Hogwarts Legacy's DLSS 5 Update Shows Developers Are Listening to PC Gamers in Keeping It Away from the Game's Characters.

NVIDIA's DLSS 5 Is Becoming Smaller in Almost Every Respect, Including Performance Overhead and AI Upscaling.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 becomes smaller in almost every way, including performance overhead and AI simplification.

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The promised new DLSS 5 model is set to launch in a few days alongside the new RTX Spark chip that will power the new and expensive laptops. As we hoped and expected, the new model also reduces the overall footprint and thus performance overhead. But that's not the only problem that seems to have been fixed.

Nvidia's own stats, which we'll be able to confirm soon, state that it has half the GPU that the September version shipped with, and offers a 20% reduction in 4K VRAM usage as another neat tip. Nvidia says it did this by refining the training data and reducing the model size to about 118 million parameters. It is approximately 24% smaller.

This is great, because when this feature came out - in NBA2K27 and subsequently almost every other game you can think of - the biggest issue we had with it was the significant performance you get just from enabling it. Originally, Nvidia told us that they were expecting about 60% performance from turning it on in NBA2K27, and now it's only 30%.

It's a different model, and from speaking to developers at Nvidia's recent event, you can see the differences if you put them eye to eye. However, these differences should be subtle enough that the performance improvement is still the main thing you take away from the experience.

Considering the very light touch stuff in NBA2K27 - especially when you spend most of your time zoomed out, only entering the top third of the screen - 30% is a much more acceptable performance drop compared to losing more than half the frame rate.

It looks like you can try DLSS 5 for yourself today

Nvidia took me into a room to show off DLSS 5 in person, and it's beautiful, ugly, impressive, and troubling all at the same time.

DLSS 5 is called "DLSS Neural Rendering" in NBA 2K27's graphics options, and I think I sense a rebranding of Nvidia's controversial graphics technology.

The other big issue we had with DLSS 5 was obviously what was shown with the character models in the initial reveal back in March of this year. The most obvious example was Jasmine Grace, who became the unwanted poster of DLSS 5. And it's quite telling that none of the games revealed at the time, including Resident Evil Requiem, have released DLSS 5 updates to their games.

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Yes, Hogwarts Legacy is finally getting its DLSS 5 shine. But from the photos Nvidia is now sharing on its blog about the new update, it's clear that the developers were swayed by the negative publicity the feature received when it was announced.

Looking at the new images, it seems that the effect is almost entirely one of ambient lighting and materials. Drag the slider before/after the images with the characters in the image and you will see that their features do not charge one bit. Compare that to the initial Hogwarts reveal and the difference is night and day. Or if you want to turn DLSS on or off.

The developers have clearly pulled back those sliders quite a bit, if not completely masking the characters' faces.

If you want to see the world of Hogwarts heritage in a more beautiful environment, the new update is coming on November 5th. What still doesn't have a specific date is the only other official game getting the Neural Rendering: Where Winds Meet update. The action RPG will receive confirmed support "in the near future" and it's a similar situation to Hogwarts where the only real impact of the DLSS 5 update is on the environment. It looks great, but it's clear that the developers are once again providing an AI beauty filter for its characters.

We will soon have some of our numbers on the new DLSS 5 model.

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Dave has been playing on the Colecovision and Commodore Vic 20 codebook since Zaxxon and Lady Bug (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the age of 16 and eventually ended up debugging a Cyrix-based system about a year later. When he threw it out of the window. He first began writing decades ago for the official PlayStation and Xbox World magazines, then moved full-time to PC Format, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3, among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmare market for graphics cards, processors with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs bigger than a Cybertruck.

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