The Next Generation is Here: Nvidia Announces DLSS 5

It's hard not to call this black magic. Last night, Nvidia opened its GTC 2026 conference, and among the flood of announcements and reveals from the company, we got a complete surprise: the announcement of DLSS 5. The announcement of the next generation of DLSS is so surprising mainly because DLSS 4.5 hasn't even launched yet, and only last week Nvidia announced it would arrive at the end of the month. That said, in recent years Nvidia has revealed the new generation of DLSS alongside the reveal of a new generation of graphics cards, so the reveal of DLSS 5 without a new generation and at this timing came more or less out of nowhere.

So what's actually new and different with DLSS 5? The fifth generation uses a new rendering model that's been trained to understand scenes and frames from games, including recognition of characters, hair, fabric types, and different lighting conditions. The model essentially takes each frame and enhances it with photorealistic lighting and textures based on the actual geometry of the scene. It's essentially generation of an improved frame with more detail based on the base frame in real-time at up to 4K resolution. According to the company, this is the biggest breakthrough it has achieved in the field and a kind of "GPT moment for graphics" that presents a connection between classic rendering done on the card's core and generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI).

Additionally, Nvidia claims that implementing DLSS 5 will be relatively simple and will use the same SDK framework that the technology already uses today with additional tools and capabilities. If for years we've seen games chasing photorealistic graphics through detailed textures and massive amounts of computing power, Nvidia is offering with DLSS 5 a different solution in the form of rendering a simple base frame and generating a new one on top of it with photorealistic graphics, advanced lighting and reflections—all in real-time with relatively low latency of up to 16ms. Currently, the games Starfield, Assassin's Creed Shadows, Resident Evil Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy, Oblivion Remastered, and NARAKA: BLADEPOINT are expected to receive DLSS 5 support ahead of its summer launch. And if you still haven't grasped how insane DLSS 5 is, I highly recommend watching the Digital Foundry video below to see some demonstrations of it from Resident Evil Requiem and Starfield.

Currently, it's unknown which cards will support DLSS 5, but the RTX 50 series is pretty much certain, and the question hanging in the air right now is whether RTX 40 cards will also support it or if they'll be left behind with DLSS 4.5, which arrives on March 31.