Nvidia Brings DLSS 5 to Hogwarts Legacy, but Some Fans Can't Tell the Difference
About a month after it debuted in NBA 2K27, DLSS 5 is now being added to Hogwarts Legacy, with a newer, faster model.
In a blog post, Nvidia announced that it is launching a new model for DLSS 5 that's — according to Team Green — twice as fast as the model that debuted in NBA 2K27 last month. While the basketball game will be getting an update that adds this new model, and thus improves performance, Nvidia is also bringing the neural rendering tech to Hogwarts Legacy and Where Winds Meet in November.
Nvidia has been hard at work getting DLSS 5 to run well enough that people will actually turn it on when they're playing games. It's not hard to see why that's a major focus; when I first tested the tech back in September, I found that it could absolutely cripple my frame rate at 4K on the RTX 5090. It wasn't long ago, either, that Nvidia debuted the technology at GTC 2026 in March, where it needed to run on two RTX 5090s to deliver a playable experience, and even then it was super limited.
Now, though, Nvidia claims the new model is twice as fast as September's model, and ten times faster than it was when DLSS 5 was first revealed. If that's true — and I won't know that until I actually test it — it makes sense that developers are now willing to add the feature to their games.
But unlike some of the deep-fried examples I've seen of DLSS getting modded into games, the Hogwarts Legacy examples Nvidia shared in its blog are a lot more subtle. Rather than completely changing the way characters look, like it did when DLSS 5 was first revealed, it mostly just looks like it balances lighting and subsurface scattering.
And I'm not alone there. Over on X/Twitter, NikTek posted a GIF of him scrubbing through an image comparison with DLSS 5 turned on and off, and noted how small of a difference it makes. He then wonders who would actually use it with such a minor visual change and a big performance hit. However, there were some folks who applauded the subtle changes, with jayv7s replying, "This is the correct way to use it, no exaggerated AI slop filters on top, just normal pure improvement."
However, the subtlety of DLSS 5 will ultimately depend on the developer. There are plenty of dials that devs can adjust to make the game look as natural as possible, or leaning in the opposite direction to make games look like some kind of nightmare ripped straight from Midjourney. However, it is at least a little bit reassuring that in NBA 2K27 and now in Hogwarts Legacy, the developers are at least trying to maintain the same aesthetic.
No matter how subtle it is, though, DLSS 5 does work by using AI to re-draw games, even though it is anchored by the geometry and color data provided by the game. That's definitely enough to turn some people off of this tech, but if the changes are subtle enough and the performance continues to improve at this pace, I can see it eventually getting added to more than one or two games.