Nvidia's DLSS 5 is capable of turning a video game character into something that reads as an actual human being. Therein lies the trouble.
There is nothing wrong with photorealism in games. It’s a fine goal. But a line exists somewhere, and DLSS 5 blew straight through it, leaving beloved digital faces looking real in the same unsettling way a wax museum feels real.
All of which leads to the experiment that no one had asked anybody for: Fallout: New Vegas, the action RPG from 2010, pushed through DLSS 5.
Thirteen minutes in a Mojave nobody requested
The showcase comes from YouTuber Ryan Bevins. It runs thirteen minutes, with the game rendered via DLSS 5, neural rendering and an RTX 5080 carrying the workload.
In Bevins’ own words, this is “Fallout: New Vegas running at 2560×1440 with experimental DLSS 5 Neural Rendering through DLSS5-Feeder.”
Watch it and judge for yourself: upgrade, or haunting?
The game could use a hand. Maybe not this one
It’s worth being fair about where this starts. New Vegas does look dated, and that’s to be expected. The thing shipped on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 more than a decade ago.
To this day a large chunk of players insist it’s the finest Fallout anyone has made. Pixel counts were never the reason for that reputation. Still, a touch-up wouldn’t go amiss.
Whether DLSS 5 is the touch-up anybody had in mind is another matter entirely.
The comments section turned on itself
Viewers arrived split down the middle, and nobody was being polite about it.
“The models look fantastic and benefit greatly from DLSS 5,” read one comment.
A second viewer was rather less generous: “Fallout: New Vegas looks so bad even DLSS 5 can’t help it, but the characters do look slightly better.”
The slider problem
The most incisive observation in the thread came from a single commenter, and it applies far beyond this one game — it’s about the entire genre of comparison video.
“With these comparison videos, I feel that people just put the neural slider all the way to the max and call it a day instead of making it look decent with tastefully adjusted slider values,” they wrote. “It’s like putting a sharpening filter or contrast filter all the way to the right, it’ll make things worse, it has to be adjusted per game basis.”
Plenty of others summed it up in a single word. “Uncanny.”
Bethesda has the official version in the works
Bethesda currently has a proper New Vegas remake in development, and a Fallout 3 remake is in the pipeline too. So the real answer to “what should this game look like in 2026” is still being drafted — by people with the source files in hand, rather than a neural slider.
In the meantime, we have thirteen minutes of footage in which Benny’s face resembles somebody who might genuinely turn up on your doorstep.