A fan-made graphics mod has sim racers convinced that a decade-old PC game now looks sharper than the real thing.
Assetto Corsa has no official DLSS 5 support from Nvidia or from Kunos, the studio that built it, so what's circulating is the work of community modders.
The recording proved so striking that a screen recording of the game received over 13,000 likes on X. Take a look for yourself. It really is incredible.
The clip itself is an onboard lap in a chrome Vodafone McLaren-Mercedes, the driver wearing a yellow, Hamilton-style helmet, threading a hilly circuit hemmed in by walls. The visuals really are the point as reflections roll across the bodywork, light bounces and pools the way it would on a real track, with a surface that has a depth the original game never had.
YouTube has accumulated a number of similar videos over the last couple of weeks, featuring recreations such as Hamilton's 2011 MP4-26 navigating the Nordschleife and Senna's MP4/6 at Silverstone. Hamilton-era McLarens have become the go-to demo cars due to the incredible reflections.
What DLSS 5 actually does
Nvidia's DLSS 5 is an AI neural rendering system. It takes the finished frame from a game engine and layers on lighting and material detail that developers usually leave out to protect frame rates. In March earlier this year, Jensen Huang showed off the technology at GTC before its debut on 3 September.
The rollout is escalating, too. An even better variant debuts tomorrow, with Nvidia claiming huge performance gains and 20% reduced 4K memory consumption. DLSS 5 integration arrives for RTX Remix development utilities on 23 October. Unfortunately, no current racing games currently officially support this. That's why...
A fan mod is the way to do it
This is where the community stepped in. Kunos developed Assetto Corsa as a PC racing simulator in 2014, maintaining its player base through extensive community modifications, particularly the widely used Custom Shaders Patch.
Modders have now found a way to push DLSS 5-style rendering into the game through tools such as OptiScaler loaders and ReShade. Nvidia locks its own model to RTX 50 cards, yet some of these set-ups even run on AMD hardware. GameGPU reports roughly 27 to 30 fps at 4K on a Radeon RX 9060 XT. That's playable, barely, for a game from 2014.
So this is a community mod, not actually Nvidia's technology bolted onto Kunos's game, and it comes with the usual caveats. It's demanding, Kunos doesn't support it, and you should expect plenty of glitches. One Steam user described the result as "very similar to Reshade, but with much bigger performance impact". Not exactly a ringing endorsement, though it doesn't seem to be affecting how impressed people are by these graphics.
So, will developers adopt this technique? If a handful of modders can get clips like this out of a game from 2014, the major sim studios will have noticed.