DLSS 5 explained, with Linus Tech Tips

0:02Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of deep learning supersampling. I'm David Imel. NVIDIA's DLSS 5 technology was released on September 3rd, and it's notably different from the ways it's been doing supersampling in the past. Supersampling is a technology used to boost video game fidelity and performance on existing hardware. There's been a lot of pushback from some people in the gaming community and even the developer community about this, So I wanted to bring on Linus Sebastian and David Gautier from Linus Tech Tips to talk to me about what DLSS5 is and why pretty much everybody is so up in arms about it.

0:37But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026. Beats have announced the new Beats 360 headphones, which are specifically designed for working out. They come with IPX4 water resistance, removable ear cups and replaceable batteries. Senior reviewer Victoria Song says they can get a bit icky after a 40-minute workout, but the ear cups are pretty easy to clean once they get too gross. They don't come cheap, though. At$350, they're competing with headphones from Sony and the original Sonos Ace. Elsewhere in the exercise world, Peloton have announced a cheaper foldable treadmill called the TreadFlex.

1:17It's still pretty expensive at$2 ,195, but this time it can save 50 % of the floor space when it's folded up. Peloton have also announced Whoop integration, so if you're a loyal Fitness Fan subscriber, you can get much more accurate treadmill readings. Next, Microsoft has announced 268 layoffs as part of its 3 ,200 layoffs it has planned for this year. As part of the reorg, Halo development is moving under Activision, and Obsidian is moving under Bethesda to focus on the Fallout games. Not even Minesweeper and Solitaire are safe. Those games are moving to Candy Crush developer King. And finally, Apple is opening a live music venue in London next week called the Apple Music Hall.

1:59It was built under the company's European headquarters and has room for 600 audience members. But if you can't make it to London, I'm sure you're going to be able to visit this thing in the Vision Pro pretty soon. A flight to London would still probably be cheaper, though. You can read more at TheVerge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026.

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3:42Nilay Patel:Now it's your turn. Try Atio for free by going to atio.com slash verge. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash Verge. All right, Linus Sebastian, David Gautier, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks for having us. This is really exciting. Yeah, I'm super glad to have you guys here. It's been a while since I've seen you, so it's nice to see you, first of all. But we really wanted to bring you in because there's this new thing that just dropped, Nvidia DLSS 5. Super sampling, sort of, right? Yeah, we've lost track a little bit of what the SS in DLSS stands for. I think that's pretty clear. Yeah, we've had DLSS before, which was sort of a way to upscale content when you had a lower tiered GPU.

4:32Can you explain what DLSS 5 is and why it's different from what we've had before? Yeah, well, DLSS in the past meant we've got this lower resolution that we're rendering at internally. And then we're using, you know, some form of machine learning to take that and extrapolate, you know, kind of like way back in the day when you would have like a low resolution image that you took on your one megapixel digital camera, and you'd kind of try to stretch it out and then, you know, sharpen it and fill in the missing information it was like that but powered by machine learning so towards the end of it with dlss 4.5 actually getting pretty good um dlss 5 takes that and instead of just you know adding pixels that weren't there it seems to be adding elements of the scene that weren't there or adding colors that weren't there.

5:33And NVIDIA has strongly hinted, not just hinted, they have said outright that this is where they believe the future of rendering is going because they just basically have been saying that Moore's law, where we can just have more and more transistors and bigger and bigger chips that can traditionally render better and better every year is completely dead. That's NVIDIA's kind of stance on that. And then this concept of neural rendering is the future where we take a relatively low fidelity scene and then we use our best guesses based on a trained AI model as to what exactly the intent was to have there.

6:15One of the demos of this technology that really stood out to me, this was years ago. They did this demo where they had this almost MS Paint-like drawing application. Do you guys remember this? Oh, yes. They drew this mountain scene, and then just a blue line squiggle through it, and then they just press the button, and it goes, wow, beautiful mountains and a river. And that seems to have, for longer than I think most people outside the company have realized, that seems to have been NVIDIA's vision. And it seems like, earnestly, they believe that this will be a benefit to developers and gamers.

6:54So as a developer, I could just say barrel and then a beautifully rendered barrel would just get crapped out onto my screen that looks photorealistic, essentially, because I don't actually have to render all those pixels and I can do it so cheaply. Now, David, our David, David Gauthier, actually spent a lot more time with DLSS 5 than I did on games that NVIDIA didn't authorize. And it seems like, at least at this stage, we're falling well short of, you know, magic barrel and, oh, here's a leather jacket. And it just suddenly is trained on what a leather jacket is supposed to look like and is miraculously photorealistic.

7:39So I think it's a little disingenuous for people to say, well, it's just an Instagram filter. But, you know, David, you looked at it across a much wider range of games than I did. Where does it sit on that spectrum of magic neural rendering to Instagram filter in your mind? I think its biggest limitation is the fact that it has to be rendered 60 times at least a second. And so that tiny little window to be able to generate the uplift of AI really limits the amount of creativity that the AI can do. Even NVIDIA is trying to distance it in terms of messaging from being generative AI. But as it is right now, they've trained the program to be able to separate objects and you can control each object individually.

8:28You can apply different amounts of the, you know, quote unquote, filter to those objects. And it doesn't transform them in the sense that it can take a crude drawing of a barrel and make it work. It needs a pretty good input. They said the better input in, the better output out. And I noticed that in my testing that if I gave it higher fidelity graphics, it looks significantly better after the AI. That being said, it still has that AI look. And if you have that immediate disgust reaction to AI generated content, this won't change your mind about it. I have so many questions here because you mentioned you've tried this on a bunch of different games.

9:06I watched your guys' video that you put out where you tested on Expedition 33. You tested on a Final Fantasy game and it did seem to upskill the textures to an extent. Or maybe it was like a de-haze filter a little bit. You know, the haze kind of went away. The contrast went up. Does that not take a lot of creative power away from the artists and the developers and the way that they want these characters to look? Because to your point in your video, you showed one character that was supposed to be kind of an anime style character and they ended up just looking like a real person. So where do you think the line is there?

9:42Right now, you know, the conversation around artist intent is really complicated because the DLLs that we were using were leaked. only NBA 2K27 has actually been tuned with all the different sliders that NVIDIA makes available to developers to decide how they want to apply these effects. So every other game that we looked at was a combination of our best guesses for what might look pretty okay and what, whoops, definitely doesn't. And also us kind of goofing around with them to see what our range of best case scenario and worst case scenario might actually look like here i think it's going to be a really contentious issue even with game developers i think some of them see it as the ai slot filter you turn it on everything sucks um and then others are coming to the defense the creative director of kingdom come deliverance 2 uh went on twitter or x um to defend it and said like this is what we wanted our game to look like we just didn't have the technology or the resources is to make it happen and so i think excuse me sorry well they made that a lot worse so uh don't get us started on star wars don't do it uh but i think right now and i think in the immediate future this will only be good in games that are chasing photorealism and anything where there's a stylized look uh doesn't work even games that are kind of halfway there like expedition 33 where it's realistic proportion characters, but there's sort of a dream-like quality to it.

11:19It sort of takes away from that. And another thing I noticed is that whatever AI, or whatever data set they're training it on, is sort of sucking the color out of it in the same way that lazy color correction in film is doing. And so I think they're using a kind of generalized data set that is like, oh, that's what film is doing. It's trying to make it look more like an actual movie without doing the detail work to make it actually pop. And I just want to jump in and say, I don't want my games to look like movies. Right. Yeah. Games should look like games and movies should look like movies, except when the movie is, you know, the Super Mario World movie or when a game is really like committed to, you know, that gritty, realistic, filmic look.

12:04and it's a very, you know, cinematic art style and very story-driven, like, then, okay, yeah, fine, you know, make my game look like a movie. But these are two different mediums and we shouldn't just go, okay, well, yeah, they're the same now, right? Yeah. Now, since this is only an NVIDIA technology, are we going to enter a world where AMD gamers have a different graphical experience than NVIDIA gamers? Okay, now you're getting into, like, the big questions and okay okay immediately no because the performance hit of this is already pretty catastrophic on a 50 90 and i i made an offhand remark i think in the video that it was going to be i think i said five years or something like that before anyone's like really using this and someone responded to me they go what are you talking about i'm using it today and i love it i I have a 5090.

13:01I'm like, how many people have a 5090? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, because this is not, this is not a real mainstream technology until, you know, the last generation's 60 series card can run it in some kind of meaningful way. And that will not happen until we are a couple launches in and NVIDIA launches a new GPU series like every two years now. So that was kind of what I was trying to say there is that right now, you know, this is very similar to, I would say, the early days of the more traditional DLSS that was more about just filling in the missing pixels in that we've got hardware that is, even at the very high end of what's available, struggling to really utilize the feature as it is.

13:52and the features implementation is still in in my opinion pretty early stages in terms of how useful it is because it's not it's not creating barrels out of nothing that that perfectly integrate into the rest of the scene right it's just applying lipstick right you know it's and and to be clear it's not do it's not applying that lipstick in in a universally um you know unpleasant way. Like I actually found that particularly with background characters, where there was less time and attention that could be spent on that. I actually was pretty pleased with the results sometimes. Like I loved the extra little, you know, shot of immersion that I got walking around in the street populated by NPCs in cyberpunk um and that's something that you know i i hate to i hate to validate the well this was our intent we just didn't have time to spend on it argument because i think the flip side of that argument is well um you know that's a shortcut right like we're we're giving game developers the tools to be lazy i i i don't i don't buy that but you know the the barrel one i think you could you could kind of make an argument for, you know, well, yeah, maybe you should draw a barrel.

15:19Like, isn't this art? Yeah. Right? But I think, you know, every game ever that I can think of that has a main character has struggled a little bit from the main character looking a little bit out of place next to all the NPCs that are procedurally generated or that are drawn, but obviously they can't spend as long. or you're in a world where there's like half a dozen different models for your non-playable characters, right? Like there's always a compromise there. And if I could have AI fill in the gaps, you know what? I find that to be an immersion increasing experience. It's just that we don't have the hardware to run it today and it's more subtle today than I think it's going to need to be to really change my gaming experience enough to justify the performance hit.

16:16And it's a big one. Yeah. Another aspect of the future of DLSS 5 will be how they continue to optimize it. Since the spring, they say that it's five times more performant. When they first showed the demos at that time, it required two 5090s to make it work. Oh my gosh. We should just be grateful. We should be grateful. It doesn't require two 5090s. SLI is coming back. Yeah, exactly. Bring it back. Who knows when we're getting the next generation of graphics cards, but hopefully NVIDIA will continue to optimize, make it faster. One thing that I noticed is that they are definitely paying attention to the backlash that's been happening.

16:51Not only did they encourage people to post videos earlier to kind of, I think, balance out sort of the fan outcry of DLSS 5. They have now said that they are going to work on a 4 ,000 series version of DLSS 5. and so we know that they're paying attention we know that they are trying to mitigate the the pr disaster that it's become uh and hopefully that means for gamers that want to use it they won't have to buy uh 70 90s or whatever it will be in three four years right i mean i don't have much hope for that the 40 series can run it but this is the this is the lightest version of DLSS 5 that there will likely ever be.

17:38I shouldn't say that. This isn't the lightest version, but it feels like we're going to be going down a path where just like the Transformer model and the way that that just doesn't run as well on older series cards, it has a bigger performance hit. I think what we're going to see is we're going to see DLSS 5 sort of versions that are tuned for the different generations of cards. And a 40 series just doesn't have the same neural capabilities as a 50 series, and neither is going to be anywhere near what we're going to see in the future. So yeah, you might have the feature, but I just don't think it's realistic that you're going to be running, maybe walking, but I don't think you're going to be running the future variants of this that are going to really meaningfully impact the gaming experience.

18:39But I mean, it's a funny thing that we're even having this conversation because when I first got into this hobby, oh, I don't know, almost 25 years ago now, it was like, well, yeah. Your old card doesn't support DirectX 9C, so you don't have the new feature. And everyone was like, okay, I guess I'll need a new one. But then again, back then you could get a new card for$150. That was reasonably performant. So people's mentality around how long they want to keep their cards and have access to all the new features has totally changed. But so has the cost structure of upgrading. It's gotten insane.

19:22I'm just going to jump over on Newegg because the last time I was looking at any of this, 50 series was going up in price again. Right. Because local AI and things like that. I think they're 50 oh smokes am I on the US site? 50 80s are like $15,$1600 now. Oh my god. That's how much you can build an entire computer for. And less than that.

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24:22There also seems to be a little bit of mixed messaging, I think, because DLSS previously, and I remember people are always mad, obviously. I remember a previous version of DLSS when it was generating frames and people were like, so my GPU is only truly generating a certain amount of frames like, oh, and now it's doing the opposite, right? It's generating this upscaled version, but it has to use more power instead. So the messaging from NVIDIA seems a little confusing as well. It's like super sampling, yes, but 50 % performance cost seems like a lot. Even on a 5090, does a 50 % performance cost seem like it's taking a game from like fairly playable to not very playable?

25:05Well, that really depends. And I think to your point, NVIDIA is getting a little bit confused in their messaging here because they want to sell you high frame rate, right? They want to sell you high resolution. They want to sell you ray traced lighting. and they want to sell you, you know, AI-assisted, machine learning-assisted enhancement of objects on the screen. Good luck enabling all of that at the same time. Yeah. Right? Pick two. Yeah. I actually disagree. I think NVIDIA knows exactly what it's doing in maybe a malicious way where they know that dollar for dollar, AMD can compete in raw performance where AMD's having struggles in competing is in this feature set and DLSS being better than FSR in general.

26:02And now they're making it that not only is it going to give you a performance uplift, if you want the highest fidelity, you also want DLSS so that it'll balance out and you're so dependent on their feature set and their ecosystem to get the complete gaming experience. So I think it's by design that they've uplifted performance and they're tanking it so that you need the whole ecosystem at once right but what you end up with is something that i think from a console perspective you know like you can you target 30 fps or whatever might be might be okay but from a traditional pc gaming standpoint you look at nvidia's messaging over the last again a lot of the last 20 years um this idea of not turning all the sliders to max this idea of tuning your sliders so yeah in this game i'm going to chase high frame rate because i'm playing competitively or in this other game i'm going to chase fidelity uh in this other game i'm going to chase lighting this idea of uh of not being able to just have the highest end hardware and crank it is i think a new one that a lot of long time pc gamers are going well i thought i I thought I was gaming on PC.

27:14I thought I had a high-end GPU. Why am I compromising? And especially when, you know, we're paying so much money for this high-end hardware, it goes, well, we have to go, is this really, you know, five times better than PlayStation 5? It's better than PlayStation 5, sure, but is it five times better? Six times better? Or, you know, whatever that number works out to, depending on what GPU you're chasing. And it's just, I think it's contributing to people feeling like, well, who cares anyway? Because it's all just unattainable. I think it's really interesting that the DLSS 5 news happened the same week as the big GTA 6 drop.

27:54Which is clearly and publicly non-AI, no-AI generated content. Just really handcrafted, you know, all the money on this planet thrown at this project. and it looks absolutely phenomenal on a base PS5. And it's kind of reinforcing that idea that developers just haven't been optimizing. It's like, they're just trying to be lazy doing this. And it's hard to look at GTA 6 and be like, oh, I want DLSS 5, not what they do in GTA 6. And so the games are out, we'll see. But from my perspective, I'm like, let's go back to just putting time and care into these games. with that said i mean gta 6 is a guaranteed payout at the end right and depending on which estimate you're looking at um is expected to cost anywhere between a billion and three billion dollars to produce so if anything i'm gonna push back on this mr gautier and i'm gonna say i i think when we look at what it costs to produce such a finely tuned insanely well-running oiled machine like gta 6 um it's pretty easy to go oh well i can see why almost nobody else is doing that because almost nobody else has a built-in buyer base that they know they're going to sell billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of this game.

29:26No wonder they don't do it. You are 100 % right. Yeah, it seems that there are exceptions like Expedition 33 where it can look amazing and it comes from a smaller indie-ish studio and everyone's like, wow, every game should look like this. But it seems to me that the direction the industry has gone, most studios have not enough money and not enough time. Well, Expedition took a lot of flack for how well-optimized it was. Oh, how poorly optimized it was. It runs kind of really well in certain windows. Like if you kind of tune your settings like this, you can actually get a pretty darn playable experience on like handheld PCs.

30:07But then as soon as you start to turn things on, like PC gamers are used to doing, it starts to really struggle unless you throw extremely high-end hardware at it. And that's exactly the kind of outrage from the PC community that I was talking about before. They're not used to that. They go, well, I spent a bunch of money. I should be able to turn up all the sliders. I think something that's really changed, though, is how scalable the technology that's being sold to developers is. Like every presentation of Unreal Engine, they're like, this is what the future will be. No, nothing can run this right now.

30:41but we're building this into this version of Unreal so that one day people can crank that slider and they'll see everything. And I feel like we rarely got that before. Crisis. Exactly. Crisis was like the one big example of like, computers can't run this yet, but one day they will be able to fully maximize this and it'll be great. And I think it was exciting when it was a one-off and these days it feels like we're just being trailed along to spend more money in the future. And I think it was exciting back when we would get a new generation of GPUs every year and that new generation would be the same price or cheaper.