Digital Foundry previews Nvidia DLSS 5 neural rendering and performance costs

Digital Foundry’s first look at Nvidia DLSS 5

The technology could be extremely resource-hungry

Nvidia has just unveiled DLSS 5, a neural rendering technology that can dramatically alter image output. Digital Foundry have since released their first impressions, having had the chance to examine the feature more closely. As a reminder, it is expected to reach the market in the autumn.

Digital Foundry describe the technology as monumental, adding that they are not yet fully able to judge what its arrival could mean in the wider context.

How DLSS 5 sits alongside the upscaler and frame generator

The team also backs up earlier expectations that DLSS 5 will arrive as a separate option running in parallel with the upscaler and the frame generator. In other words, it is effectively an additional new toggle-this time, Nvidia says, intended to push game visuals towards a more cinematic standard.

At the same time, the source notes that DLSS 5 is integrated into the frame generator, because with this lighting approach every frame is now generated. However, it remains unclear whether the new function will truly be impossible to enable without also switching on frame generation.

"The artificial intelligence underpinning DLSS understands the semantics of the scenes being processed. It ‘recognises’ and treats elements such as skin, hair, water and metal differently in order to apply photorealistic lighting effects. While some comparisons can be made with generative AI, DLSS 5 delivers consistent, coherent rendering of the game world, its environments and the characters within it. It can work with standard rasterised games, games with ray tracing support and games using path tracing-the higher the model accuracy, the better the final results in terms of material response, lighting and shading."

Performance questions and the GeForce RTX 50 requirement

Digital Foundry also focus on performance. Upscalers and frame generation are designed to increase performance, whereas neural rendering clearly introduces extra compute cost. It is already confirmed that this will run only on GeForce RTX 50 graphics cards, but Nvidia did not demonstrate it on a single RTX 50-rather, it was shown using two RTX 5090 cards.

Specifically, two cards were used because one was dedicated exclusively to processing DLSS 5. Even though the technology is still roughly half a year away from launch, that detail is a worrying signal. It may be that DLSS 5 cannot be enabled without frame generation partly because even an RTX 5090 on its own may not have enough performance headroom. It is also important to bear in mind that the higher the resolution, the greater the performance cost of DLSS 5 will be.