“As a creator, I have mixed feelings about this technology. AI is good at bringing old photographs to life or adding color to them, right? I think we might stop doing remakes one day. People still restore old films in 4K by hand, for instance. AI could do that easily.”

He spoke about some of the smaller details that he decided during the development of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and how generative AI technology can lose much of the artist’s intent when reinterpreting these scenes by, for example, changing the lighting.

“As the person who made the original, I wouldn’t want someone changing it too much. There was a reason I chose a particular lighting setup. It would be different if AI understood those intentions.”

On the subject of generative AI being able to change things in games without too much input or handholding, Kojima said, “I wouldn’t like that. Unless I was controlling the AI in my own work, that may be different. I don’t know, though.” Ultimately, he isn’t quite sure whether technologies like DLSS 5 will play a major role in game development at Kojima Productions going forward.

However, he does accept that “this will probably become standard” in the industry. “Maybe AI will eventually do all that automatically,” he said on the subject of using the technology to replace engineers and production teams across various disciplines. “In a hundred years, the resolution may be even higher. But I don’t much like the idea.”

Over the years, Kojima has had plenty to say on the subject of AI taking over the world through a number of his games, with the two most noteworthy examples being Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Both titles involve an enigmatic group of sentient AIs that have been secretly controlling various aspects of the world, from MGS2’s S3 Plan to the Sons of Patriot system in MGS4. Whether we will see these themes pop up again in Kojima Productions’ next espionage title, Physint, remains to be seen.

As for DLSS 5, the technology officially made its debut with the release of NBA 2K27 last month. The technology has seen plenty of criticism since it was first unveiled earlier this year, as the showcase presentation revealed that it would bring about several changes to how various characters looked. One of the big examples of this was how it could change the appearance of Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace Ashcroft.

In response to this criticism, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that he “doesn’t love AI slop” and that DLSS 5 will be different from typical AI-generated images.

We’ve seen things, both good and bad, in the process, and we can safely say that the tech works very well to make an older title or one with splendid visual fidelity even better, making such titles look substantially more modern and more detailed. However, things get murkier the closer you look, and there’s always the performance cost that the magic it can work would bring.

Well, we put DLSS 5 to work on a beefy setup that includes a Ryzen 7 9850X3D, 64GB of 6000MHz DDR5 RAM, and a 5080 GPU. That gave us a lot of power to play with, and the tech some breathing room to operate in. There were bugs/oddities that are attributable to the mods too, but the experiment was enough to get a good grip on what works and what doesn’t with DLSS 5. Let’s dive right into the games, beginning with:

1. Cyberpunk 2077

A sprawling, first-person open-world title that boasted a lot of detail and some substantial demands on any system, it felt like an obvious choice for our experiment. Wanting to hang out with Johnny Silverhand again might have had something to do with it, of course, but Cyberpunk’s close and personal shots of NPCs you’re in a conversation with are perfect places to see DLSS 5 in action.

Well, that’s just what we did. Getting to the marked location on our map, with all of our settings tuned up to the max, was an already visually astounding experience to begin with, and you might not notice just how much DLSS 5 manages to smooth out details in the open world. We must mention its effect on the game’s lighting systems, though, as it does a great job of creating more natural, authentic reflections and gives a more authentic look to spots lit up by rays of light. However, getting to the meeting with our contact was where things got really interesting.

The dimly lit room with bright neons was a perfect place for the rendering to do what it did best, and it ironed out a lot of glare from a red light nearby, which was reflected quite unrealistically in the NPC’s eyes, while casting a weird glow on their face. Well, not with DLSS working in the background to balance things out, and the resulting image was not only cleaner, but more detailed.

The difference was tangible, with the textures on the man’s skin looking so much more realistic, the light gently glinting off pores in his skin, while his eyes still caught the light, but didn’t make him look like an unhinged maniac in the process. Materials on clothing and the like also got wrinkles and reflections to make what we were seeing look quite authentic indeed. It’s equally impressive that we were able to maintain a consistent 60fps at 4K with everything maxed out.

It’s easy to see why people are excited about what DLSS 5 can do after that hour in Night City. Of course, that was only the first stop on our journey with NVIDIA’s latest. We’re joining Naked Snake in a remake that brings out more of what the tech can manage to light.

2. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater

Konami’s remake of the popular classic was already quite a looker to begin with. But turning DLSS 5 on and off in the game’s opening moments showcased a tangible difference between the original image and the new one. The clouds looked more detailed, while the sun’s rays glanced off the plane’s metal surfaces ever so gently with DLSS running in the background.

Inside the cockpit, Major Zero’s skin tone and face might have been too much of a deviation from the original for our taste, but it wasn’t too distracting to be an issue. Naked Snake’s dive from the plane benefited from the better lighting, although the software did behave quite strangely with the fake hair, its color often switching from an ashen-blonde to brown, so darn tangible. That issue solved itself once Snake peels off the mask he’s wearing to conceal his real face, but it does bear mentioning nonetheless.

The jungle you find yourself in benefits greatly from the enhancements that DLSS brings, no complaints there. But as far as Snake is concerned, we did think its enhancements came with the price of looking a tad too artificial. Konami’s meticulous detailing might not be necessarily enhanced by DLSS 5. Instead, it just looks different, and that’s a bit of a problem.

Snake does still look like Snake, yes, but his eyes seem strangely devoid of expression, an unfortunate side effect of the original game’s representation of an operative who is calm and collected at all times, his expressions never giving away what he’s thinking. We can’t safely say it was the case with DLSS running, though, as his face did look more realistic in terms of textures, skin, and hair, but felt strangely devoid of expression in his eyes.

It’s kind of like the effort to make him look more human kind of had the opposite effect, and while we think all of that can probably be ironed out by some optimizations, things were on the fence for DLSS in the game’s take on Russia. We’re off to Gotham City next, where Rocksteady’s deliberate stylization stands to clash with NVIDIA’s new neural rendering.

3. Batman: Arkham Knight

Here’s where things get interesting. We expected DLSS to have a lot to do in an older game, and Arkham Knight’s unique art style and the dark, gritty vibe that Rocksteady brought to it felt like a good choice to see how the tech performs in environments where the lighting isn’t as bright as the last two games we tested.

It turns out that DLSS 5 was surprisingly good at preserving Rocksteady’s original vision for what its characters should look like. The kind waitress from the game’s unforgettable opening looked quite similar to the original game’s rendition of her, although the tech did well to bring out stray strands in her messy bun and improve her reflection on the cafe’s polished floors as she walked on over to the kitchen.

But it’s when you stand on Gotham’s streets and turn it on that you see a kind of accidental remaster of what the game looks like. The lighting gets an instant, very welcome boost, with rays of light now falling softly on the concrete, lighting it up while the pitter-patter of rain becomes ever so slightly more tangible as a result.

This one’s a great showcase of how an older game stands to benefit from neural rendering, generating a better image while not replacing any of the original assets. It wouldn’t have been ideal if DLSS had changed Batman’s iconic jawline too much, or perhaps tried to make Gordon look like he’d just stepped out of a salon. Instead, it preserves that grimy look that most of the characters whose night has gone on too long have, while working its magic on the world around you to make Gotham look even more resplendent despite the grim situation it faces in the game.

We expected exaggerated materials and perhaps even skin thanks to how close the game likes to get to faces, but that was blissfully absent from the experience. However, we couldn’t stay in Gotham no matter how melancholically beautiful it looked, as we had one more stop with our superpowered rig: the Nora heartlands in Aloy’s debut adventure.

4. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered

We’ve had a fairly good amount of praise for DLSS 5 so far, but this is where things get interesting, and where a few cracks begin to show in its armor. It does a good job of making Aloy’s whole world look more realistic, with better facial textures and more details in the world; there’s no doubt about it. However, as another relatively older title, it presents an interesting contrast to Arkham Knight.

It was evident from the very second we turned on DLSS 5 in this one, but it totally interferes with what Guerrilla originally envisioned the world to look like. It adds a sort of reddish hue to it all, sort of like the software decided that every minute of every day in-game was stuck in perpetual twilight, the reddish glow of the setting sun bathing the world in a color that was far removed from the original image.

Your returns with all the good things it does in Zero Dawn then become subjective, and quite hard to defend from anybody who argues that the tech can interfere with existing art styles that are deliberate choices from artists and developers. Greater realism doesn’t necessarily mean that the image is better looking in this case, and it’s the first loss for DLSS 5 in our testing. But we’ve been holding back. There’s another part of our experiment that we’ve saved for last, and it’s where the tech met its match!

5. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

We saw what DLSS 5 could do with the remake of Snake Eater on a powerful system, but we wondered if it could do the same on a title that was a port of a PS3 game, and manage to make enough of a difference to matter. Additionally, we did our testing on a PC with significantly lower specs, with an RTX 3080Ti working with 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 5950X powering it all.

As you can imagine, trying to run things in 4K with DLSS 5 on tore into our performance, with low framerates interfering with our ability to enjoy the experience. Going down to 1440p made the game playable, but it was at 1080p that we were able to get somewhat stable, consistent performance out of the game. There’s no denying that it did improve environmental details, character models, and lighting and shadows by a considerable margin, but at the cost of a significant nerf to resolutions as it worked behind the scenes to improve on textures and assets that were designed for an era long past.

It’s rather ironic that something called DLSS can demand a lower resolution, but Guns of the Patriots is a great example of how computationally expensive it can be, and how lower-specced systems struggle to make effective use of it.

The Intent Behind Good Performances

There you have it. We put DLSS 5 to work across a variety of games that were chosen to test out what it can do, across two vastly different systems. There are great things like how it immediately improves the lighting and details in environments and on character models, but what it does with a few faces might not be everybody’s cup of tea. Making deliberately stylized imagery more photorealistic might not be the best use of what it can do, and that’s an area that is definitely in need of improvement thanks to how vocal concerns about preservation of artistic visions currently are.

More details do not necessarily mean better graphics, too, and an important question to consider is whether graphical tech should simply reconstruct images to make them better, or attempt to reinterpret them with results that currently seem a tad too unpredictable for the tech to be called consistently good. There is a degree of subjectivity involved, and we must say that things looked really good when DLSS 5 worked as intended, but we can see how others might not like what it does with the images it works on.

We’d say that the tech is impressive, but its implementation is a mixed bag at the moment. We’d say that it needs to be more subtle about what it’s doing, its improvements being subtle enough to make a tangible difference to any scene without it completely switching things up in some cases. Developer control becomes more important than ever with software that threatens to override it from time to time. It’s important to remember that our results were via modded use of the software, and you should take a look at 2K27 to see what it looks like when developers take control of its output.

What it produces is more in line with NVIDIA’s claim that the software is guided by artists and developers, and you can see what Visual Concepts has done to ensure that it doesn’t overdo its job.

It’s why the results of our experiment were both exciting, thanks to what it could achieve in good hands, but equally concerning if it’s left to do its thing without some guidance from the people whose artistic visions it aims to enhance. It cannot become a universal solution to making things look realistic, and its implementation needs to focus on improving instead of replacing aspects of an image that an artist places in it with deliberation.

DLSS 5 adds details and makes games look better in most cases, but whether those improvements would be in line with what the developers of each experience intended is another story altogether. It’s only the beginning of the journey, but NVIDIA would do well to set a path to a more cautious use of its new tech if it‘s going to make it as awesome as what it has managed to achieve so far.

Regardless, it looks like it’s here to stay, launching on September 3rd and making its way to NBA 2K27 to bring a level of photorealism to the game that’s been out of reach for developers due to performance limitations of the hardware and software. Generative AI could be the tool they need to overcome those obstacles and bring that realism to athletes like Cade Cunningham, who got a special mention in the announcement among others.

It’s even bringing improvements to courtside NPCs and spectators, while allowing RTX 5090 owners to run the game in 4K at a whopping 370 frames per second. The accompanying summary of how DLSS 5 works is interesting to read and should help arm you with more knowledge before you wade into the sea of opinions around the tech.

As for NBA 2K27, it launches on September 4th for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2. Check out our feature for everything you should know.

The trailer showcases how Tides of Annihilation can look on supported hardware if players enable path tracing and DLSS 4.5. Unlike Nvidia’s typical “RTX On/RTX Off” style of videos, we don’t get helpful side-by-side comparisons of the same scenes. All of the scenes are instead shown only with RTX enabled. These visuals all look incredibly detailed, with the area’s lighting playing a major role in establishing the mood of the scenes.

We also get to look at the previous trailer’s boss fight, but with RTX enabled. All of this boss’s magical abilities are at full display, especially in terms of how these magical beams play with the lighting of the scene. The system running Tides of Annihilation with RTX enabled is also likely making heavy use of DLSS 4.5 to ensure that frame rates remain stable and the player doesn’t suffer from stutters and frame drops.

Tides of Annihilation was unveiled all the way back in February 2025, and since then, developer Eclipse Glow Games has continued to release new trailers and reveal new details about the title. The most recent one from earlier this week gave us a deeper look at the game’s story, and the developers also explained details about the Knight system, which will enable protagonist Gwendolyn to switch up her gameplay style.

Among the Knights showcased for this was Lancelot, who focuses on fast-paced swordplay and gives Gwendolyn new tools to rush into groups of enemies and even some defensive options for when she gets stuck in a bind.

The story of Tides of Annihilation has been described by the studio as being its own take on the classic Arthurian legend. Rather than simply recreating the same narrative, however, the studio instead decided to tell its own story that revolves around a regular person, Gwendolyn, who lives in the modern age and finds herself stuck in an invasion from another dimension.

While Gwendolyn starts out the story being understandably scared of the horrors taking place around her in the new world she finds herself trapped in, she eventually finds some friends and allies, all of whom encourage her to become a warrior capable of commanding the knights and eventually even bring an end to the war.

Gameplay in the trailer was noted as being from the middle of the game. This means that the studio got to show off just how intense the combat in Tides of Annihilation could get. However, the developers also confirmed that, when it comes out, the intensity of combat in the game will be gradually ramped up as players start getting stronger, and that it won’t be this intense right from the beginning.

Tides of Annihilation doesn’t yet have a release date, and the developers have said that they are working hard to finish it. The game is being made for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

RTX is also supported, though it’s to support Lumen and MegaLights, and Reflex will ensure low latency. Which may not matter all that much in Campaign but should be worthwhile in Versus. That is, after the development team is ready to outline all the changes coming in the 4v4 format.

Of course, those who pre-ordered E-Day or subscribed to PC Game Pass can experience all of the above when the open beta goes live on August 6th. It’s likely multiplayer-only, so expect more details on maps, modes and other changes in the coming weeks. Who knows? We may even see the inclusion of the new Horde Siege.

Gears of War: E-Day, meanwhile, launches on October 6th for Xbox Series X/S and PC alongside Game Pass Ultimate and PC. With a Campaign that’s over 14 hours long and a reported budget upwards of $400 million, it’s certainly one of Xbox’s biggest bets, especially after making it console-exclusive. For more details, check out our feature here.

DLSS Ray Reconstruction is a tool that can be used in games to improve visual quality and frame rates without having to rely on hand-trained denoising techniques. The technology makes use of neural rendering and is available on all of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX graphics cards. The latest iteration of the tech has been trained on Nvidia’s own supercomputers and is capable of generating higher-quality pixels in parts of ray-traced frames that are typically noisier due to rays not being sampled.

Ray Reconstruction’s latest iteration is able to unify denoising capabilities along with DLSS Super Resolution into a single model, bringing in efficiencies as it analyzes temporal and spatial engine data to create sharper and more stable images while maintaining high fidelity visuals. The new model is equipped with an efficient denoiser that provides 35 percent more compute capability and can process 20 percent more parameters without missing a beat in performance compared to the previous model.

Along with this, it also builds on the upgrades that are coming to RTX GPUs with DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, with the model having deeper spatial awareness in every scene. This allows it to be more intelligent in how it uses a game engine’s pixel and motion data for sampling purposes. Thanks to this, it can offer more accurate lighting and better temporal stability, along with clearer and smoother motion for ray tracing and path tracing scenes.

At launch, Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction will be capable of running in 27 games, including Everspace 2, Alan Wake 2, Crimson Desert, Cyberpunk 2077, DOOM: The Dark Ages, Directive 8020, Star Wars Outlaws, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Pragmata, Resident Evil Requiem, and Hogwarts Legacy, among others.

Features for DLSS 4.5 were first unveiled back in January, with Super Resolution leading the pack in terms of release. At the time, Nvidia had also confirmed that there would be other features and enhancements under the same umbrella, including Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, which is capable of offering a 6X multiplier over previous versions of Multi Frame Generation, which itself could go up to 4X.

Alongside offering smoother frame rates, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation is also capable of offering better synchronization between a user’s graphics card output and their display. Essentially, additional frames are only generated when they are actually needed and if the display can actually support them. This means that, if a user’s display runs at a refresh rate of 144 Hz, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation won’t overshoot that limit at the expense of other performance considerations.

Many of the features in DLSS 4.5 are powered by a new transformer model that was trained on an expanded dataset over its predecessor.

For more on DLSS, check out some of the controversies surrounding the next generation of the technology – DLSS 5.

One example is the Giant Knight that protagonist Gwendolyn encountered in the first trailer. To help improve performance, Unreal Engine China technical director Wei Liu says they conducted tests for CPU/GPU bottlenecks. It has since reduced computational overhead and raised the average frame rate. Of course, the collaboration has also ensured that Nanite can be used in-game for “automated collision and shadow optimization.”

The overarching result is that even if a Giant Knight is in the background, it will retain the same high-quality textures and fluid motion without any performance hit. And while Eclipse Glow previously announced support for DLSS and Path Tracing, it’s also communicated with Nvidia for “detailed performance analysis.” The two will also work together on “joint optimizations at the driver level” in the future. And if that wasn’t enough, parent company Tencent also provided technical assistance, though further details weren’t shared.

For those itching to play the game, a hands-on event has been announced for this Summer with registration open to all players. You can expect more details through the developer’s socials, so stay tuned for updates.

Mishima and Hsu revealed that the implementation of path tracing directly into RE Engine was handled by Capcom’s Kenta Nakamoto and Kosuke Nabata, and that it took them a year and a half to accomplish. The system seemingly makes use of Nvidia’s DLSS Ray Reconstruction technology to help with denoising, and was noted as being important to make sure that real-time performance was acceptable. Unfortunately, this also had the side-effect of making path tracing in Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata exclusive to Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards.

The speakers also noted that a number of design choices were made so that Capcom could make use of streaming RIS, which could pick the most important light sources to which path tracing could be applied, all while remaining efficient. These design decisions include the compensation of brightness so that scenes with spotlight-based lighting wouldn’t suffer from darkening artifacts, the use of Lambertian diffuse with single-lobe specular instead of the full bidirectional scattering distribution function (BSDF), the exclusion of image-based lighting, and the addition of emissive polygons.

As for DLSS Ray Reconstruction, Capcom made use of the technology to fix visual artifacts that could arise from subsurface scattering, frosty and blurry glass surfaces, and refracting surfaces like raindrops, among other things.

Leading up to their respective releases, both Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata got trailers for their PC versions, showcasing how path tracing could bring in massive changes to scenes thanks to more realistic lighting that was only possible using RTX graphics cards. Along with this, the trailers also made sure to showcase other RTX-related benefits, including DLSS 4 and its Multi Frame Generation, which could help boost frame rates by making the GPU generate extra frames between the game’s own outputs.

As for other qualities of the games, both Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata have been reviewed quite positively, which means that Capcom has been on quite a solid run when it comes to releasing high-quality games. Resident Evil Requiem is available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2. Pragmata is slated for release later this week—on April 17th—on the same platforms.

While you wait for the release of Pragmata, take a look at its most recent trailer, where Capcom showcased how protagonist Hugh can make use of his arsenal of weapons alongside android Diana as they make their way through The Cradle. The default weapon available to Hugh is the Grip Gun, which essentially acts as a pistol of sorts. When it’s time to deal more damage, however, Hugh can get his hands on the Shockwave Blaster, for example, which can help him attack multiple foes at the same time.

However, it is worth remembering that Hugh’s weapons aren’t the only thing you’ll need to use. Enemies in Pragmata have high defences, and you will need to make use of Diana’s hacking abilities to make them lower their guard.

In case you missed it, we really liked Pragmata in our review, scoring it a nine out of ten for its innovative fusion of combat and puzzle-solving. However, those same elements may also prove a tad divisive if you go in expecting a straightforward shooter. Either way, the one thing we’re sure you’re going to love is the game’s excellent visuals and a unique art style that pops with colors as its levels and bizarre, homicidal bot enemies spring to life.

This is especially apparent during combat when attempting to hack your way past enemy defenses, even as you’re tasked with evading their attacks and managing the space around you. We already anticipated the combat being among the game’s best features, but the visuals, especially on high settings, do give it a run for its money.

In its full GDC 2026 session outlining the future of Path Tracing, Nvidia’s Martin Stich talked about how one non-gameplay scene (based on assets provided by CD Projekt RED) featured 60 million plants and one million trees across a 5×5 km terrain. Despite featuring 200 different plant species and some trees having more than 10 million polygons, it loads without any streaming.

All of this is complete with fully path-tracing lighting. Perhaps the most impressive part of all this is that it runs at 4K/80 FPS, but there are some caveats. It’s running on an RTX 5090, and the 4K resolution is upscaled from 1440p with DLSS Quality mode. Comparatively, an RTX 4070 would eke out 58 frames at 1440p (upscaled from 960p).

As noted previously, none of this represents the actual gameplay or the hardware you’ll need to run The Witcher 4 on PC. At this point, it’s a cool tech demo of what RTX Mega Geometry is capable of using the game’s assets. Whether it reaches this level of fidelity and complexity remains to be seen, so stay tuned.

The Witcher 4 doesn’t currently have a launch date, though there are claims of a late 2027 launch. Officially, it’s still in full production with CD Projekt RED recently scaling up its team (among others) for the same.