be nothing less than “the most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018”.
The “GPT moment for game graphics”
The core of the innovation is a real-time-capable AI model that is intended to subsequently enrich existing game pixels with photorealistic light and physically correctly simulated materials.
In contrast to previous DLSS versions, which were primarily designed to increase performance through AI upscaling and frame generation, DLSS 5 aims to fundamentally improve visual quality for the first time, according to NVIDIA.The technology, according to the Nvidia announcement “takes color values and motion vectors of a frame as input and uses them to calculate a more detailed image with film production-level lighting”.
Twenty-five years after the invention of the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics. DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for game graphics – combining hand-crafted rendering and generative AI to make a dramatic leap in visual realism.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
What DLSS 5 (according to Nvidia) should achieve
According to Nvidia, the DLSS 5 model analyses “complex scene semantics”: characters, hair, fabrics and translucent skin tones are to be recognized as well as ambient light conditions – all on the basis of a single frame without additional precalculations.
According to Nvidia, the major effects include so-called “subsurface scattering” on skin.This is a light effect in which light rays are not simply reflected on a surface, but first penetrate the material, are scattered there and only then emerge again at another point.Developers should be able to use controls for intensity or color correction to specify where and how the enhancements are applied in the image.
The integration is to take place via the already established Nvidia Streamline framework, which is also used by DLSS 4 and NVIDIA Reflex.
Four titles at Digital Foundry hands-on
Among the confirmed titles that will support DLSS 5 are Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil Requiem and Oblivion Remastered. These titles have already been examined by the tech experts at Digital Foundry in a first hands-on with DLSS 5.
The big promise up front: Digital Foundry also calls DLSS 5 the “biggest leap forward since Pathtracing”.
The aforementioned subsurface scattering comes off just as well as the significantly more natural hair display, which, according to Digital Foundry, proves to be a “generation-spanning leap in image quality”.In the games Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Oblivion Remastered, DLSS 5 also provided more realistic shading and ambient occlusion: Objects appeared more believably embedded in their surroundings than the original renderer allowed.The handling of foliage and vegetation is particularly noteworthy, which the tech experts say DLSS 5 handles “convincingly, even taking ray and patch tracing into account”.
Not ready yet: Two RTX 5090s and visible bugs
However, Digital Foundry also notes what the hands-on impression could not yet show.
Nvidia needed two RTX 5090s for the demos: one GPU was responsible for the game, while the second graphics card explicitly only calculated DLSS 5.The new generation is therefore not yet capable of running on a single GPU – VRAM requirements and computing costs are still too high for this.For the actual release, DLSS 5 is designed to run on a single GPU. Nvidia states that the computing effort scales with the resolution as usual.In addition, according to Digital Foundry, isolated bugs have been spotted in the image.Nvidia itself describes the current status as a “snapshot” and announces further optimizations until the planned release.
In any case, the update to DLSS 4.5 is due first, which is set to arrive with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and the new 6x mode, among other things.
DLSS 5 coming in fall 2026 – details still open
Nvidia is targeting next fall as the release period for DLSS 5. However, there is no specific date or list of supported graphics card generations yet – the new upscaling generation is RTX-exclusive as before, but it is still unclear whether only the current RTX 50 generation or older graphics cards will benefit.
