NVIDIA unveils DLSS 5 with neural rendering for photoreal lighting and materials
NVIDIA has announced DLSS 5 at GTC 2026, marking a shift in DLSS from a performance-focused feature set toward image generation aimed at visual fidelity. The company says the new version uses a real-time neural rendering model that adds photoreal lighting and material detail to game frames, with support planned for this fall.
According to NVIDIA, DLSS 5 takes color and motion vector data from each frame, then applies an AI model that enhances lighting and material response while staying anchored to the source 3D scene. NVIDIA says the system runs in real time at up to 4K and is designed to keep output deterministic and consistent from frame to frame, which is a key requirement for games.
Source: NVIDIA
The company positions DLSS 5 as a visual pipeline updat e rather than another frame generation step. NVIDIA says the model is trained to understand scene elements such as skin, hair, fabric and lighting conditions, then use that information to improve effects like subsurface scattering, fabric sheen and light interaction on hair. Developers will also get controls for intensity, color grading and masking, while integration continues through the existing NVIDIA Streamline framework used for DLSS and Reflex.
Source: NVIDIA
Support is already lined up from several major publishers and studios, including Bethesda, CAPCOM, Ubisoft, NetEase, Tencent and Warner Bros. Games .
NVIDIA says the first wave of DLSS 5 titles will include
- Starfield,
- Assassin’s Creed Shadows,
- Hogwarts Legacy,
- Resident Evil Requiem,
- Delta Force,
- NARAKA: BLADEPOINT
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
According to Digital Foundry , NVIDIA used TWO RTX 5090 cards to run the demo, however the technology will use one card at launch.
Nvidia actually used two RTX 5090s for its demos: one plays the game, the other exclusively runs the DLSS 5 technology. The use of two GPUs is required right now as DLSS 5 still has a long way to go in terms of optimisation – both in terms of performance and its VRAM footprint. However, DLSS 5 is designed for use on a single GPU and that’s how it will ship later this year. Quite how scalable it is also remains to be seen, but in common with other DLSS technologies, Nvidia tells us that the computational cost scales with resolution.
— Digital Foundry
NVIDIA is yet to confirm which architectures will support DLSS 5.
Source: NVIDIA
