NVIDIA announces DLSS 5, which leverages AI to generate 'photoreal' graphics and lighting in real-time

"Twenty-five years after NVIDIA invented the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics once again," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA at GTC. "DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics, blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression."

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NVIDIA's surprise DLSS 5 announcement this week has garnered a wide range of responses from the wider gaming community and media, and it's not hard to see why. The announcement video above, presenting DLSS 5 Off and DLSS 5 On examples in games like Resident Evil Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy, EA SPORTS FC, and Starfield, is jaw-dropping for the difference it makes in lighting, realism, and even detail. Mind-blowing even.

As NVIDIA briefly summarizes, DLSS 5 is a "real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials," taking a game's color and motion vectors as input. From there, developers have access to detailed controls over DLSS 5's intensity, color grading, masking, and more, to "maintain each game's unique aesthetic." As impressively game-changing as it is, and even though DLSS 5 doesn't change things like character models and animation, some of the results can look a little jarring in that Uncanny Valley sort of way.

This is the phenomenon in which the more photorealistic an artificial image appears, the more likely it is to elicit an instinctive human response to reject it entirely. DLSS 5 is something NVIDIA has been working on for nearly a decade, and at GTC 2026, this early demo and real-time first look was running on a PC with two GeForce RTX 5090s. DLSS 5 is on track for release later this year, with NVIDIA confirming that the launch version will run on a single GPU; there's no word on the VRAM requirement or whether it will be limited to high-end GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards.

DLSS 5's AI model is trained on complex scenes, focusing on elements such as characters, hair, fabric, translucent skin, shadows, and light sources within a single frame. And in real-time, using a game's data and what is being rendered by the GPU, it takes all of this information to dramatically change the look of the final image while retaining the "structure and semantics of the original scene." DLSS 5 is a reminder that lighting, shadow, color, and things like subsurface scattering on skin can make the same character model look almost completely different.

Here are three examples from Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield, and Hogwarts Legacy that showcase the difference cinematic path-traced-like shadows can make, while also highlighting how DLSS 5 AI model inference and added "photoreal" detail can make it look like a different game.

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NVIDIA is calling DLSS 5 the "most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018," and it's worth noting that all of the examples above have been tuned and approved by the game developers and studios. "When NVIDIA showed us DLSS 5, and we got it running in Starfield, it was amazing how it brought it to life," Bethesda Game Studios and Starfield director Todd Howard said. "We've played it. We can't wait for all of you to do so as well."