Nvidia provided more DLSS 5 footage during its keynote at SIGGRAPH 2026 yesterday. We’re getting ever closer to the DLSS 5 release date this fall, and Nvidia has been pretty silent about the project following its initial reveal at GTC in March – until now. The neural rendering visuals faced immediate backlash from gamers, who were quick to label it an “AI filter” that disrupts the art.

During the presentation, Nvidia’s Edward Liu went into further detail about how the technology works under the hood. He says, “DLSS must change the image in a way that it does not change the story” – referring to how DLSS 5’s neural rendering is trained to preserve artistic intent while maintaining a consistent image. Developers may fine-tune the visuals with a set of sliders.

DLSS 5 is designed to preserve artistic intent

“I think it looks great. It’s a new level of realism, but looking real here is only half the problem. The other half is staying true to the original content, and that is tricky because all the generative models are probabilistics.”

“We’re going to use the frame the game just rendered. It’s not a prompt, it’s not a reference, it’s not a proxy scene, it’s a render’s own output. And it’s one signal that is actually universally available across all the engines. Unlike a prompt, this is actually a very information-dense and pixel-aligned view of the current shot… so we took the render frame and make it more realistic.”

Edward Liu, Director of Applied Deep Learning Reserarch at Nvidia

During the presentation, Liu explained three “fundamental and tough research challenges” of developing DLSS 5 and ensuring its visual makeover stays true to what is originally rendered by the game engine. “We draw a hard line and train the model in a way to respect intent,” says Liu, using aspects such as albedos, surface normals, and lighting information to restrain and guide the model.

• Challenge 1 – Preserving Artistic Intent
• Challenge 2 – Frame By Frame Streaming
• Challenge 3 – Real Time 4K

Nvidia displayed several slides showcasing the DLSS 5 developer tools, which provide game devs with access to global controls such as ‘Structure Intensity’ and ‘Tone Intensity’ with a slider from 0-1. There’s also a ‘Developer Masking’ feature which allows artists to manipulate objects individually – automatic masking identifies models or characters for devs to manually tinker with.

As such, developers can hand-pick what they want to alter with DLSS 5 – and by how much. This likely comes as a relief for gamers quick to judge the ‘AI filter’ altering how characters look. Resident Evil Requeim’s Grace Ashcroft was a leading example in Nvidia’s original demonstration earlier this year. With these tools, devs could simply choose to ignore DLSS 5 for character models.

Three models will be shipping with DLSS – Model A, Model B, and Model C – trained with different parameters and with a different interpretation of a rendered scene/frame. Developers can mix and match which model is used throughout the game.

Overall, it’s nice to see more behind-the-scenes on DLSS 5 ahead of launch. It certainly seems that Nvidia aims to silence the backlash by showcasing its versatility. DLSS 5 is far from a post-processed filter, and it gives artists control over what is actually shown in the final image. One thing we’re waiting for is more on its performance hit – the original March preview required two RTX 5090s, but it is being optimized to run on a single GPU; the new neural rendering feature will be exclusive to the RTX 50 series.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.