NVIDIA is getting ready to unleash DLSS 5, its latest attempt to push real-time game graphics closer to photorealism. The company says the new 3D-guided neural rendering technology will be available from September 3 at 9 p.m. PT, with NBA 2K27 becoming its first game to support it across RTX 50-series GPUs, laptops and GeForce NOW.
I got a look at DLSS 5 running in NBA 2K27 and the Zorah demo at Gamescom, and I’ll admit: it is considerably more impressive in motion than the initial announcement might suggest.
When NVIDIA first showed DLSS 5, one of the immediate concerns was that AI-generated visuals could end up overriding the artistic choices made by game developers. Having seen the technology in action, that’s not really what is happening here.
DLSS 5 analyzes the rendered frame along with information such as color and motion vectors, using its neural model to understand characters, objects, materials, lighting and their relationships within a scene. More importantly, developers remain in control of how much of that processing actually happens.
That control goes surprisingly deep. Developers can use automatic or manual masking and adjust the intensity of structural details such as contact shadows, reflections and ambient occlusion, as well as broader lighting and color response. They can also apply those controls globally or to individual objects. In other words, DLSS 5 isn’t simply telling a game, “Here, let me make this prettier.” Artists can decide what gets the AI treatment and how aggressive it should be.
And this is where the technology gets particularly interesting. In the demos I saw, DLSS 5 could distinguish different elements within a scene and treat them independently. A character, their clothing, surrounding objects and the background can effectively become separate pieces that developers can control. The result is a much more convincing interaction between lighting, materials and surfaces.
NVIDIA also emphasizes that the better the input, the better the output. That makes sense: DLSS 5 isn’t conjuring an entire game out of thin air. It is using the information already produced by the game to enhance the final image.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for me wasn’t even the visual quality. It was the hardware running it. When DLSS 5 was initially shown, the technology required two RTX 5090 GPUs. At Gamescom, however, I saw the technology running on a laptop equipped with an RTX 5060. That’s a pretty wild reduction in hardware requirements for something that is still producing remarkably convincing results.
There is a performance trade-off depending on the quality settings, but the visual improvement is hard to ignore. NVIDIA’s own NBA 2K27 figures show DLSS 5 running alongside ray tracing and DLSS Multi Frame Generation, with an RTX 5060 reaching 258 fps at 1080p High settings, while an RTX 5090 reaches 370 fps at 4K Ultra using Performance mode.
And that is probably the part I’m most excited to test properly. DLSS 5 isn’t just another checkbox in NVIDIA’s increasingly enormous graphics-settings menu. From what I’ve seen, it can fundamentally change how lighting, materials and characters appear on screen while still giving developers considerable control over the final image.
NBA 2K27 gets first dibs on September 3. Based on what I saw at Gamescom, I’m very curious to see whether DLSS 5 can consistently deliver that same “wait, that’s actually rendered in real time?” feeling once it leaves the carefully prepared demo environment.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.