The Vergecast - DLSS5 Explained with Linus Tech Tips
Episode Date: September 22, 2026Nvidia's new DLSS 5 (Deep Learning Super Sampling 5) rendering technology uses AI to (theoretically) improve video game graphics. When it was announced, social media declared that it was "yassifying" ...video game characters, changing faces in a way game developers didn't intend. Linus Tech Tips' own Linus Sebastian and David Gauthier join guest host David Imel to break down the the hype and controversy. Further reading: The Beats 360 are what I’d bring to the gym if I hated earbuds Peloton is back with a ‘cheaper’ folding treadmill Whoop and Peloton integration is finally here Xbox is barely Xbox anymore Apple’s first live music venue is opening beneath its UK headquarters Nvidia’s DLSS 5, explained DLSS 5: Has Nvidia’s AI graphics technology gone too far? DLSS 5 looks like a real-time generative AI filter for video games Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Deep Learning Super Sampling.
I'm David Amel.
Invidia's DLSS-S-5 technology was released on September 3rd, and it's notably different from the ways it's been doing
super sampling in the past.
Super sampling is a technology used to boost video game fidelity and performance on existing hardware.
There's been a lot of pushback from some people in the gaming community and even the developer
community about this, so I wanted to bring on Linus Sebastian and David Gatier from Linus Tech Tips,
to talk to me about what DLSS-S-5 is
and why pretty much everybody is so up in arms about it.
But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.
This is 90 seconds on the verge for Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026.
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atio.com slash verge. That's A-T-T-I-O.com slash verge. All right, Linus Sebastian, David Gattier,
welcome to the Vergecast.
having us. This is really exciting. Yeah, I'm super glad to have you guys here. It's been a while
since I've seen you, so it's nice to see you, first of all. But we really wanted to bring you in
because there's this new thing that just dropped Nvidia DLSS 5, uh, super sampling, sort of, right?
Yeah, we've lost track a little bit of what the SS and DLSS stands for. I think that's pretty
clear. Yeah. We've had DLSS before, which was sort of a way to upscale content
when you had a lower tiered GPU.
Can you explain what DLSS-5 is
and why it's different from what we've had before?
Yeah, well, DLSS in the past meant we've got this lower resolution
that we're rendering at internally,
and then we're using some form of machine learning
to take that and extrapolate, you know,
kind of like way back in the day
when you would have like a low-resolution image
that you took on your one-me,
megapixel digital camera and you'd kind of try to stretch it out and then, you know, sharpen it and
fill in the missing information. It was like that, but powered by machine learning. So towards the
end of it with DLSS4.5 actually getting pretty good. DLSS5 takes that and instead of just, you know,
adding pixels that weren't there, it seems to be adding elements of the scene that weren't there or
adding colors that weren't there. And
Nvidia has strongly hinted, not just hinted. They have said
outright that this is where they believe the future of
rendering is going because they just basically have been saying
that Moore's Law where we can just have more and more transistors
and bigger and bigger chips that can traditionally render
better and better every year is completely dead. That's, that's
NVIDIA's kind of stance on that, and then this concept of neural rendering is the future,
where we take a relatively low fidelity scene, and then we use our best guesses based on a trained
AI model as to what exactly the intent was to have there. One of the demos of this technology
that really stood out to me, this was years ago, they did this demo where they had this almost
MSPaint-like drawing application. Do you guys remember this? Oh, yes. And they drew this
like mountain scene and then just like a blue line squiggle through it.
And then they just press the button and it goes,
wow, beautiful mountains in a river.
Right.
And that seems to have for longer than I think most people outside the company have realized,
that seems to have been Nvidia's vision.
So I as a, and it seems like earnestly,
they believe that this will be a benefit to developers and gamers.
So as a developer, I could just say barrel.
And then a beautifully rendered barrel would just get crapped out onto my screen
that looks photorealistic essentially because I don't actually have to render all those pixels
and I can do it so cheaply.
Now, David, our David, David Gochier, actually spent a lot more time with DLSS-5 than I did
on games that Nvidia didn't authorize.
And it seems like, at least at this stage, we're falling well short of, you know, magic barrel.
And, oh, here's a leather jacket.
And it just suddenly is trained on what a leather jacket is supposed to look like and is miraculously photorealistic.
So I think it's a little disingenuous for people to say, well, it's just an Instagram filter.
But, you know, David, you looked at it across a much wider range of games than I did.
where does it sit on that spectrum of magic neural rendering to Instagram filter in your mind?
I think its biggest limitation is the fact that it has to be rendered 60 times at least a second.
And so that tiny little window to be able to generate the uplift of AI really limits the amount of creativity that the AI can do.
even Nvidia is trying to distance it in terms of messaging from being generative AI.
But as it is right now, they've trained the program to be able to separate objects and you can control each object individually.
You can apply different amounts of the, you know, quote unquote filter to those objects.
And it doesn't transform them in the sense that it can take a crude drawing of a barrel and make it work.
It needs a pretty good input.
They said the better input in, the better output out.
and I noticed that in my testing that if I gave it higher fidelity graphics, it looks significantly
better after the AI.
That being said, it still has that AI look.
And if you have that immediate disgust reaction to AI generated content, this won't change your
mind about it.
I have so many questions here because you mentioned you've tried this on a bunch of different
games.
I watched your guys' video that you put out where you tested on Expedition 33.
You tested on a Final Fantasy game.
And it did seem to upskill the textures to an extent
or maybe it was like a de-haze filter a little bit.
You know, the haze kind of went away, the contrast went up.
Does that not take a lot of creative power away
from the artists and the developers
and the way that they want these characters to look
because to your point in your video,
you showed one character that was supposed to be
kind of an anime-style character
and they ended up just looking like a real person.
So where do you think the line is there?
Right now, you know, the conversation around artist's intent is really complicated because
the DLs that we were using were leaked. Only NBA 2K27 has actually been tuned with all the
different sliders that NVIDIA makes available to developers to decide how they want to apply
these effects. So every other game that we looked at was a combination of our best guesses
for what might look pretty okay and what, whoops, definitely.
doesn't, and also us kind of goofing around with them to see what our range of best case scenario
and worst case scenario might actually look like here.
I think it's going to be a really contentious issue, even with game developers.
I think some of them see it as the AI slot filter.
You turn it on.
Everything sucks.
And then others are coming to the defense.
The creative director of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 went on Twitter or X to defend it and said
like this is what we wanted our game to look like.
We just didn't have the technology or the resources to make it happen.
And so I think...
Excuse me, sorry.
Well, they made that a lot worse, so...
Don't get us started on Star Wars. Don't do it.
But I think right now, and I think in the immediate future, this will only be good in games that are chasing photorealism.
And anything where there's a stylized look,
doesn't work. Even games that are kind of halfway there, like Expedition 33, where it's
realistic proportioned characters, but there's sort of a dreamlike quality to it. It sort of takes
away from that. And another thing I notice is that whatever AI, or whatever data set they're
training it on is sort of sucking the color out of it in the same way that lazy color
correction and film is doing. And so I think they're using a kind of generalized data set that
is like, oh, that's what film is doing. It's trying to make it look more like a actual
movie without doing the detail work to make it actually pop.
And I just want to jump in and say, I don't want my games to look like movies.
Right.
Yeah.
Games should look like games and movies should look like movies, except when the movie is,
you know, the Super Mario World movie or when a game is really like committed to, you know,
that gritty, realistic, filmic look.
And it's a very, you know, cinematic art style and, you know,
and very story-driven, like, then, okay, yeah, fine, you know, make my game look like a movie.
But these are two different mediums, and we shouldn't just go, okay, well, yeah, they're the same now, right?
Yeah.
Now, since this is only an Nvidia technology, are we going to enter a world where AMD gamers
have a different graphical experience than Nvidia gamers?
Okay, now you're getting into, like, the big questions.
And, okay, immediately, no.
because the performance hit of this is already pretty catastrophic on a 50-90.
And I made an offhand remark, I think, in the video that it was going to be, I think I said,
five years or something like that before anyone's, like, really using this. And someone responded
to me, they go, what are you talking about? I'm using it today. And I love it. I have a 59.
And I'm like, how many people have a 59?
Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, because this is not.
This is not a real mainstream technology until, you know, the last generation's 60 series card can run it in some kind of meaningful way.
And that will not happen until we are a couple launches in.
And Nvidia launches a new GPU series like every two years now.
So that was kind of what I was trying to say there is that right now, you know, this is very similar to, I would say, the early days of the more traditional.
additional DLSS that was more about just filling in the missing pixels in that we've got
hardware that is even at the very high end of what's available, struggling to really utilize
the feature as it is, and the feature's implementation is still in, in my opinion, pretty early
stages in terms of how useful it is, because it's not creating barrels out of nothing that
that perfectly integrate into the rest of the scene.
Right.
It's just applying lipstick.
Right.
And to be clear, it's not, it's not applying that lipstick in a universally, you know, I actually found that
particularly with background characters where there was less time and attention that could be spent on that,
I actually was pretty pleased with the results sometimes.
I loved the extra little shot of immersion that I got walking around in the street
populated by NPCs in cyberpunk.
And that's something that, you know, I hate to validate the, well, this was our intent.
We just didn't have time to spend on it argument because I think the flip side of that argument is
well, you know, that's a shortcut, right?
Like, we're giving game developers the tools to be lazy.
I don't buy that, but, you know, the barrel one, I think you could,
you could kind of make an argument for, you know, well, yeah,
maybe you should draw a barrel, like, isn't this art?
Yeah.
Right?
But I think, you know, every game ever that I can think of that has a main character
has struggled a little bit from the main character
looking a little bit out of place
next to all the NPCs that are procedurally generated
or that are drawn, but obviously they can't spend as long
or you're in a world where there's like half a dozen
different models for your non-playable characters, right?
Like there's always a compromise there.
And if I could have AI fill in the gaps,
you know what?
I find that to be an immersion increasing experience.
It's just that we don't have the hardware to run it today,
and it's more subtle today than I think it's going to need to be
to really change my gaming experience enough to justify the performance hit.
And it's a big one.
Yeah.
Another aspect of the future of DLSS-5 will be how they continue to optimize it.
Since the spring, they say that it's five times more performance,
when they first showed the demos at that time,
it required two 5090s
to make it work.
Oh my God.
We should just be grateful.
We should be grateful.
It doesn't require two 5090s.
SLA is coming back.
Yeah, exactly.
Bringing back.
Who knows when we're getting
the next generation of graphics cards,
but hopefully Invidia will continue to optimize,
make it faster.
One thing that I notice is that they are definitely
paying attention to the backlash that's been happening.
Not only did they encourage people to post videos earlier
to kind of, I think,
balance out sort of the fan outcry of DLSS-Five.
They have now said that they are going to work on a 4,000 series version of DLSS-5.
And so we know that they're paying attention.
We know that they are trying to mitigate the PR disaster that it's become.
And hopefully that means for gamers that want to use it, they won't have to buy 7090s
or whatever it will be in three, four years.
Right. I mean, I don't have much hope for that. The 40 series can run it, but this is the, this is the lightest version of DLSS-5 that there will likely ever be. I shouldn't say that. This isn't the lightest version. But it feels like we're going to be going down a path where just like the transformer model and the way that that just doesn't run as well on older,
series cards. It has a bigger performance hit. I think what we're going to see is we're going to see
DLSS-5 versions that are tuned for the different generations of cards. And a 40 series just
doesn't have the same neural capabilities as a 50 series and neither is going to be anywhere near
what we're going to see in the future. So yeah, you might like have the feature. But I don't, I
I just don't think it's realistic that you're going to be running, maybe walking, you know,
but I don't think you're going to be running the future variants of this that are going to really
meaningfully impact the gaming experience. But I mean, it's a funny thing that we're even having
this conversation because when I first got into this hobby, oh, I don't know, you know, almost 25 years
ago now, it was like, well, yeah, your old card doesn't support DirectX 9C, so you don't have
the new feature. And everyone was like, okay, I guess I'll need a new one. But then again,
back then, you could get a new card for 150 bucks. That was reasonably performance. So people's
mentality around how long they want to keep their cards and have access to all the new features
has totally changed. But so has the cost structure about it.
upgrading. It's gotten insane.
Right. I'm just going to jump over on New Egg because the last time I was looking at any of
this, 50 series was going up in price again. Right. Because local AI and things like that.
I think there are 50. Oh, smokes. I'm on the U.S. site? How much are they now? How much?
80s are like $15, $1,600 now. Oh my God. That's how much you can build an entire computer for
and less than that.
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There also seems to be a little bit of mixed messaging, I think, because DLSS previously.
And I remember people are always mad, obviously.
I remember a previous version of DLSS when it was generating frames and people were like,
so my GPU is only truly generating a certain amount of frames, like, ah!
And now it's doing the opposite, right?
It's generating this upscaled version, but it has to use more power instead.
So the messaging from Nvidia seems a little confusing as well.
It's like super sampling, yes, but 50% performance cost seems like a lot.
Even on a 5090, does a 50% performance cost seem like it's taking a game from like fairly playable to not very playable?
Well, that really depends.
And I think to your point,
Nvidia is getting a little bit confused in their messaging here
because they want to sell you high frame rate, right?
They want to sell you high resolution.
They want to sell you ray-traced lighting.
And they want to sell you, you know,
AI-assisted, machine learning assisted,
enhancement of objects on the screen.
Good luck.
enabling all of that at the same time.
Yeah.
Right?
Pick two.
Yeah.
I actually disagree.
I think Nvidia knows exactly what it's doing in a, in a, maybe a malicious way where
they know that dollar for dollar, AMD can compete in raw performance, where AMD's
having struggles in competing is in this feature set and DLSS being better than FSR in general.
And now they're making it that not only is it.
going to give you a performance uplift if you want the highest fidelity.
You also want DLSS so that it'll balance out and you're so dependent on their feature set and
their ecosystem to get the complete gaming experience.
So I think it's by design that they've uplifted performance and they're tanking it so that
you need the whole ecosystem at once.
Right.
But what you end up with is something that I think from a console perspective, you know,
like you target 30 FPS or whatever might be okay.
but from a traditional PC gaming standpoint,
you look at Nvidia's messaging over the last, again,
a lot of the last 20 years,
this idea of not turning all the sliders to max,
this idea of tuning your slider.
So, yeah, in this game, I'm going to chase high frame rate
because I'm playing competitively.
Or in this other game, I'm going to chase fidelity.
In this other game, I'm going to chase lighting.
this idea of not being able to just have the highest end hardware and crank it
is I think a new one that a lot of long-time PC gamers are going,
well, I thought I was gaming on PC.
I thought I had a high-end GPU.
Why am I compromising?
And especially when we're paying so much money for this high-end hardware,
it goes, well, we have to go, is this really five times,
better than PlayStation 5?
It's better than PlayStation 5, sure,
but is it 5 times better, 6 times
better, or whatever that number works out to
depending on what GPU you're chasing?
And it's just, I think
it's contributing to people feeling like, well,
who cares anyway, because it's all just unattainable?
I think it's really interesting
that the DLSS5 news happened the same week
as the big GTA6 drop,
which is clearly
and publicly non-AI,
no AI,
content, just really handcrafted, you know, all the money on this planet thrown at this project.
And it looks absolutely phenomenal on a base PS5.
And it's kind of reinforcing that idea that, you know, developers just haven't been optimizing.
It's like they're just trying to be lazy doing this.
And it's hard to look at GTA6 and be like, oh, I want DLSS5, not what they do in GTA6.
And so the game's odd out we'll see.
but from my perspective,
I'm like, let's go back to just putting time and care into these games.
With that said, I mean, GTA6 is a guaranteed payout at the end.
And depending on which estimate you're looking at,
is expected to cost anywhere between a billion and $3 billion to produce.
So if anything, I'm going to push back on this,
I'm going to say, I think when we look at what it costs to produce,
produce such a finely tuned insanely well-running, boiled machine like GTA-6,
it's pretty easy to go, oh, well, I can see why almost nobody else is doing that,
because almost nobody else has a built-in buyer base that they know they're going to sell
billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of this game.
No wonder they don't do it.
You are 100% right.
Yeah, it seems that there are exceptions like Expedition 33 where it can look amazing and it comes
from a smaller indie-ish studio and everyone's like, wow, every game should look like this.
But it seems to me that the direction the industry has gone, most studios have not enough money
and not enough time.
Well, Expedition took a lot of flack for how well optimized it was.
Well, how poorly optimized it was.
It runs kind of really well in certain windows.
Like if you kind of tune your settings like this, you know, you can actually get a pretty darn playable experience on like handheld PCs.
But then as soon as you start to turn things on, like PC gamers are used to doing, it starts to really struggle unless you throw extremely high-end hardware at it.
And that's exactly the kind of outrage from the PC community that I was talking about before.
They're not used to that.
They go, well, I spent a bunch of money.
I should be able to turn up all the sliders.
I think something that's really changed, though,
is how scalable the technology that's being sold to developers is.
Like every presentation of Unreal Engine,
they're like, this is what the future will be.
No, nothing can run this right now,
but we're building this into this version of Unreal
so that one day people can crank that slider
and they'll see everything.
And I feel like we rarely got that before.
Crisis.
Exactly.
Crisis was like the one big example of like,
computers can't run this yet.
But one day, they will be able to fully maximize this and it'll be great.
And I think it was exciting when it was a one-off.
And these days it feels like we're just being trailed along to spend more money in the future.
And I think it was exciting back when we would get a new generation of GPUs every year.
And that new generation would be the same price or cheaper.
Whereas now we're being promised this shiny high fidelity rendering future that, you know, people are just looking at and going, well, okay,
car or
GPU. Right. Remember the
970 for $350
you know before the scandal.
Yeah. All that stuff.
Now I want to talk a little bit about
the way that this is actually working
because I've seen some people hooking up
DLSS-5 filters to
like switch to capture cards.
And seeing someone applying it to their webcam output
as well. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's clearly not filter. It's like
doing these neural rendering
things. But
do you think the future is like a world where independent people figure out how to do,
because it's been leaked enough. Now people can apply it to things. Do you think there's a world
where it's not locked to Nvidia and everyone is able to do this kind of technology?
So, I mean, first things first, Nvidia, it's so funny watching Nvidia take all of the
flack for, you know, fake frames and fake resolution and all this kind of stuff. And then you
watch the community slowly get their frogs selves boiled by these new ideas. And then when,
you know, Intel and AMD announced competing features, they kind of go, oh, well, thank goodness,
you know, Intel and AMD are catching up to Nvidia. Now they'll be more competitive and will
be less likely to be beholden to this, you know, monopoly company that has over 90% of the market share
and discrete GPU. And it's like, well, hold on a second. Do you hate these features or do you
like these features because boy do you guys ever buy a lot of
Nvidia GPUs and boy do you ever not buy anyone else's stuff if they
don't support the latest Nvidia features and right to AMD and
Intel's credit you know while they haven't led the charge really on
DLSS because that's Nvidia's technology and they're putting very real
R&D budgets behind this even if you you know it's not a fake
budget even if it's giving you fake frames and fake resolution
they are doing a pretty good job of you know
trying their best to keep up.
And I think that now that
that NVIDIA has shown DLSS-5,
and even before that,
it was very clear that this was the direction
they were headed,
AMD and Intel will be working on this,
and we will see these features on other devices.
With that said, right,
you can't just apply DLSS-5 to your webcam.
That is not DLSS-5.
That is like some elements maybe
of how DLSS-5 is working,
being, you know, bodged together and applied to an output, but it requires vector data that your
webcam simply doesn't have. And, you know, look no further for an illustration of what I'm
talking about than old school frame interpolation and motion prediction on, like, early smart TVs.
I remember we had this partnership back when I was working at the computer store with Samsung.
and they were really pushing this like in-between frame.
I think it was running it up to like 900 hertz fake,
you know, whatever it was.
And they had this scene of like hundreds of birds flying.
And that was one of their demo scenes
to show off this technology in the store.
And the first thing I said when I looked at this,
I went, wow, that looks terrible.
Because bird wings are not easy to predict.
They're easy to predict for a human being who knows,
oh yeah, well, they go all the way.
this way and then they go all the way that way.
But the processor in that smart TV had no idea.
So the wings just ended up being this weird, glitchy mess
because it didn't know which way they were supposed to be moving
and where to put the fake frame that it was inserting in between.
And so without the vector data that is going to tell DLSS-5
what direction it's going, it's all just going to be wings.
Right?
you're going to end up with weird glitches.
So on a pretty static image,
like on this video podcast recording,
it might actually look kind of okay
as like an AI filter,
the same way that any other sort of machine learning-driven filter technology
can work pretty well these days.
But unless you were also adding some means of telling it,
you know, what direction his head is going and at what speed,
it's not going to be able to get,
at the things that were that were occluded in the last frame.
And it's not going to be DLSS-S-5.
It's just going to be using the DLSS-5 DLs to apply a bad-looking AI filter.
Do you imagine that NVIDIA is going to keep changing the way that these filters work?
Because I remember when they first announced DLSS-5 a number of months ago,
they were getting a lot of flak for yassifying the people that they applied it to.
it looked pretty ridiculous.
And now the games look a little bit better,
the face structures look a little bit better.
Do you think that in a way,
them basically having it only work on like a 50-90
on like one game officially
is a way for them to have time to optimize
the way this works when it eventually trickles down
to cheaper graphics cards?
No doubt.
100%.
This is, I hate this line so much
because it is the most.
most just Silicon Valley Tech Bro line and I hate it.
I hated saying trickle down so I understand.
But this is the worst version of DLSS-5 that you'll ever see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It will get better.
And you know what?
If you had asked me this same question a year ago, I'd have said, you know,
I'd have done my usual lines, right?
Never buy what something will be in the future, right?
which is still true.
And I have my doubts about, you know, whether this type of technology will ever be something
that I would want to use, blah, blah, blah, all the usual stuff that I said.
DLSS4.5 really was a turning point for me where I looked at it and I went, well, of course I'd
turn that on.
And I didn't know if I was sure that we would get there.
or even if I was excited about the possibility of getting there,
it wasn't something that I would have been able to recommend to someone
to spend their real hard-earned money on.
Not yet.
It was still something that was, to me, subjective.
Like DLSSS4 was still subjective.
You might like it.
You might appreciate it in these certain scenarios.
There was always an asterisk.
With DLSS4.5, I kind of went, oh, they were right.
Hmm.
And that gives them some credit to me, where they can now make some claims.
And I won't be thinking of, you know, the last time that they made a prediction about the future of rendering and they didn't get it right.
I'll be thinking about the last time they made that prediction, they made that big bet and they nailed it, which was DLSS 4.5.
So maybe that's why even though this is more of like an object enhancement feature than a resolution enhancement feature, they're branding at DLSS because they're lean.
on that credibility that they've built around the DLSSS brand.
Right.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
David, what do you think?
I think that...
I like that you guys are like disagree.
This is good for podcasts.
Oh, you do not all disagree.
Don't get us started on Star Wars.
They already told you not to do that.
I think that the DLSS five that we're going to have in a year
is going to be so markedly different than the one we have now.
And we will have a slew of refined titles.
Right now, we're getting...
YouTube shorts, we're getting videos of people being like,
I turn it on this game, max the settings,
and it looks real bad. And so everyone's
kind of dunking on it doing this. And I think
in the same way that it's gotten harder to identify
AI generated content without really concentrating,
I think we're going to get used to the way that
DLSS looks. It's going to look better and better.
And then eventually it'll become
more and more normalized.
And that's a little bit of a scary prospect for me.
Amazing guys. I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for coming on explaining this.
It's been a while since I've been
in the PC gaming space.
So very helpful.
Appreciate it.
Our pleasure.
Oh, our pleasure.
This was a lot of fun.
Thanks for having us on.
Well, that's been it for the Vergecast.
Let's know what you think.
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The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kajas,
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