Nvidia has announced plans to expand the availability of its controversial AI-powered image generation technology, DLSS 5. Initially planned for use only on the RTX 50 series and in a single game, the technology will officially come to the GeForce RTX 40 series once performance work on the RTX 50 is complete. The company said model updates will be released later in the fall. No support plans have been announced for the RTX 30 and RTX 20 series at this stage. Modders had managed to run a leaked version of DLSS 5 on older graphics cards, but experienced low frame rates and crashes.
Nvidia said the detailed settings used by modders will not be made available to players. For players, DLSS 5 will only have an on-off toggle. Controls such as model selection, Structure Intensity, Tone Intensity, automatic masking, and custom pixel-level masking will be available to developers. Developers will be able to add some of these options to their own graphics menus if they wish.
DLSS 5 can automatically identify objects in a scene and apply different levels of AI processing to elements such as faces, fabrics, and vegetation. Semantic AI masking and engine-level masking allow artists to assign custom settings to specific groups of objects, such as glassware, water droplets, or vegetation. A native plug-in for Unreal Engine 5 and Nvidia SDKs are available. The technology can be applied to an entire game or to different scenes, cutscenes, and gameplay sections; because the models run on every frame, there is no minimum frame rate requirement.
Nvidia did not reconfirm that the previously announced Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, Resident Evil Requiem, and the other 12 games will launch with DLSS 5. The company only said that more games are on the way and that many developers are working on the integration.
Why it matters
The expansion of DLSS 5 to the RTX 40 series broadens the hardware limits initially set for the technology; however, uncertainty remains for RTX 30 and RTX 20 owners. Players’ inability to access detailed image settings means that the experience will depend less on the graphics card than on the menus and integration choices offered by the teams developing the games. As a result, the same technology may produce different results across games depending on the settings developers assign to scenes or groups of objects. Nvidia’s failure to reconfirm DLSS 5 support for the previously mentioned games also shows that it is not yet clear in which titles and to what extent the announced compatibility will be used in practice.
Background
Nvidia is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 12 news articles mentioning the name in the last 90 days; the most recent is dated 4 September 2026.