DLSS 5 now runs on a single graphics card and has arrived in Hogwarts Legacy

NVIDIA has released DLSS 5 with 3D-Guided Neural Rendering in Hogwarts Legacy. In this technology, a neural network paints in lighting and material detail on top of an already rendered image. It is a separate feature; it does not replace the upscaling and frame generation from earlier DLSS versions. It can be enabled by owners of GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards and laptops, RTX Spark PCs and GeForce NOW Ultimate subscribers. Next up are War Thunder (mid-November) and Where Winds Meet (23 November).

The technology itself has changed too. When NVIDIA first showed DLSS 5 in March, it took two GeForce RTX 5090s to run. Now one graphics card is enough, and over seven months the company says it has improved performance tenfold. In Hogwarts Legacy the feature is switched on via the “Neural Rendering” option in the game's settings.

What the neural network does to the frame

DLSS 5 runs as the final stage of the graphics pipeline. It takes the frame's colour and motion vectors as input and outputs more believable light and materials. NVIDIA stresses that the result is deterministic, temporally stable and tied to the game's content: the engine's frame determines what has to stay unchanged, while the artist decides what may change. The Omniverse documentation lists a wider set of inputs: image, depth, motion vectors and the temporal history of frames.

For the player it all comes down to a single on/off toggle. Tuning the look is entirely up to developers, and this is where technical artists get work to do.

What a studio can control

Through the DLSS 5 SDK a studio chooses between several models with different weights that produce different results. A model can be assigned to the whole game or combined per scene: for example, one for dense vegetation in open locations, another for dramatic interiors, and separate ones for gameplay and cutscenes.

• Structure Intensity and Tone Intensity. The first slider controls high-frequency detail: shading in crevices (ambient occlusion), reflections, subsurface scattering. The second handles low-frequency detail: overall lighting and colour response. At zero Tone Intensity, colours stay exactly as they are in the rendered frame.
• Semantic AI masking. The model recognises the objects in a scene by itself, and the developer can boost processing of the environment while holding back characters, or the other way round.
• Engine-level masking. The artist picks out individual props or groups of assets and tunes neural lighting for those alone.

“Engine-level masking lets artists isolate specific props or asset groups, such as glassware, water droplets or foliage, and apply their own neural lighting settings to individual elements of the game without affecting their surroundings.”

That is how NVIDIA describes this capability. For an art director it is a way to, say, refine the light on glass or foliage without touching the rest of the scene and the characters.

The model has become lighter and faster

All three games ship with the October 2026 version of the Neural Rendering model, which NVIDIA released last month for RTX 50 Series and RTX Spark systems. Compared with the previous version it is:

• twice as fast;
• 24% smaller, around 118 million parameters;
• 20% lighter on video memory at 4K.

NVIDIA also gives frame rate figures, but in combination with other technologies. Hogwarts Legacy at maximum settings in 4K with ray tracing, DLSS 5, 6X Multi Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction and Reflex delivers up to 300 fps on an RTX 5090; at 2560×1440, according to NVIDIA, up to 370 fps. With this update the game supports the full set of DLSS technologies. The company does not break out neural rendering's own contribution to these numbers.

War Thunder and Where Winds Meet

In War Thunder, DLSS 5 will arrive with the big Eagle's Shadow update along with dozens of new aircraft, ships and tanks. In NVIDIA's ground battle test the game runs at up to 400 fps in 4K and up to 550 fps at 2560×1440 on the Ultra preset with path tracing. On a laptop RTX 5090 at 2560×1440 on the High preset with path tracing, up to 300 fps is shown, and on RTX 50 Series laptops at 1920×1080, up to 490 fps.

War Thunder's visual identity is built on authentic vehicles. In an interview with NVIDIA, Gaijin Entertainment spells out the requirement: any gain in realism must preserve the markings, materials and look of the machines that players recognise. War Thunder previously received DLSS 4.5 with Multi Frame Generation, Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction and DLAA, as well as Reflex, ray tracing and path-traced global illumination.

Where Winds Meet gets DLSS 5 on 23 November. The game has more than 100 million players, its peak concurrent player count on Steam has passed 250,000, and it has over 116,000 Steam reviews. NVIDIA is releasing the Game Ready driver with DLSS 5 support for these games on 4 November through the NVIDIA app. The company promises new DLSS 5 projects in the coming weeks and months.

What this means for artists and tech artists

DLSS 5 hands part of the frame's final look over to a neural network, which is why the set of masks and sliders matters more here than in earlier DLSS generations. The Omniverse documentation warns outright: the result generates appearance detail and cannot be treated as a physically accurate reference. For studios that calibrate light and materials against reference, this probably means an extra step: checking whether the neural network is pulling the image away from the intended look, and masking problem assets.

The other side is the audience. The technology is only available on RTX 50 Series, RTX Spark and in GeForce NOW Ultimate, so owners of other cards will see the original render. The base image still has to stand on its own, and DLSS 5 remains an add-on for part of the audience.

There is also the question of access to the tool. In Omniverse the feature is still experimental: Windows only, Blackwell-generation GPUs only, driver 615.64 or newer and Real-Time Path-Tracing mode only. On the NVIDIA developer forum, the developer of their own SMILE 2.0 engine wrote in September that they had found a mention of neural rendering in the public Streamline 2.14.1 package, but neither an implementation nor an integration guide. Judging by the announcements, DLSS 5 is so far showing up in games NVIDIA works on together with the studios; for Unreal Engine 5 projects the company says there will be a plugin. Small studios on in-house engines will probably have to wait for more open access to the SDK.

Why was DLSS 5 squeezed down to a single graphics card in seven months? What worked harder: pressure from competitors, model optimisation, or haste to sell RTX 50?