Gaming has been Samarveer’s greatest passion, and the Literature graduate in him takes immense joy in dissecting games for their themes, messages, and impact. Samarveer holds a deep appreciation of gaming, and considers the platform to be the most immersive and impactful across all media. He can be found engaging with gaming communities online, always ready to debate the finer points of ray tracing or itching to write an 8-page collegiate thesis on any game that impacts him emotionally.
I'll admit I haven't been particularly kind to DLSS 5. Nvidia's neural rendering tech has always struck me as an expensive solution to a problem nobody asked it to solve. It seemed like it had a nasty habit of steamrolling artistic intent in favor of that unmistakable AI-generated sheen.
I still think there's plenty of truth to that criticism, but after spending considerably more time experimenting with DLSS 5 on my own PC and my own games, I've found myself in an uncomfortable position — I'm starting to like it. Interestingly, that change in opinion is because of OptiScaler, which lets me completely change how I experience neural rendering.
I was wrong about DLSS 5 being a binary switch
Actually using neural rendering changed my perspective
I've spent enough time criticizing DLSS 5 to know exactly what I dislike about it. Neural rendering can make every game look over-processed and smooths over deliberately crafted details. My concern was never that the technology didn't work — we're talking about Nvidia, after all. I just had apprehensions about the way DLSS 5 seemed to make somebody else's artistic decisions for them, without giving players much say in the matter.
Now, the official way to use DLSS 5 is to have an RTX 50-series GPU and use neural rendering only in the games that officially support it (very short list at the moment). However, the open-source and modding community has been using the DLSS neural rendering files, along with tools like OptiScaler (or ReShade) to experiment with the new tech and inject it into any game they can.
OptiScaler, in particular, works fantastically with any game that already has support for DLSS Super Resolution, and that's exactly what I've been using for my games as well. With OptiScaler, I realized that I could actually influence how neural rendering looked in my games. Between the available presets, model choices, and rendering controls, DLSS 5 became something I could tweak and play around with instead of being a single-push visual makeover I had to accept as is.
OptiScaler gives me more control than native PC ports
More knobs to turn and fewer frames to sacrifice
Right off the bat, it's remarkable how OptiScaler lets my RTX 4070 Ti run DLSS 5. It has given me an absurd amount of control over how the technology behaves. OptiScaler lets me choose between Natural, Cinematic, and Default presets, each with models A, B, and C. I can even tweak the render resolution and experiment with the final image instead of letting Nvidia's preferred implementation dictate what my games should look like.
Let's not ignore the elephant in the room, though — the DLSS 5 performance tax. Using even a single neural rendering layer on top of your active game more than halves your frame rate, which is a terrible cost to pay. It feels like the ray-tracing tax all the way back in 2020, except it's a little easier on the eyes. Thankfully, it's OptiScaler that lets me really get some of that performance back with a setting that is inarguably the star of the neural rendering show.
OptiScaler lets users move neural rendering before super resolution kicks in. That way, if you're using DLSS Super Resolution to render the game at a lower internal resolution before upscaling it to your target resolution of 1440p or 4K, OptiScaler applies the neural rendering to the lower resolution instead of the final resolution. The GPU having to do less work every second instantly results in better and smoother performance, all while keeping the results almost the same, and miles ahead of vanilla, non-DLSS 5 rendering.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that using OptiScaler allows me to access multi-frame generation. MFG is officially available only on RTX 50-series GPUs, but OptiScaler makes it available on other GPUs as well, including my RTX 4070 Ti. This gives me a much bigger frame rate number to absorb neural rendering's overhead, which ultimately makes DLSS 5 less expensive to use in real time.
Neural rendering is becoming whatever PC games want it to be
And that's the way it should be
If the PC community has taught me anything, it's that artificial limitations rarely survive contact with enthusiasts who are sufficiently determined. Not only do I have two major RTX 50-series exclusive features on my 3-year-old, "last-gen" card, but I'm able to run them pretty smoothly.
I've argued before how neural rendering risks homogenizing games and replacing art direction with AI-generated eye candy, but experimenting with DLSS 5 across different games has shown me that the technology can be genuinely transformative when applied thoughtfully. My favorite games have been benefiting from visual makeovers I never knew I wanted.
There's no doubt that Nvidia will keep refining its implementation, but I don't need to wait for another iteration to appreciate what's possible today. I just want the freedom to decide how my games look, and OptiScaler has given me another reason to love PC gaming. Once something like DLSS 5.5 actually drops, with refinements worth of a new or half-generation title, we'll have a whole host of new implementations to play around with. In the meantime, I'm cautiously optimistic, and raring to go and test neural rendering on any game I haven't transformed or "remastered" already.
I'm glad I gave DLSS 5 another chance
The best part about PC gaming — apart from the expensive hardware and never-ending benchmarking — is the freedom to experiment, break things, and discover possibilities that even hardware manufacturers or game developers may never have thought of. Sure, I've spent plenty of evenings wrestling with the DLSS 5 DLL files instead of actually sitting down to play my games, but that's part of the experience at this point.
I still have reservations about where Nvidia is taking neural rendering, and I don't expect every future implementation to win me over. But I've learned that there's a considerable difference between disliking a technology's worst tendencies and dismissing everything it can accomplish. OptiScaler has given me enough reasons to keep an open mind, which is not something I would have said about DLSS 5 a few months ago.
