Nvidia's DLSS 5 can make a video game character look like a real person. That’s the problem.
Photorealism in games is fine. Good, even. But there’s a line, and DLSS 5 sprinted past it, leaving some of our favorite digital faces looking terrifyingly real in the way a wax museum is terrifyingly real.
Which brings us to the latest experiment nobody requested: Fallout: New Vegas, the 2010 action RPG, run through DLSS 5.
A 13-minute look at the Mojave you didn’t ask for
YouTuber Ryan Bevins put together the showcase. Thirteen minutes of the game rendered with DLSS 5, neural rendering and an RTX 5080 doing the heavy lifting.
Bevins described it as “Fallout: New Vegas running at 2560×1440 with experimental DLSS 5 Neural Rendering through DLSS5-Feeder.”
So now you can decide for yourself whether this is an upgrade or a haunting.
The game does need help. Just maybe not this help
Let’s be honest about the starting point. New Vegas looks outdated, and it should. It launched on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 well over a decade ago.
Plenty of players still call it the best Fallout ever made. That reputation was never built on pixel counts. But a facelift wouldn’t hurt.
The question is whether DLSS 5 is the facelift anyone wanted.
The comments section picked a fight with itself
Viewers showed up divided, and they didn’t hold back.
“The models look fantastic and benefit greatly from DLSS 5,” one comment read.
Another was less charitable: “Fallout: New Vegas looks so bad even DLSS 5 can’t help it, but the characters do look slightly better.”
The slider problem
One commenter made the sharpest point in the thread, and it’s less about this game than about every comparison video like it.
“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.”
Others reached for a shorter word. “Uncanny.”
Bethesda is working on the real thing
An official New Vegas remake is currently in development at Bethesda, alongside a remake of Fallout 3. Which means the definitive answer to “what should this game look like in 2026” is still being written by people with access to the source files, not a neural slider.
Until then, there’s a 13-minute video of Benny’s face looking a little too much like a person who could show up at your door.
