Nvidia's DLSS 5 is designed to add photographic realism to modern 3D titles, but modder Valery Kryzhanovsky has been forcing it into games where it was never meant to run. His experiments, documented on YouTube and in blog posts, cover everything from 2D platformers and RPGs to contemporary games like The Witcher 3 and Marvel's Spider-Man. For retro DOS titles, he ran them in DOSBox and layered DLSS 5 on top using ReShade, with RenoDX providing the configuration interface.
The results vary widely. In the original 1991 Duke Nukem, the filter can emboss rectangular visual elements and add a sense of depth, while doing a decent job of detecting objects like the player, enemies, and bullets without disturbing their inner details. But if the filter is applied too strongly, the output quickly starts to look like an acid trip. Kryzhanovsky notes that the injection point matters as much as the filter strength or color preset: injecting at the render stage in a 3D game like RBDOOM-3-BFG changes actual face geometry.
Kryzhanovsky concludes that force-injected DLSS 5 works best with still images, as demonstrated by the consistent results he got with Heroes of Might and Magic. He believes the technology is promising but undercooked, and he identifies the lack of a temporal element — it only analyzes the current frame — as a key drawback. The source article provides no independent testing or counterpoints, so these assessments rest solely on the modder's own findings.