Nvidia's DLSS 5 has leaked, and modders are already creating uncanny valley nightmares

Credit: @stopmrdomino.bsky.social Published Aug 28, 2026, 12:47 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary A leaked version of DLSS 5 has allowed modders to run the neural upscaling model in several games, producing uncanny, altered visuals. The unfinished DLSS 5 build is creating freaky character faces and changing the vibe of games — it's sometimes amusing but often terrifying. This early version of DLSS 5 is extremely resource-intensive, and modders are reporting nearly a 50% performance loss. Back in March, there was a notable uproar about Nvidia's DLSS 5 and its generative AI upscaling, which takes things to the next level by actually altering how games look artistically. Some called it a "yassification filter," while others said it's just straight-up AI slop, prompting Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to tell everyone they're "completely wrong" about the tech. Fast-forward a few months, and an unfinished version of DLSS 5 has leaked in NBA 2K27's early access build, giving us a glimpse of the uncanny-valley abominations the technology is capable of creating. According to VideoCardz, modders identified the "nvngx_dlssnr.dll" libraryfile asversion 310.8.0.0 of NVIDIA DLSSNR, which contains the unreleased runtime for DLSS 5 Neural Rendering.Very quickly, the RenoDX modding community got to work and got DLSS 5 running in Control. Since then, modders have added DLSS 5 to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. There are even examples out there of the technology running in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. We might be entering gaming's AI slop era It's unclear if the final version of DLSS 5 will look this extreme The results in Control don't actually seem that bad, especially the changes to the detail in the environment (check it out in the video below), but when you look atCloud in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, things start to fall apart very quickly. CJ in GTA: San Andreas also looks pretty terrifying and is something I wish I could unsee. DLSS 5 adds an uncanny filter to characters, with Cloud looking barely recognizable (amusingly, he resembles an Instagram influencer). And let's ignore how DLSS 5 changes Skyrim's visual vibe almost entirely.It also seems that the unreleased version of DLSS 5 is ridiculously resource-intensive, with one modder on the RenoDX Discord server reporting an "almost 50 percent performance loss" (via Kotaku). It's worth noting that this is an unfinished version of DLSS 5, so while it's undeniably fun to poke fun at the AI upscaling tech, it's unclear if this is what the final version of the technology will look like. Games built from the ground up with DLSS 5 in mind will likely look way better.But on the other hand, maybe they won't, and we're about to enter gaming's AI slop era in a big way.