DLSS 5 gets toned down for its Hogwarts Legacy debut next month

is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.

When Nvidia originally showed off DLSS 5 earlier this year, the technology immediately got branded as gen AI for video games. To gamers, Nvidia had lost the plot. I personally couldn’t get over how faces were transformed using DLSS 5. The 15-year-old student from Hogwarts Legacy suddenly looked much older, and Grace from Resident Evil Requiem looked yassified.

Now more than six months later, DLSS 5 is about to debut properly in Hogwarts Legacy, and it looks like it has been seriously toned down. Nvidia published new comparison screenshots today, where the changes to faces are as subtle as they are in NBA 2K27. Teenagers no longer look like middle-aged men, and even the environmental changes look more subtle.

Nvidia has always maintained that developers have “detailed artistic control” over DLSS 5, and ultimately make the choice on how to implement the technology in their own games. DLSS 5 will now appear in Hogwarts Legacy on November 5th, and it’s also coming to Where Winds Meet late next month.

Nvidia is also improving the performance hit of DLSS 5 with an October update to the neural rendering system that should make it twice as fast on RTX 50-series GPUs and the upcoming RTX Spark laptops. “The DLSS 5 October update shrinks the footprint by 24 percent to roughly 118 million parameters while reducing 4K VRAM usage by 20 percent,” says Nvidia’s Andrew Burnes. This new DLSS 5 model will debut first in NBA 2K27 on October 16th and “will ship by default with future DLSS 5 games.”

Alongside the DLSS 5 updates, Nvidia has also shipped a new Nvidia app beta update that includes a faster performance mode for Frame Generation on RTX 40- and 50-series GPUs. The updated AI model uses a “faster and lighter algorithm to boost frame rates” for Frame Gen, Multi Frame Gen, and Dynamic Multi Frame Gen. Nvidia says it has “minor trade-offs in image quality,” and that performance mode for Frame Generation should now be up to 35 precent faster.

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