Hogwarts Legacy gets DLSS 5 neural rendering, War Thunder is next

Hogwarts Legacy on PC now supports DLSS 5, NVIDIA’s AI “neural rendering” mode that reworks how light and surfaces look in a frame. The update is live for owners of GeForce RTX 50 Series desktops and laptops, RTX Spark PCs and GeForce NOW Ultimate subscribers. Players switch it on with a new “Neural Rendering” option in the game’s settings.

Two more games are lined up this month, according to NVIDIA: War Thunder gets support in mid-November and Where Winds Meet follows on November 23.

What DLSS 5 actually changes

Earlier DLSS versions were mostly about speed, rendering fewer pixels and filling in the rest. DLSS 5 adds a final AI pass on top of the finished image. It keeps the game’s own geometry, textures and lighting as the base, then adds detail such as deeper shadows in corners, light passing through skin and richer materials.

Earlier this year the technology became the subject of “horror-show” memes online, though Ars Technica notes it has come a long way since then. NVIDIA’s answer is developer control: studios can pick between several models, mix them per scene, dial “structure” and “tone” intensity up or down, and mask out characters so only the environment is enhanced.

Avalanche Software says it used those controls to lift the look of Hogwarts environments while keeping characters recognisable. “This allowed us to iterate and tune environments, tone and skin structural parameters in a manner that keeps the game true to the original vision,” said Jose Villeta, the studio’s director of software engineering.

Performance

Combined with 6X Multi Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction and Reflex, NVIDIA claims the RTX 5090 runs the game at max settings with ray tracing at up to 300 frames per second in 4K. NVIDIA also says the neural rendering model got 2X faster in an update last month. These are the company’s own figures.

Reported by NVIDIA, Ars Technica. Compiled with AI tools.