You might have seen headlines all over the place saying that DLSS 5 is working in all sorts of video games and applications, but it's important to remember that while modding and workarounds have allowed for that, "official" DLSS 5 support is still only limited to one game: NBA 2K27. Now, Nvidia has announced that support is expanding, so folks with 40 or 50 Series graphics cards should take note.
DLSS 5 support is arriving this month for Hogwarts Legacy, War Thunder, and Where Winds Meet. Hogwarts Legacy will receive support on November 5 as HBO's Harry Potter series waits in the wings for its December 26 release date. War Thunder will see the feature added in "mid-November", and Where Winds Meet will get the upgrade on November 23 in the US and November 24 in other territories.
Most of the conversation surrounding DLSS 5 since its official launch, surprisingly, hasn't been about the AI image quality or yassification of characters under it. In fact, talk of the town seems to have been the fact that using DLSS 5 cripples frame rates in games, even on high-end Nvidia hardware. I found this while doing my own testing with DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27, but Nvidia has since updated the AI model to reportedly deliver 2x the speed.
Official DLSS 5 support will mean that the developers of these supported games will have had their say in the way it influences their art. Any game that's seen unofficial support will have just had the upscaler applied as a blanket over the artwork, but this next batch of games could go a long way to showing how versatile DLSS 5 can or can't be when developers have had a chance to steer it in (slightly) different directions. These include choices between different AI models and sliders to enhance individual things within environments.
So far, we've only seen that at work in one sports game that's targeting a photorealistic, broadcast look, and it'll be interesting to see how that will translate to the upcoming trio of supported games.
When I spoke to DLSS 5 engineers at Gamescom, they told me this technology was only being targeted at games striving for photorealism. I can absolutely see that in something like War Thunder, but Hogwarts Legacy and Where Winds Meet have more stylized, video game-y takes on what photorealism means for their character models, so I'll be intrigued to see if that all holds true.
Thankfully, from the Hogwarts Legacy trailer above, it looks as though a lot of the yassificaiton of the game's characters from the initial DLSS 5 reveal has been abandoned, with most of the upscaling work going toward extremely lifelike environments and lighting.
Ironically, the performance stats displayed in that trailer from Nvidia show how DLSS 5 runs in 4K with an RTX 5090. Currently, it's near impossible to find stock of the RTX 5090 or 5080 in the US as rumors swirl that both GPUs have been discontinued, and that a 24GB RTX 5080 could be replacing both in the months to come. With massive inflation in the cost of Nvidia graphics cards due to the RAM shortage, that would likely be as expensive as you suspect.
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