The 12 Most Ridiculous DLSS 5 Videos — and Why Half of Them Are Praise

On August 28, 2026, somebody noticed that NBA 2K27's early-access build shipped with a file it had no business shipping with: nvngx_dlssnr.dll, the DLSS 5 Neural Rendering runtime, version 310.8.0.0. Within hours, the RenoDX modding Discord had pulled it out and started force-feeding it into games NVIDIA never intended to demo. By the weekend, X was drowning in clips.

The results are the funniest thing to happen to PC gaming this year, and also — genuinely — the clearest look anyone outside NVIDIA has had at what 3D-guided neural rendering does when nobody is supervising it. (For the architecture underneath, our sister site explainx.ai has the deep dive: DLSS 5 — neural rendering or an AI slop filter?.)

bunpav's take: these videos are real, they are not the shipping product, and — the part almost every repost gets wrong — most of them are compliments. The loudest clips in this cycle are people saying DLSS 5 looks incredible. Where the praise stops is the interesting part, and it stops in exactly one place.

TL;DR — what people are actually asking

What actually leaked, in one paragraph

DLSS 5 is not an upscaler. That is the single most common misread. NVIDIA unveiled it at GTC on March 16, 2026, calling it the company's biggest graphics breakthrough since real-time ray tracing debuted in 2018, and what it does is take the rendered color buffer plus motion vectors and re-derive lighting and materials — skin, hair, cloth, subsurface scattering — through a neural model, anchored to the original geometry. Developers pick from three tuning profiles NVIDIA labels Model A, Model B and Model C, each with a different structural intensity, and in the shipping version they can dial the effect per object so a character's face can be treated differently from their jacket.

The leaked DLL has none of that supervision. It is the raw model, injected globally, at maximum enthusiasm, into games shipped years before it existed.

That is why the clips look like this.

The 12 most ridiculous DLSS 5 videos

A word on "ridiculous," because this batch earns both meanings. The single most-reposted clip in the cycle calls Night City "ridiculously realistic." The second most-reposted is a man watching the tech desecrate Dark Souls 3. Same word, opposite verdicts, and the split is not random — it tracks the kind of game almost perfectly.

One caveat before the list: none of these are controlled A/B tests. They are community captures, compression and all, from an unfinished build with no per-title tuning. Treat them as a stress test of the model's defaults, not a review of any of these games.

Team "this looks incredible"

Worth stating plainly, because the meme coverage buried it: most of the viral DLSS 5 clips are people who are impressed.

1. Cyberpunk 2077 — "starting to look like real life"

Cyberpunk 2077 is starting to look like real life. DLSS 5 + NeoClarity + Path Tracing on an RTX 5090 makes Night City look ridiculously realistic. This is getting out of hand.

Note the stack. This is not DLSS 5 alone — it is DLSS 5 layered on top of a separate clarity mod and full path tracing, on the most expensive consumer GPU NVIDIA sells. It is the best-case demo in the entire cycle, and it is also the least representative of what anyone will actually run.

2. GTA V — Michael, Trevor and Franklin get the treatment

GTA V DLSS 4.5 vs DLSS 5 🤯🔥 Michael, Trevor & Franklin look noticeably more detailed and realistic with improved facial detail, textures and lighting. Tested on my RTX 5060 Ti 16GB

GTA V is the purest test available: a 2013 game with 2013 material authoring and almost no PBR data for the model to respect, so it improvises freely. That it improvises well here is the strongest argument in the mod's favour — there was genuinely no information to preserve.

3. Watch Dogs — the E3 downgrade, undone 14 years later

It only took 14 years, but we finally got the E3 version of Watch Dogs. Thanks, NVIDIA DLSS 5

If you only watch one clip, make it this one. Ubisoft's 2012 E3 demo of Watch Dogs looked dramatically better than the game that shipped in 2014 — wetter streets, richer bounce light, denser atmospherics — and the gap was so stark it put the word "downgrade" into permanent gaming vocabulary.

This is the purest possible case for neural rendering, because the missing quality was never an artistic choice. It was a performance concession, made on 2014 hardware, against art direction that already existed and was already shown publicly. There is no intent here for the model to violate — only a promise to make good on.

4. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced — "looks like a movie"

Holy fuck… when the animations are actually good, DLSS 5 genuinely starts looking like a movie.

The qualifier is the whole insight: "when the animations are actually good." Neural relighting flatters good underlying work and cannot rescue bad work — it is a multiplier on what the engine already produced, not a floor.

Worth noting Black Flag Resynced launched July 9, 2026. This is a two-month-old remaster with freshly authored materials being re-derived anyway.

5. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy — five days old, already modded

Some dude will look you straight in your dude eyes and say "the DLSS one looks worse." 😭 Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy with DLSS 5 is a straight-up cinematic experience.

Asobo shipped Resonance on August 27, 2026 — one day before the leak went public. A studio whose entire technical reputation rests on lighting and crowd rendering got neural-relit by strangers inside a week.

6. 007 First Light — and the rights problem nobody is discussing

If Resonance didn't change your mind, this probably will. 007 First Light with DLSS 5. Those who genuinely don't see the improvement here are just trolling.

Set the confidence aside and look at what is actually being modified. IO Interactive's Bond game shipped May 27, 2026 with a licensed likeness — a contractually approved asset. "The GPU driver softened his jawline" is not a defense that survives a rights review, and it is a concrete reason shipping DLSS 5 exposes per-object controls instead of a global switch.

7. Red Dead Redemption 2 — the defense, in Portuguese

Por que vocês acham que o DLSS 5.0 fica um lixo? Ele simplesmente melhora e aprimora tudo. Olhem esse exemplo no Red Dead Redemption 2

Roughly: why do you all think DLSS 5.0 is trash? It simply improves and enhances everything. A useful reminder that the backlash is loudest in English-language gaming media and is nowhere near universal.

Team "look what you did to it"

8. Dark Souls 3 — the clip that explains the objection

DLSS 5 is running in older games now, so naturally I had to see just how badly it could butcher my beloved Dark Souls III. 💀

This is the best argument against a global toggle, and it has nothing to do with build quality. Dark Souls 3's identity is desaturation and occlusion — Lothric is legible precisely because most of it is crushed into shadow and mud-brown. A model that adds photoreal light transport to skin and metal is not neutral there. It is an opinion, and it is the opposite of FromSoftware's.

No amount of runtime maturity fixes this. It is a disagreement about intent, not a bug.

9. Crimson Desert — genuinely too close to call

I tried DLSS 5 on Crimson Desert … 😱 What do you think?

Even the poster declines to render a verdict. Pearl Abyss shipped Crimson Desert on March 19, 2026 with a proprietary engine already built around cinematic skin and cloth rendering — so this is the fairest fight in the list, and the most honest answer really is "depends what you value."

The one that names the price

10. Control — 86fps to 34fps, and the modder who started it all

This is INSANE. DLSS 5 AI Neural Filters on Control. Modders have gotten DLSS 5 running on Control via group RenoDX. — Mod by Speedlemur. — Running on a 5060. 86->34 FPS — Costs 40% FPS. Characters only for now. via Benchlab

Control was the first game the leaked library ran in, courtesy of modder Speedlemur, and character models only. It is also the only widely-shared clip that puts the bill on screen: 86fps to 34fps on an RTX 5060 — a 40% cost, for an effect applied to characters alone.

Every clip above this one should be read with that number attached.

The clip that settles it

11. Starfield — "with the right game, insane. With the wrong one, slop."

Found the first game I'd actually leave DLSS 5 on: Starfield. With the right game, this tech is actually insane. With the wrong one, it can look like overprocessed AI slop.

This is from the same person who posted the Dark Souls 3 clip, which is exactly why it is the most credible sentence in the entire cycle. It is not a fan take or a hater take. It is someone who ran both and found the actual boundary.

And Starfield is the perfect illustration: Bethesda's NPC faces have been a punchline since 2023, so a model that re-derives subsurface scattering genuinely fixes the waxy-mannequin look Creation Engine is famous for. There was nothing there to protect.

The one that broke containment

12. Roblox — "it's......... 'beautiful'"

I added DLSS 5 to Roblox... it's......... "beautiful" (more videos in replies)

Posted at 4:09 AM on September 2, 2026 by game developer Hoofer — roughly 761,000 views and 37,000 likes within a day, the widest reach of anything in this cycle, and the only clip that escaped graphics-enthusiast circles entirely.

The scare quotes are load-bearing. Roblox's aesthetic is aggressively non-photoreal — blocky avatars, flat shading, primary colors — and running a photoreal skin-and-materials prior over it produces something the model was never asked to reconcile. It is the Dark Souls 3 problem taken to its logical extreme, which is exactly why it is funny.

It also raises the least-discussed risk on this list. The fastest-growing category of game content is made by people who are not lighting artists — Roblox creators, jam developers, prompt-to-game builders. A shared photoreal prior genuinely helps their under-lit scenes. Apply it to a million user creations and they all converge on one look — and aesthetic variety is the entire product on a UGC platform.

Why the split falls exactly where it does

Rank any of the twelve clips by one question: is the lighting under-authored by accident, or on purpose?

• By accident — GTA V's 2013 materials, Starfield's waxy skin, an old DirectX game nobody will remaster. The model adds information nobody had time to author. Everyone in "Team incredible" is looking at this case.
• On purpose — Dark Souls 3's crushed blacks, a deliberately unglamorous character, a stylised palette. The model reads withheld detail as missing detail and helpfully supplies it. This is the Dark Souls clip, and it is not fixable by a better build.

The DLSS 5 network was trained toward photoreal skin: soft subsurface scattering, even albedo, plausible specular falloff. Handed a low-information input, it fills the gap with that prior. Game art is full of information that is intentionally low-fidelity — and the model cannot tell "missing" from "withheld."

That is the entire argument, and it is why the shipping version's per-object controls matter more than any benchmark. The flip side — the jobs where a learned lighting prior genuinely earns its cost — is broken down in Top 10 neural rendering use cases beyond DLSS 5's beauty filter.

It is also not hypothetical. It is the exact thing that blew up at the reveal.

The Resident Evil moment that started the backlash

NVIDIA's own GTC demo picked Grace Ashcroft from Resident Evil Requiem as the hero comparison — and players immediately clocked that the DLSS 5 version looked like she had been made up for the occasion. The narrative objection was sharper than the technical one: Grace is, at that point in the game, on her way to investigate her mother's death. She is not wearing makeup, and the model gave her some.

Capcom's response was quietly devastating. Requiem producer Masato Kumazawa said the reaction demonstrated that players liked Capcom's original character design — turning NVIDIA's showcase into free validation for the art team it had just overwritten.

What NVIDIA says

Jensen Huang was asked about the "AI slop" framing directly by Tom's Hardware editor-in-chief Paul Alcorn. His answer:

Well, first of all, they're completely wrong.

Huang's argument is that neural rendering is "very different than generative AI" — that it "enhances and adds generative capability" without changing artistic control, because the geometry, animation and scene composition are all still authored. The pixels get relit; nothing gets invented.

That distinction is real and it is also doing a lot of work. The leaked clips are the counter-argument in video form: when the tuning pass is missing, "relighting" and "restyling" are the same operation. NVIDIA's own fix — per-object structure and tone controls in the shipping build — is a tacit admission that the default is too strong.

The performance number nobody puts in the headline

Modders running the leaked library report brutal losses — the Control mod measured 86fps down to 34fps on an RTX 5060, a 40% hit for character models alone, and a Cyberpunk 2077 test on an RTX 5070 fell from roughly 138fps to 68fps. That will improve; it is an untuned build with no developer integration and NVIDIA says the model got roughly 5x faster in six months between GTC and its SIGGRAPH 2026 update.

But look closely at NVIDIA's own launch benchmarks for NBA 2K27:

Those are enormous numbers, and they are measured with 6x multi frame generation plus DLSS Super Resolution on Quality. The neural rendering pass is expensive enough that it ships stacked on top of the most aggressive frame generation NVIDIA has ever offered. That is the trade: photoreal relighting, paid for in generated frames.

So what actually ships on September 3?

DLSS 5 launches September 3, 2026, and the shipping picture is a lot narrower than the discourse:

• One confirmed day-one game: NBA 2K27.
• RTX 50 series only — desktop and laptop, plus GeForce NOW. RTX 40 and older are not supported at launch.
• Per-object artist controls, which is precisely what the leaked build lacks.
• NBA 2K27 is arguably the ideal first case: real-world athlete scans, controlled arena lighting, faces the model was likely trained toward. NVIDIA describes it preserving scanned facial geometry while rendering "light naturally passing through player ears, natural lighting of skin, and how light catches hair."

A basketball sim is a very different problem from Lothric.

What you should do

1. Enjoy the clips, don't cite them as DLSS 5's quality — in either direction. The gushing ones and the dunks are both an untuned build injected into games with zero developer integration. That is a good stress test and a bad review.
2. Don't chase the leaked DLL. It came out of a pre-release build, it costs up to half your frame rate, and injecting unsigned DLLs into online games is how anti-cheat bans happen. Resonance and Black Flag Resynced are new enough to still be patching.
3. Check your GPU before you plan anything. No RTX 50 series card means no DLSS 5 on September 3, full stop. GeForce NOW is the only way around it right now.
4. Judge it on NBA 2K27 first, then wait for a game with art direction to defend. The interesting test is not whether it flatters an athlete scan. It is what it does to a stylised game once a developer has actually tuned the per-object controls.
5. Watch what developers say, not what the driver does. Capcom already used the reveal to argue its original design won. Expect more studios to treat DLSS 5 support as an art-direction decision rather than a checkbox.

The honest summary: the ridiculous DLSS 5 videos are showing you a real technology with its safety rails removed — and the fact that most of them are compliments is the part the outrage cycle keeps dropping. The shipping version will look better and cost less. It will also still be a model with an opinion about what human skin should look like — and the last two weeks were a very loud preview of what happens when that opinion disagrees with the art team's.

Related reading

• Spider-Man 2 Brand New Day Patch Adds Free Suits, PSSR 2.0, and Power Saver — the console side of the same upscaling arms race.

• EA Goes Private in $55B Saudi PIF Deal — Then Its Strategy Chief Lays Out the AI Plan — where publisher-level AI ambitions are heading.

• Notch Said 'Reject AI' on July 14. By July 21 He Was Ready to Try Vibe Coding. — the developer-side version of this argument.

• Procedural Placeholder Assets vs AI-Generated 3D: When Each One Wins — when a model's guess is good enough, and when it isn't.

• The Witcher 3 Remastered Trailer Explained — Free Upgrade September 29, Songs of the Past 2027 — another 2026 visual overhaul with an art team attached.

• Claude of Duty: Matt Shumer's AI-Built Three.js FPS With Zero Art Assets — the far end of "let the model draw it." AI coverage on explainx.ai:

• Top 10 Neural Rendering Use Cases Beyond DLSS 5's Beauty Filter — where the tech actually earns its cost, and where it doesn't.

• NVIDIA DLSS 5: Neural Rendering or an AI Slop Filter? — the SIGGRAPH architecture deep dive and the artist-control argument.

• The Slopocalypse — what "AI slop" means in 2026 — where the phrase being thrown at DLSS 5 came from.

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer — the AI-VFX debate — the same fight, in film marketing.

• GeForce NOW cloud gaming — the complete guide — the other way to get DLSS 5 without an RTX 50 card.

Primary sources:

• NVIDIA GeForce news hub — NVIDIA's official DLSS 5 announcements and benchmarks.
• RenoDX on GitHub — the modding project at the center of the leak.

Accurate as of September 2, 2026. DLSS 5 ships September 3 and the leaked library is an unfinished pre-release build — expect visual quality, performance cost and supported-game lists to change quickly. Embedded clips are community captures hosted on X and reflect their authors' setups, not the shipping product.