DLSS 5 explained, with Linus Tech Tips

Nvidia's new DLSS 5 (Deep Learning Super Sampling 5) rendering technology uses AI to (theoretically) improve video game graphics. When it was announced, social media declared that it was "yassifying" video game characters, changing faces in a way game developers didn't intend. Linus Tech Tips' own Linus Sebastian and David Gauthier join guest host David Imel to break down the the hype and controversy. Further reading: The Beats 360 are what I’d bring to the gym if I hated earbuds Peloton is back with a ‘cheaper’ folding treadmill Whoop and Peloton integration is finally here Xbox is barely Xbox anymore Apple’s first live music venue is opening beneath its UK headquarters Nvidia’s DLSS 5, explained DLSS 5: Has Nvidia’s AI graphics technology gone too far? DLSS 5 looks like a real-time generative AI filter for video games Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of deep learning supersampling. I'm David Amell. Nvidia's DLSS 5 technology was released on September 3rd, and it's notably different from the ways it's been doing supersampling in the past. Supersampling is a technology used to boost video game fidelity and performance on existing hardware. There's been a lot of pushback from some people in the gaming community and even the developer community about this, so I wanted to bring on Linus Sebastian and David Gauthier from Linus Tech Tips to talk to me about what DLSS 5 is and why pretty much everybody is so up in arms about it. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026.

• 0:46David Pierce?

  Beats have announced the new Beats 360 headphones, which are specifically designed for working out. They come with IPX4 water resistance, removable ear cups, and replaceable batteries. Senior reviewer Victoria Song says they can get a bit icky after a 40-minute workout, but the ear cups are pretty easy to clean once they get too gross. They don't come cheap, though. At $350, they're competing with headphones from Sony and the original Sonos Ace. Elsewhere in the exercise world, Peloton have announced a cheaper, foldable treadmill called the TreadFlex. It's still pretty expensive at $2,195, but this time, it can save 50% of the floor space when it's folded up. Peloton have also announced Whoop integration, so if you're a loyal fitness fan subscriber,

• 1:30David Pierce?

  you can get much more accurate treadmill readings. Next, Microsoft has announced 268 layoffs as part of its 3,200 layoffs it has planned for this year. As part of the reorg, Halo Development is moving under Activision, and Obsidian is moving under Bethesda to focus on the Fallout games. Not even Minesweeper and Solitaire are safe. Those games are moving to Candy Crush developer King. And finally, Apple is opening a live music venue in London next week called the Apple Music Hall. It was built under the company's European headquarters and has room for 600 audience members. But if you can't make it to London, I'm sure you're going to be able to visit this thing in the Vision Pro pretty soon. A flight to London would still probably be cheaper, though. You can read more at theverge.com.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026.

• 2:20Speaker 01

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• 3:40David Pierce?

  All right, Linus Sebastian, David Gautier, welcome to The Vergecast.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Thanks for having us.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  This is really exciting.

• 3:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm super glad to have you guys here. It's been a while since I've seen you, so it's nice to see you, first of all. But we really wanted to bring you in because there's this new thing that just dropped, Nvidia DLSS 5 supersampling, sort of, right?

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've lost track a little bit of what the SS in DLSS stands for. I think that's pretty clear.

• 4:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, we've had DLSS before, which was sort of a way to upscale content when you had a lower-tiered GPU. Can you explain what DLSS 5 is and why it's different from what we've had before?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, DLSS in the past meant we've got this lower resolution that we're rendering at internally, and then we're using, you know, some form of of machine learning to take that and extrapolate, you know, kind of like way back in the day when you would have like a low-resolution image that you took on your 1-megapixel digital camera, and you'd kind of try to stretch it out and then, you know, sharpen it and fill in the missing information. It was like that, but powered by machine learning. So towards the end of it, with DLSS 4.5 actually getting pretty good.

• 5:01David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  DLSS 5 takes that, and instead of just, you know, adding pixels that weren't there, it seems to be adding elements of the scene that weren't there, or adding colors that weren't there.

• 5:17David Pierce?

  Right.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  And Nvidia has strongly hinted, not just hinted, they have said outright that this is where they believe the future of rendering is going, because they just basically have been saying that Moore's Law, where we can just have more and more transistors and bigger and bigger chips that can traditionally render better and better every year, is completely dead. That's Nvidia's kind of stance on that, and that this concept of neural rendering is the future, where we take a relatively low-fidelity scene, and then we use our best guesses based on a trained AI model as to what exactly the intent was to have there.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  One of the demos of this technology that really stood out to me, and this was years ago, they did this demo where they had this almost MS Paint-like drawing application. Do you guys remember this?

• 6:10David Pierce?

  Oh, yes.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  And they drew this like mountain scene, and then just like a blue line squiggle through it. And then they just press the button and it goes...

• 6:19David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Beautiful mountains in a river.

• 6:21David Pierce?

  Right.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  And that seems to have, for longer than I think most people outside the company have realized, that seems to have been Nvidia's vision. So I, as a... And it seems like, earnestly, they believe that this will be a benefit to developers and gamers. So as a developer, I could just say, "Barrel." And then a beautifully rendered barrel would just get crapped out onto my screen that looks photorealistic essentially, because I don't actually have to render all those pixels, and I can do it so cheaply. Now, David, our David, David Gauthier, actually spent a lot more time with DLSS 5 than I did

• 7:04Speaker 03

  on games that Nvidia didn't authorize. And it seems like, at least at this stage, we're falling well short of, you know, "Magic barrel, and oh, here's a leather jacket." And it just suddenly is trained on what a leather jacket is supposed to look like and is miraculously photorealistic. So I think it's a little disingenuous for people to say, "Well, it's just an Instagram filter." But, you know, David, you looked at it across a much wider range of games than I did. Where does it sit on that spectrum of magic neural rendering to Instagram filter, in your mind?

• 7:40Speaker 02

  I think its biggest limitation is the fact that it has to be rendered 60 times at least a second. And so that tiny little window to be able to generate the uplift of AI really limits the amount of, you know, creativity that the AI can do. Even Nvidia is trying to distance it in terms of messaging from being generative AI. But as it is right now, they've trained the program to be able to separate objects, and you can control each object individually. You can apply different amounts of the, you know, quote-unquote "filter" to those objects. And it doesn't transform them in the sense that it can take a crude drawing of a barrel and make it work. It needs a pretty good input.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  They said the better input in, the better output out. And I noticed that in my testing, that if I gave it higher-fidelity graphics, it looks significantly better after the AI. That being said, it still has that AI look. And if you have that immediate disgust reaction to AI-generated content, this won't change your mind about it.

• 8:46David Pierce?

  I have so many questions here, because you mentioned you've tried this on a bunch of different games. I watched your guys' video that you put out where you tested it on Expedition 33. You tested it on a Final Fantasy game. And it did seem to upscale the textures to an extent, or maybe it was like a de-haze filter a little bit? You know, the haze kind of went away, the contrast went up. Does that not take a lot of creative power away from the artists and the developers and the way that they want these characters to look? Because to your point in your video, you showed one character that was supposed to be kind of an anime-style character, and they ended up just looking like a real person? So where do you think the line is there?

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Right now, you know, the conversation around artist intent is really complicated, because the DLSS that we were using were leaked. Only NBA 2K27 has actually been tuned with all the different sliders that Nvidia makes available to developers to decide how they want to apply these effects. So every other game that we looked at was a combination of our best guesses for what might look pretty okay and what whoops, definitely doesn't. And also us kind of goofing around with them to see what our what our range of best-case scenario and worst-case scenario might actually look like here.

• 10:07David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  I think it's going to be a really contentious issue, even with game developers. I think some of them see it as the AI slot filter. You turn it on, everything sucks. And then others are coming to the defense. The creative director of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 went on Twitter or X to defend it and said like, "This is what we wanted our game to look like. We just didn't have the technology or the resources to make it happen."

• 10:31Speaker 03

  George Lucas.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Excuse me, sorry.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Well, they made that a lot worse, so.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Don't get us started on Star Wars, don't do it. But I think right now, and I think in the immediate future, this will only be good in games that are chasing photorealism. And anything where there's a stylized look doesn't work. Even games that are kind of halfway there, like Expedition 33, where it's realistic proportion characters, but there's sort of a dreamlike quality to it. It sort of takes away from that. And another thing I noticed is that whatever AI, or whatever dataset they're training it on, is sort of sucking the color out of it in the same way that lazy color correction in film is doing. And so I think they're using a kind of generalized dataset that is like, oh, that's what film is doing.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  It's trying to make it look more like an actual movie without doing the detail work to make it actually pop.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  And I just want to jump in and say I don't want my games to look like movies.

• 11:33David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Games should look like games and movies should look like movies, except when the movie is, you know, the Super Mario World movie. Or when a game is really like committed to, you know, that gritty, realistic, filmic look. And it's a very, you know, cinematic art style and, and very story driven. Like then, okay, yeah, fine, you know, make my, make my game look like a movie. But, but they, but these are two different mediums and we shouldn't just

• 12:02David Pierce?

  Right.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  go, okay, well, yeah, they're, they're the same now, right?

• 12:05David Pierce?

  Yeah. Now, since this is only an Nvidia technology, are we going to enter a world where AMD gamers have a different graphical experience than Nvidia gamers?

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Okay, now you're getting into like the big questions. And, okay, okay, immediately, no. Because the performance hit of this is already pretty catastrophic on a 5090. And I, I made an offhand remark, I think in the video, that it was going to be, I think I said five years or something like that before anyone's like really using this. And someone responded to me to go, what are you talking about? I'm using it today and I love it. I have a 5090. And I'm like,

• 12:46David Pierce?

  How many people have a 5090?

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, because this is not, this is not a real mainstream technology until, you know, the last generation's 60 series card can run it in some kind of meaningful way. And that will not happen until we are a couple launches in. And Nvidia launches a new GPU series like every two years now. So that was kind of what I was trying to say there is that right now, you know, this is very similar to, I, I would say the early days of the more traditional DLSS that was more about just filling in the missing pixels in that we've got hardware

• 13:29Speaker 03

  that is even at the very high end of what's available, struggling to really utilize the feature as it is. And the feature's implementation is still, in, in my opinion, pretty early stages in terms of how useful it is. Because it's not, it's not creating barrels out of nothing that, that perfectly integrate into the rest of the scene.

• 13:51David Pierce?

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  It's just applying lipstick. You know, it's, and, and to be clear, it's not, it's not applying that lipstick in, in a universally, you know, unpleasant way. Like I actually found that particularly with background characters, where there was less time and attention that could be spent on that.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  I actually was pretty pleased with the results sometimes. Like I, I loved the extra little, you know, shot of immersion that I got walking around in a street populated by NPCs in cyberpunk. And that's something that, you know, I, I hate to, I hate to validate the, well, this was our intent. We just didn't have time to spend on it argument. Because I think the flip side of that argument is, well, um, you know, that's a shortcut, right? Like we're, we're giving game developers the tools to be lazy. I, I, I don't, I don't buy that. But, you know, the, the barrel one, I think you could, you could

• 15:00Speaker 03

  kind of make an argument for, you know, well, yeah, maybe you should draw a barrel, like, isn't this art?

• 15:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Right? But I, I think, you know, every game ever that I can think of that has a main character has struggled a little bit from the main character looking a little bit out of place next to all the NPCs that are procedurally generated or that are drawn. But obviously they can't spend as long. Or, or you're in a world where there's like half a dozen different models for your, your non-playable characters, right? Like there's, there's always a compromise there. And if I could have AI fill in the gaps, you know what? Um, I, I find that to be an immersion increasing experience. It's just that, um, we don't have the hardware to run it today.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  And it's, it's more subtle today than I think it's going to need to be to really change my, my gaming experience enough to justify the performance hit. And it's a big one.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Another aspect of the future of DLSS 5 will be how they continue to optimize it. Since the spring, they say that it's five times more performant. When they first showed the demos at that time, it required two 5090s to make it work.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Well, we should just be grateful. We should be grateful it doesn't require two 5090s. SLI is coming back.

• 16:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Bring it back.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Who knows when we're getting the next generation of graphics cards? But hopefully Nvidia will continue to optimize, make it faster. One thing that I noticed is that they are definitely paying attention to the backlash that's been happening. Not only did they encourage people to post videos earlier to kind of, I think, balance out sort of the fan outcry of DLSS 5. They have now said that they are going to work on a 4000 series version of DLSS 5. And so we know that they're paying attention. We know that they are trying to mitigate the, the PR disaster that it's become. And hopefully that means for gamers that want to use it,

• 17:04Speaker 02

  they won't have to buy 7090s or whatever it will be in three, four years.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, I don't have much hope for that. The 40 series can run it. But this is the, this is the lightest version of DLSS 5 that there will likely ever be. I shouldn't say that this isn't the lightest version. But it feels like we're going to be going down a path where just like the, um, the transformer model and, um, and the way that that just doesn't run as well on older series cards. Uh, it has a bigger performance hit. I think what we're going to see is we're going to see DLSS 5 sort of versions that are tuned for the different generations of cards.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  And a 40 series just doesn't have the same neural capabilities as a 50 series and neither is going to be anywhere near what we're going to see in the future. So yeah, you might like have the feature, but I don't, I, I just don't think it's realistic that you're going to be running, maybe walking, you know? But I don't think you're going to be running the future variants of this that are, that are going to really meaningfully impact the gaming experience. But, I mean, it's a, it's a funny thing that we're even having this conversation. Because when I first got into this hobby, oh, I don't know,

• 18:31Speaker 03

  you know, almost 25 years ago now, it was like, well, yeah. You know, your old card doesn't support DirectX 9C. So you don't have the new feature. And everyone was like, okay, I guess I'll need a new one. But then again, back then you could get a new card for 150 bucks. That was reasonably performant. So, so, so people's mentality around how long they want to keep their cards and have access to all the new features has totally changed. But so has the cost structure of upgrading. It's gotten, it's gotten insane.

• 19:05David Pierce?

  Right.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Like, I'm just going to jump over on Newegg because the last time I was looking at any of this, 50 series was going up in price again.

• 19:14David Pierce?

  Right? Because local AI and things like that.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  I think they're 50, holy smokes, am I on the US site? 5080s are like 15, 1600 dollars now.

• 19:24David Pierce?

  Oh, my God. That's how much you can build an entire computer for. And less than that.

• 19:32Speaker 01

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• 24:10David Pierce?

  There also seems to be a little bit of mixed messaging, I think, because DLSS previously. And I remember people are always mad. Obviously, I remember a previous version of DLSS when it was generating frames and people were like, "So my GPU is only truly generating a certain amount of frames?" Like, ah! And now it's doing the opposite, right? It's generating this upscaled version, but it has to use more power instead. So the messaging from Nvidia seems a little confusing as well. It's like, super sampling, yes, but 50% performance cost seems like a lot. Even on a 50/90, does a 50% performance cost seem like it's taking a game from like fairly playable to not very playable?

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Well, that really depends. And I think to your point, Nvidia is getting a little bit confused in their messaging here because they want to sell you high frame rate, right? They want to sell you high resolution. They want to sell you ray-traced lighting. And they want to sell you, you know, AI-assisted, machine learning-assisted enhancement of objects on the screen. Good luck enabling all of that at the same time.

• 25:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Right? Pick two.

• 25:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  I actually disagree. I think Nvidia knows exactly what it's doing in a, maybe a malicious way where they know that dollar-for-dollar AMD can compete in raw performance. Where AMD's having struggles in competing is in this feature set and DLSS being better than FSR in general. And now they're making it that not only is it going to give you a performance uplift if you want the highest fidelity, you also want DLSS so that it'll balance out. And you're so dependent on their feature set and their ecosystem to get the complete gaming experience. And so I think it's by design that they've uplifted performance and they're tanking it so that you need the whole ecosystem at once.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  Right. But what you end up with is something that I think from a console perspective, you know, like you can, you target 30 FPS or whatever, might be, might be okay. But from a traditional PC gaming standpoint, you look at Nvidia's messaging over the last, again, a lot of the last 20 years.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  This idea of not turning all the sliders to max, this idea of tuning your slider. So yeah, in this game, I'm going to chase high frame rate because I'm playing competitively. Or in this other game, I'm going to chase fidelity. In this other game, I'm going to chase lighting. This idea of not being able to just have the highest-end hardware and crank it is, I think, a new one that a lot of longtime PC gamers are going, well, I thought I, I thought I was gaming on PC. I thought I had a high-end GPU. Why am I compromising? And, and especially when, you know, we're paying so much money for this high-end hardware.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  It goes, well, we have to go, is this really, you know, five times better than PlayStation 5? It's better than PlayStation 5, sure, but is it five times better? Six times better? Or, you know, whatever that number works out to, depending on what GPU you're chasing. And it's just, I think it's contributing to people feeling like, well, who cares anyway? Because it's all just unattainable.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's really interesting that the DLSS 5 news happened the same week as the big GTA 6 drop, which is clearly and publicly non-AI, no AI-generated content. Just really handcrafted, you know, all the money on this planet thrown at this project. And it looks absolutely phenomenal on a base PS5. And it's kind of reinforcing that idea that, you know, developers just haven't been optimizing. It's like, they're just trying to be lazy doing this. And it's hard to look at GTA 6 and be like, oh, I want DLSS 5, not what they do in GTA 6.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  And so the game's not out, we'll see, but from my perspective, I'm like, let's go back to just putting time and care into these games.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  With that said, I mean, GTA 6 is a guaranteed payout at the end. And depending on which estimate you're looking at, is expected to cost anywhere between a billion and $3 billion to produce. So if anything, I'm going to push back on this, Mr. Gauthier, and I'm going to say, I, I think when we look at what it costs to produce such a finely tuned, insanely well-running, boiled machine like GTA 6, it's pretty easy to go, oh, well, I can see why almost nobody else is doing that because almost nobody else has a built-in buyer base

• 29:06Speaker 03

  that they know they're going to sell billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of this game. No wonder they don't do it.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  You are 100% right.

• 29:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, it seems that there are exceptions, like Expedition 33, where it can look amazing and it comes from a smaller indie-ish studio. And everyone's like, wow, every game should look like this. But it seems to me that the direction the industry has gone, most studios have not enough money and not enough time.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Well, Expedition took a lot of flak for how well-optimized it was.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Well, how poorly optimized it was.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  It runs kind of, it runs kind of really well in certain windows. Like if you, if you kind of tune your settings like this, you know, you can actually get a pretty darn playable experience on like handheld PCs. But then as soon as you start to turn things on, like PC gamers are used to doing, it starts to really struggle unless you throw extremely high-end hardware at it. And that's exactly the kind of outrage from the PC community that I was talking about before. They're not used to that. They go, well, I spent a bunch of money, I should be able to turn up all the sliders.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  I think something that's really changed, though, is how scalable the technology that's being sold to developers is. Like every presentation of Unreal Engine, they're like, this is what the future will be. No, nothing can run this right now, but we're building this into this version of Unreal so that one day people can crank that slider and they'll see everything. And I feel like we rarely got that before.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Crisis.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Exactly. Crisis was like the one big example of like, computers can't run this yet, but one day they will be able to fully maximize this and it'll be great. And I think it was exciting when it was a one-off. And these days it feels like we're just being trailed along to spend more money in the future.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  And I think it was exciting back when we would get a new generation of GPUs every year. And that new generation would be the same price or cheaper. Whereas now we're being promised this shiny, high-fidelity rendering future that, you know, people are just looking at and going, well, okay, car or GPU?

• 31:16David Pierce?

  Right. Remember the 970 for $350, you know, before the scandal?

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:22David Pierce?

  All that stuff. Now, I want to, I want to talk a little bit about the way that this is actually working. Because I've seen some people hooking up DLSS 5 filters to like switch to capture cards.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  I've seen someone applying it to their webcam output as well.

• 31:36David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's clearly not filtered. It's like doing these neural rendering things. But do you think the future is like a world where independent people figure out how to do? Because it's, it's been leaked enough, now people can apply it to things. Do you think there's a world where it's not locked to Nvidia and everyone is able to do this kind of technology?

• 31:56Speaker 03

  So, I mean, first things first, Nvidia, it's so funny watching Nvidia take all of the flak for, you know, fake frames and fake resolution and all this kind of stuff. And then you watch the community slowly get their frog selves boiled by these new ideas. And then when, you know, Intel and AMD announce competing features, they kind of go, oh, well, thank goodness, you know, Intel and AMD are catching up to Nvidia. Now they'll be more competitive and will be less likely to be beholden to this, you know, monopoly company that has over 90% of the market share in discrete GPU. And it's like, well, hold on a second. Do you hate these features or do you like these features? Because, boy, do you guys ever buy a lot of Nvidia GPUs?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  And boy, do you ever not buy anyone else's stuff if they don't support the latest Nvidia features? And to AMD and Intel's credit, you know, while they haven't led the charge really on...

• 32:52Speaker 03

  DLSS, because that's Nvidia's technology and they're putting very real R and D budgets behind this, even if you, you know, it's not a fake budget, even if it's giving you fake frames and fake resolution. They are doing a pretty good job of, you know, trying their best to keep up. And I think that now that Nvidia has shown DLSS 5, and even before that, it was very clear that this was the direction they were headed. AMD and Intel will be working on this and we will see these features on other devices. With that said, right? You can't just apply DLSS 5 to your webcam. That is not DLSS 5.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  That is like some elements maybe of how DLSS 5 is working, being, you know, bodged together and applied to an output, but it requires vector data that your webcam simply doesn't have. And, you know, look no further for an illustration of what I'm talking about than old school frame interpolation and, and, and motion prediction on like early smart TVs. I remember we had this partnership back when I was working at the computer store with Samsung and they were really pushing this like in-between frame, I think it was running up to like 900 hertz fake, you know, whatever, whatever it was.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  And they had this scene of like hundreds of birds flying. And that was one of their demo scenes to show off this technology in the store. And the first thing I said when I looked at this, I went, wow, that looks terrible. Because bird wings are not easy to predict. They're easy to predict for, you know, a human being who knows, oh yeah, well, they go all the way this way and then they go all the way that way. But the processor in that smart TV had no idea. So the wings just ended up being this like weird glitchy mess because it didn't know which way they were supposed to be moving and where to put, you know, the, the fake frame that it was inserting in between.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  And so without the vector data that is going to tell DLSS 5 what direction it's going, it's all just going to be, it's going to be wings, right? You're going to end up with weird glitches. So, so on a, on a pretty static image, like on this video podcast recording, it might actually look kind of okay. Yeah. As like, like an AI filter, the same way that any other sort of machine learning driven filter technology can, can work pretty well these days. But unless you were also adding some means of telling it, you know, what direction his head is going and at what speed, it's, it's not going to be able to, to, to guess at, at the things that were, that were occluded in the last frame.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  And it's, it's, it's not going to be DLSS 5. It's just going to be using the DLSS 5 DLSS to apply a bad looking AI filter.

• 35:50David Pierce?

  Do you imagine that Nvidia is going to keep like changing the way that these filters work? Cause I remember when they first announced DLSS 5 a number of months ago, they were getting a lot of flack for Yasifying the, the people that they applied it to and it looked pretty ridiculous. And now the games look a little bit better, the face structures look a little bit better. Do you think that in a way them basically having it only work on like a 5090 on like one game officially is a way for them to have time to optimize the way this works when it eventually trickles down to cheaper graphics cards?

• 36:23Speaker 03

  No doubt. A hundred percent. This is, I hate this line so much because it is the most just Silicon Valley tech bro line and I hate it.

• 36:37David Pierce?

  I hated saying trickle down, so I understand.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  But this is the worst version of DLSS 5 that you'll ever see.

• 36:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. It will get better. And, and you know what? If you had, if you had asked me this same question a year ago, I'd have said, um, you know, I'd have, I'd have done my usual lines, right? Never buy what something will be in the future, right? Which is still true.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  And I have my doubts about, you know, whether this, this type of technology will ever be something that I would want to use, blah, blah, blah, all, all the usual stuff that I said. DLSS 4.5 really was a turning point for me where I looked at it and I went, well, of course I'd turn that on. And I, I didn't, I didn't know if I was sure that we would get there. Or even if I was excited about the possibility of getting there, it wasn't something that I would have been able to recommend to someone to spend their real hard earned money on. Not yet. It was still something that was to me subjective, like DLSS 4 was still subjective. You might like it. You might appreciate it in these certain scenarios. There was always an asterisk.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  With DLSS 4.5, I kind of went, oh, they were right.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  And, and that gives them some credit to me where, where they can now make some claims. And, and I won't be thinking of, you know, the last time that they made a prediction about the future of rendering and they didn't get it right. I'll be thinking about the last time they made that prediction, they made that big bet and they nailed it, which was DLSS 4.5. So maybe that's why, even though this is more of like an object enhancement feature than a resolution enhancement feature, they're branding it DLSS because they're leaning on that credibility that they've built around the DLSS brand.

• 38:31David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. David, what do you think?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  I think that-

• 38:41David Pierce?

  I like that you guys are like disagree. This is good for podcasts.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Don't get us started on Star Wars. They already told you not to do that.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  I think that the DLSS 5 that we're going to have in a year is going to be so markedly different than the one we have now. And we will have a slew of refined titles. Right now we're getting YouTube shorts, we're getting videos of people being like, I turned it on this game, max the settings and it looks real bad. And so everyone's kind of dunking on it, doing this. And I think in the same way that it's gotten harder to identify AI generated content without really concentrating, I think we're going to get used to the way that DLSS looks, it's going to look better and better. And then eventually it'll become more and more normalized. And that's a little bit of a scary prospect for me.

• 39:26David Pierce?

  Amazing, guys. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on, explaining this. It's been a while since I've been in the PC gaming space, so very helpful. Appreciate it.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Our pleasure.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Oh, our pleasure. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having us on.

• 39:39David Pierce?

  Well, that's been it for the Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline, 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]. And to support everything we do here and to get ad-free podcasts, subscribe to The Verge. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchek. See you next time. Rock and roll.

• 40:02Speaker 04

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