NVIDIA announces DLSS 5 with photorealistic lighting to change the future of gaming

At its GTC 2026 event, NVIDIA has officially announced DLSS 5, a new version of its Deep Learning Super Sampling technology. The next generation of its AI-powered graphics technology introduces neural rendering techniques designed to create more realistic lighting and materials in games. The feature is expected to launch later this year.

DLSS has long been used to upscale lower-resolution frames into higher-resolution images using AI, boosting performance while maintaining visual quality, with DLSS 4.5 being the most recent update. The new version takes that concept further by using neural networks to assist with parts of the rendering pipeline itself, rather than simply reconstructing pixels.

What’s new in DLSS 5?

The biggest shift with DLSS 5 is the introduction of neural rendering, a technique where AI helps generate elements of a scene, such as lighting, materials, and surface detail, rather than relying entirely on traditional rendering methods. The system can produce photorealistic lighting effects and more accurate material reflections, potentially improving realism in ray-traced environments while maintaining high frame rates.

The technology builds on earlier DLSS features like Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Frame Generation, but moves further toward an AI-assisted graphics pipeline where neural networks play a bigger role in how scenes are constructed.

Which hardware will support DLSS 5?

NVIDIA hasn’t officially confirmed which GPU architectures will support DLSS 5 yet, but the company has said the technology will arrive alongside RTX 50-series GPUs later this year. According to Digital Foundry, NVIDIA described the lighting improvements shown in its demo as “transformational,” with the feature expected to roll out around Fall 2026.

Interestingly, the demo setup used to showcase DLSS 5 wasn’t running on a typical gaming PC. Digital Foundry reports that NVIDIA used two GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs: one dedicated to running the game itself, while the second handled the DLSS 5 neural-rendering workload. This setup is currently required because the technology still needs significant optimization, particularly in terms of performance efficiency and VRAM usage.

That said, NVIDIA says DLSS 5 is ultimately designed to run on a single GPU, and that’s how it’s expected to ship when the technology launches publicly later this year.