Nvidia’s DLSS 5 ‘slop tracing’ leaked early, and Halo looks worse than anyone feared

A GTA V player watched their frame rate fall from 90 fps to 29 fps after turning on a feature that isn’t finished, isn’t released and wasn’t supposed to be in their hands at all.

That’s where Nvidia’s DLSS 5 is right now. An unfinished build of the AI feature leaked, modders got hold of it, and the footage coming out is uglier than the official demos that already had gamers furious.

Halo: Combat Evolved got deep fried

The clip making the rounds is a cutscene from the 2001 original. With the bootleg DLSS 5 running, it doesn’t look upgraded. It looks like it went through fourteen rounds of compression on its way to becoming a meme.

Colors go blotchy, drifting toward cheap HDR. Faces get rendered in hyperrealistic detail that sits wrong against the geometry underneath. Nothing about it resembles how you remember the game looking.

That’s the settings maxed out, to be fair. But the person testing it wasn’t any kinder about the low end: “even in the BEST circumstances it takes out everything and makes it look incredibly generic.”

Their post put it more bluntly still: “NVIDIA gotta cancel DLSS 5 while they still can bro just tried it with Halo and what is this shit 😭 Actual nightmare fuel like we don’t need this”

The frame rate cost is brutal

One user ran it on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the 2024 release, and said their frames per second were cut in half. The GTA V test landed at that 90-to-29 drop.

So you pay a heavy performance tax for visuals most people testing this actively dislike. That’s an unusual trade to ask for.

Cloud Strife, yassified

The other example circulating shows Cloud Strife. Or something wearing his outfit, anyway, with enough makeup applied that he reads as a cosplayer rather than the character.

Gamers have been calling this whole thing “slop tracing,” a jab at Nvidia’s ray tracing branding. The nickname stuck hard enough that CEO Jensen Huang, who these days is generally too occupied with the AI boom to engage with the company’s gaming roots, ended up defending the feature himself.

What the demos already told us

None of this should be a total shock. The official Nvidia demos looked uncanny and disconnected from the source games’ art direction, and they carried that AI sheen you can spot instantly. The backlash started there, before anyone had leaked code to play with.

Worth stating plainly: this isn’t an official DLSS 5 release, and plenty of what’s circulating pushes the feature to an absurd extreme on purpose. Judging shipped software by a leaked build cranked to maximum isn’t fair.

But it still demonstrates how thoroughly the tech can flatten a game’s original look and swap in something cheap and gaudy. And it lands a long way from the pitch.

From “GPT moment” to damage control

When DLSS was announced in March, Huang called it gaming’s “GPT moment for graphics.” The evangelism cooled once the criticism refused to fade. He’s since said he hates “AI slop” too, while maintaining that DLSS 5 is doing something else entirely.

The leaked build is the first chance anyone outside Nvidia has had to test that distinction. If you’ve got a copy, run it on something you love and cared about the art in, then decide whether you’d keep it on for the halved frame rate.