People piggyback on their favorite games with unspectacular results.
Sometimes photorealism (or something close to it) makes a video game look better. Other times, well, you get what that means from NVIDIA’s leaked version of DLSS 5. The unfinished software, taken from an early access PC version of NBA 2K27has been grafted onto various games. The results are…let’s just say, not universally appreciated.
DLSS 5’s neural rendering model takes scaling technology in a new direction. Rather than simply reconstructing a sharper version of the game’s rendered image, it “infuses the pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials,” according to NVIDIA. In practice, the results seem stranger than truly next-gen. It’s as if someone fed a still image from the game into Midjourney and asked them to “make it photorealistic.”
In fairness, the images and videos circulating online are from an unofficial early version of NVIDIA’s upscaling technology. But that caveat aside, let’s laugh at how surreal and off-putting some of these results are.
Kill him… kill him with fire
Take Jesse Faden from Controlone of the first games to get the unofficial DLSS 5 treatment. In the game, she is supposed to be around 28 years old. But after applying some DLSS 5 magic, she suddenly looks middle-aged. You can kind of see how A.I. could get there of the original face. But it still misses the mark, seeming both more real and more fake.
Then we have Skyrim (because no matter the subject, we will always have Skyrim). DLSS 5 makes its lower-poly characters look like a 3D scan of a real person pasted onto a 15-year-old video game character.
Even putting aside how technology can drastically alter faces, there’s the fact that the underlying character models and animations remain intact. This creates a weird shift which only accentuates the eerie effect. The faces can look pretty real – until you see them staring into the distance with strangely stiff movements.
If this all helped control performance, it might be strange but harmless. After all, if a developer wants to implement it and a player likes it, step aside. But that’s not the case, at least with this leaked version. With neural rendering enabled, the control on an RTX 5070 Ti would have dropped from 71fps to 35fps in 4K. If the final version looks weird And kills performance, it’s hard to see this as anything other than NVIDA – now primarily an AI company – losing touch with the gaming audience that propelled it to the top.
DLSS 5 is expected to launch in official form this fall. Once developer-approved versions start rolling out, it will be interesting to see if the intentionally built-in uses of the final technology feel more natural.
