Nvidia's much-discussed DLSS 5 is out, and this time it's been explained way better

Nvidia spent a couple of months keeping a little more quiet about DLSS 5 after unveiling it earlier this year, and it's perhaps learned a valuable lesson about how it needs to package its AI-enhanced tools in the future.

Now, it's breaking cover to confirm that DLSS 5 will launch on 3 September, and that it's going to be in NBA 2K27 at launch as the first big game to arrive with the tech already in use. Crucially, the lengthy blog post and set of videos and sliders to exemplify what the tech is all about is much clearer this time around.

It also emphasises that the developers are really in the driving seat in terms of the degree to which they use DLSS 5 (if at all), and some of the examples that filter through are much more compelling than those given last time around.

While there are still some faces that seem to get a little, shall we say, glamourised by the tech, there are a heap of examples where it simply results in vastly more realistic lighting and details.

DLSS 5 | Introducing 3D-Guided Neural Rendering - YouTube

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One crucial clarification, for example, explains that developers will be able to tell the model to operate only on environments, rather than characters, or the reverse (or both). This means you could benefit from the increased detail and lighting realism of your carefully-designed maps, without being required to allow for similarly different-looking characters.

Devs can even do this on a per-object basis, so it really could just mean that certain important props, characters or items are highlighted for special treatment, which you'd assume would reduce the performance cost of the tech, too.

As someone who was pretty definitively unimpressed by the reveal back in March, it's fair to say that Nvidia's delivery this time around is in a completely different ballpark in terms of clarity and detail. That makes all the difference, and it might learn a lesson about how to tell people about its new options in the future.

That said, it'll be most fascinating to watch how DLSS 5 rolls out in the coming months, and how developers implement it. One of the most persuasive takes I've seen came from the creative director behind the masterful Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, who explained that the tech would let them render NPCs in armour vastly more accurately.

It's curious that he's saying this model differs from what Nvidia presented, something I can't really vouch for, but the fact that his conclusion ends up being so positive is pretty interesting and instructive. As he says, though, it's also deeply interesting that the tech might be so expensive in performance terms, at a time when the latest Nvidia cards are out of many people's budgets.

I'm lucky enough to have a rig with an RTX 5070 Ti in it, so I'll look forward to seeing what DLSS 5 can do when I get my hands on a game that's implemented it properly, but until then you might want to read Nvidia's breakdown of the tech in detail; it's fascinating stuff.