Nvidia’s DLSS 5 AI-Slop Filter May Halve Your Framerate

As an experimental version of Nvidia’s upcoming DLSS 5 makes its way into the community, modders are diving into the AI-driven upscaling tech, discovering that with the right tweaks, it can occasionally enhance the visuals of certain games. However, Nvidia has officially confirmed that using DLSS 5 can lead to a staggering 50 to 60 percent drop in framerate across any game. Not exactly ideal.

While I’m no graphics guru, I understand that upscaling is meant to elevate game visuals beyond what your hardware can typically achieve. It employs advanced algorithms to allow games to run at higher resolutions and improved framerates—DLSS 4, for example, could generate three synthetic frames for every real one and handle ray tracing more efficiently. Yet, modders have reported significant performance issues with the leaked DLSS 5, and it appears this isn’t just a quirk of the pre-release version.

Nvidia confirmed during a tech demo that DLSS 5 indeed reduces performance by 50 to 60 percent across all games, meaning your framerates could be slashed in half just to make characters look more ghostly. This performance hit affects even the most powerful GPUs, which is hardly a win for gamers.

In defense, Nvidia pointed out that six months ago, the new AI tech required two RTX 5090s to function at all, suggesting that the current performance, while disappointing, is a significant improvement in a short time. The official launch of DLSS 5 is set for September 3, leaving little room for major enhancements before then. Perhaps in another six months, it will be refined enough to offer some real benefits?

If you were considering whether DLSS 5 was worth it, this news might just push you off the fence. The idea of in-game characters resembling deflated balloons doesn’t sound appealing, and with the current GPU market being either impossible or prohibitively expensive to navigate, it’s hard to see this tech as a positive development for gamers.