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Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein@opinali · Mar 19, 2026

Daniel got important clarifications from NVIDIA. TLDR: the "DLSS5 skeptical" were right about *everything*. 1⃣ It's a…

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Summary

NVIDIA clarified that DLSS5 is a 2D AI filter that only sees color and motion data, lacking access to geometry and lighting information. The technology relies on guessing scene properties from pixels alone, explaining why demo scenes featured simple lighting and why it struggles with fast motion and complex illumination.

Summarized by ThreadOut AI from the full thread. May miss nuance — read the thread below.

  1. #1

    Daniel got important clarifications from NVIDIA. TLDR: the "DLSS5 skeptical" were right about *everything*. 1⃣ It's a 2D AI Filter. Input is only color buffer & motion vectors. The model doesn't see geometry, lights, PBR properties, normals, anything🧵 youtu.be/D0EM1vKt36s

  2. #2

    2⃣ Extremely minimal "artistic control". You can turn things on/off or mix with alpha blending and control color grading and that's it NVIDIA says they're listening to devs about extra controls but IMO high-level, subtle knobs (like prompts to a diffusion app) are very unlikely.

  3. #3

    What the AI does is *inference*. It looks at the pixels of a jacket and recognizes leather. It looks at the pixels of shadows and reflections and guesses where the lights are, their intensity, color, etc. It figures out the 3D shape of objects by their contours, shadows, etc.

  4. #4

    Then it proceeds using those guesses to re-render the scene. If the guesses are good, the result can be a lot better than the original (at least for some definitions of better i.e. more realistic and detailed). And this explains one big red flag in the reveal demos...

  5. #5

    Every scene/game had VERY simple illumination; often just ambient light. Sun/outdoors. They didn't pick their usual Path Traced demos with tons of light sources and emissives. I bet the model isn't even close to do all the guesswork for this. Especially without SSR effects.

  6. #6

    It can't even handle any fast moving object wells, but to be fair I don't know if those catastrophic frames in the FIFA demo should be blamed on the upscaler, FG, or the new AI filter. All of them have trouble with big disocclusions and very fast things. AI is not magic.

  7. #7

    I hope I'm wrong but I don't think see this improving much any soon. We may be many HW & model gens, plus much better artistic controls, away from something good. But it could be OK already in easy cases, eg slow-paced games that go for a very realistic presentation like TLOU.🔚