GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Officially, Nvidia’s controversial DLSS 5 AI rendering was supposed to launch this evening with only a single game, only on Nvidia’s latest RTX 50 GPUs, and with developers in full control of their artistic vision.
But unofficially, modders have already ported a leaked version of DLSS 5 to run on just about anything while cranking sliders to the max. Now, Nvidia is changing its plans. DLSS 5 is still launching first on RTX 50 GPUs, but it’s officially coming to older RTX 40-series GPUs as well, Nvidia spokesperson Rajal Maharaj confirms to The Verge.
“Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall. Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series,” reads part of Nvidia’s statement.
What about earlier RTX 30 and RTX 20-series GPUs, which modders successfully targeted as well, assuming you count “not exactly playable framerate and plenty of crashes” as successful? “Right now the focus is of course on 50-series,” Maharaj tells me. “Once we feel like the 50-series is in a good place, we’re going to look at the 40-series.”
Now that the cat’s out of the bag, will gamers get full control over DLSS 5’s sliders the way modders already do? Nvidia says no: “For gamers, DLSS 5 is a simple on-or-off toggle,” the company confirms. “The more granular artistic controls are for developers, including model selection, Structure Intensity, Tone Intensity, automatic masking and custom per-pixel masking.”
That said, the company tells me that developers could pass along certain controls in their own settings menus, like they’ve done with other graphics tech. (Early DLSS Super Resolution was also just an on/off toggle, but today’s games let you pick between varying levels of quality or even an exact percentage, depending on the game.)
Assuming you don’t mind DLSS 5, one of the benefits is that it’s easy to integrate. Developers don’t need to tell DLSS 5 which objects are “silverware” and which are “furniture” because the AI models can automatically recognize and isolate objects in a scene, distinguishing between faces, textiles, foliage, and more to apply different amounts of AI processing. Game engines that already know which video game objects are which can help DLSS 5, too:
For more targeted control, semantic AI masking can automatically recognize scene objects, while engine-level masking allows artists to isolate specific props or groups of assets, such as glassware, water droplets or foliage, and apply custom neural lighting adjustments to those elements.
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