DLSS 5 Hands-On: Nvidia Turns to Neural Rendering to Make Games Look Real

In NBA 2K27, the report said DLSS 5 made lighting and shadow relationships more natural and brought skin, fabric, hair, metal and wood floors into a more unified visual relationship. With DLSS 5 off, the game still looked like a high-quality 3D game, with plastic-like skin, simple light and dark transitions, clothes that appeared pasted onto models and a vivid, cartoonish color palette. With it on, the face of Luka Doncic showed more complex transitions of light, including subtle shading and translucency around the eye sockets, nose, lips and ears. Victor Wembanyama stopped looking as much like a 3D model. Court floors showed wood grain, scratches, wear and reflections in more natural relationships, and jerseys gained stronger fabric texture, finer shading in folds and more realistic reactions to light at different angles. The report said colors became more restrained, the overexposed look of the Los Angeles Lakers' court was reduced, and the overall image moved from a high-quality 3D game toward the texture of a real NBA broadcast.

The report placed DLSS 5 against a longer history of NBA 2K visuals. It said NBA 2K14 on PS4 rebuilt player and arena assets, NBA 2K17 brought the PS4 generation into maturity, and NBA 2K21 set another benchmark on PS5. NBA 2K27's base image still builds on that lineage. But the report argued that progress has slowed. Even NBA 2K26 and NBA 2K27 with DLSS 5 turned off look detailed but still immediately readable as games. The report also pointed to The Last of Us Part II, a late-PS4 game from 2020, as an example that still outperforms many PS5-era titles in characters, materials, animation and lighting. Continuing to chase realism through more complex models, assets and GPU calculations has yielded diminishing returns, with rising asset costs and compute demands producing smaller visible changes.

DLSS 5 takes a different route. Instead of relying only on handcrafted assets and more GPU rendering, it learns from the real world and participates in the generation of the final image. After the game engine and GPU complete base rendering, DLSS 5 uses a neural network to perform generative rendering at a very late stage of the graphics pipeline. Nvidia calls the approach 3D-Guided Neural Rendering. The system receives the rendered RGB image, motion vectors, temporal state from the previous frame, and masks and art control information supplied by developers. The 3D game data tells the AI what is in the frame, while an appearance prior learned from large amounts of real visual data tells it what those things generally look like in reality. The report said the process must fit inside a frame budget of a dozen or so milliseconds, with neural rendering typically taking only a few milliseconds, which is why it uses a single-step model. It still carries a clear performance cost, and in NBA 2K27 it has an RTX 50-series hardware requirement. The report stressed that DLSS 5 is not simply a filter applied to the game; the AI has seen the real world and directly takes part in generating the final image.

The performance cost is visible. On the reporter's RTX 5080, NBA 2K27 at 4K with maximum quality ran at 120 fps with DLSS 5 off, but dropped to about 45 fps with it on. The report said there is considerable room for optimization. It also said the technology does not suit every game. Sports titles such as NBA 2K27 pursue realism and are among the first to benefit. Games such as The Legend of Zelda and Mario pursue their own visual languages, so teaching AI what the real world looks like has less value for them. If neural rendering becomes widespread, the report said, it may need to learn not only reality but also the artistic styles of individual games.

The report also raised the boundary between realistic and faithful. Early DLSS 5 demonstrations drew controversy because AI could make a face more realistic while also moving it away from the face the developer originally designed. According to the report, that controversy appeared to fade after players saw how DLSS 5 changed visuals across games, including titles that had been on sale for nearly 20 years and suddenly looked like remasters. The report concluded that DLSS 5 breaks the rule that final visual complexity must grow in step with handcrafted complexity. When some visual details that once had to be modeled, drawn and calculated can be generated by a neural network from real-world experience, it changes how the game industry produces images. As the first game to truly use DLSS 5, NBA 2K27 stands at the start of that shift.