Sometimes, photorealism (or something approaching it) makes a video game look better. Other times, well, you get whatever this is from NVIDIA’s leaked build of DLSS 5. The unfinished software, extracted from an early-access PC version of NBA 2K27, has been grafted onto various games. The results are… let’s just say, not universally beloved.

DLSS 5’s neural rendering model takes the upscaling technology in a new direction. Rather than simply reconstructing a sharper version of the image the game rendered, it “infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials,” according to NVIDIA. In practice, the results look more uncanny valley than truly next-gen. It’s like someone fed a still image from the game into Midjourney and prompted it to “make it look photorealistic.”

In fairness, the images and videos circulating online are from an early, unofficial build of NVIDIA’s upscaling tech. But with that requisite caveat out of the way, let’s have a laugh at how surreal and off-putting some of these results are.

Take Jesse Faden from Control, one of the first games to get the unofficial DLSS 5 treatment. In the game, she’s supposed to be roughly 28. But after applying a little DLSS 5 magic, she suddenly looks middle-aged. You can kinda see how the AI could get there from the original face. But it still misses the mark, simultaneously looking more real and more fake.

Then we have Skyrim (because, no matter the subject, we’ll always have Skyrim). DLSS 5 makes its lower-poly characters look like a 3D scan of a real person plastered onto a 15-year-old video game character.

Even setting aside how the technology can dramatically alter faces, there’s the fact that the underlying character models and animations are left untouched. That creates a bizarre mismatch that only heightens the uncanny effect. The faces may look kinda real-ish — until you see them stare blankly into the distance with suspiciously stiff movements.

If all of this kept performance in check, it might be strange but harmless. After all, if a developer wants to implement it and a player likes it, knock yourselves out. But that isn’t the case, at least with this leaked build. With Neural Rendering enabled, Control on an RTX 5070 Ti reportedly dropped from 71 fps to 35 fps at 4K. If the final version looks weird and kills performance, it’s hard to see this as anything but NVIDA — now an AI company first and foremost — losing touch with the gaming audience that took it to the top.

DLSS 5 is scheduled to launch in its official form this fall. Once developer-approved versions start rolling out, it’ll be interesting to see whether intentionally integrated uses of the final technology look and feel more natural.