Nvidia's DLSS 5 Comes to Hogwarts Legacy, but Fans Are Split on the Visual Upgrade

About a month after making its debut in NBA 2K27, DLSS 5 is now making its way to Hogwarts Legacy, complete with a newer, faster model.

In a blog post, Nvidia announced a new DLSS 5 model that, according to Team Green, is twice as fast as the one that launched in NBA 2K27 last month. The basketball game will receive an update adding this new model, boosting performance, while Nvidia is also bringing the neural rendering tech to Hogwarts Legacy and Where Winds Meet in November.

Nvidia has been working hard to make DLSS 5 run well enough that players will actually enable it. That focus makes sense; when I first tested the tech back in September, it absolutely tanked my frame rate at 4K on an RTX 5090. Not long ago, Nvidia unveiled the technology at GTC 2026 in March, where it required two RTX 5090s just to deliver a playable experience—and even then, it was extremely limited.

Now, Nvidia claims the new model is twice as fast as September's version and ten times faster than when DLSS 5 was first revealed. If true—and I'll need to test it myself to confirm—it explains why developers are now willing to add the feature to their games.

But unlike some of the extreme examples I've seen of DLSS modded into games, the Hogwarts Legacy footage Nvidia shared in its blog is much more subtle. Rather than completely altering how characters look, as it did when DLSS 5 was first revealed, it mostly seems to balance lighting and subsurface scattering.

I'm not alone in noticing. On Twitter, NikTek posted a GIF scrubbing through an image comparison with DLSS 5 on and off, pointing out how minor the difference is. He then questioned who would actually use it given such a small visual change and a big performance hit. However, some people 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."

Ultimately, how subtle DLSS 5 appears will depend on the developer. There are plenty of dials devs can adjust to make the game look as natural as possible—or lean the opposite way and make games look like some kind of nightmare ripped straight from Midjourney. Still, it's at least a little reassuring that in NBA 2K27 and now in Hogwarts Legacy, the developers are trying to maintain the same aesthetic.

No matter how subtle it is, though, DLSS 5 works by using AI to re-draw games, even though it's anchored by the geometry and color data provided by the game. That's definitely enough to turn some people off the tech, but if the changes are subtle enough and performance continues to improve at this pace, I can see it eventually being added to more than just one or two games.