NVIDIA DLSS 5 leaked in advance, Control heroine aged overnight, causing a strange feeling
An unfinished DLSS 5 extracted from the early version of "NBA 2K27" was forced into games such as "Control" and "Skyrim" by players. As a result, the characters' faces were strangely aged and the frame rate was cut in half. The official version is not expected to be officially released until this fall.
Jesse Faden's age in "Control" is set to be about 28 years old. After putting on the outsourced version of DLSS 5, her face suddenly looked more than ten years old. It's not that it becomes ugly, but it's the kind of violation where you can understand why the AI makes the judgment it does, but feel that something is wrong - it's more real and fake at the same time.
This leaked DLSS 5 is not an official release from NVIDIA, but an unfinished build dug out by players from the PC installation files of the early access version of "NBA 2K27" and later ported to other games for testing. Engadget reports that NVIDIA’s official statement about the DLSS 5 neural rendering model is that it will “inject near-realistic light and materials into the picture.” The direction is no longer just to reconstruct the original rendered picture of the game sharper, but to directly rewrite the light, shadow and material performance.
The actual effect currently seems to be closer to the product of throwing a game screenshot into Midjourney and giving the command "make it more realistic".
Skyrim's face, set on a fifteen-year-old skeleton
The case of "Skyrim" further highlights the current embarrassing situation of this technology: low-poly character faces are covered with a texture that approximates real-life 3D scans, and are pasted on a game skeleton and animation system from fifteen years ago. The character model and movements have not been updated at all, so what the player sees is a face that is "somewhat like a real person", paired with a body that stares straight ahead and moves stiffly - this kind of model is out of touch with the animation, which is the key to amplifying the sense of dissonance.
If the picture is just weird but the performance is not compromised, it can at best be regarded as a visual experiment with different opinions. The problem is that performance also comes at a cost. According to the test of the leaked version, after turning on Neural Rendering on the RTX 5070 Ti, the frame rate of "Control" at 4K resolution dropped from 71 fps to 35 fps, which was nearly cut in half.
It must be emphasized that the images and videos currently circulating are all from incomplete pre-release versions that have not been officially released and cannot represent the actual performance of the final product. NVIDIA's official version of DLSS 5 is expected to be officially launched this fall. Whether the version actually integrated and adjusted by the developer will show a different natural effect from this batch of leaked clips remains to be verified after the official version is launched.
