A Russian modder has pushed Nvidia's leaked DLSS 5 into a game it was never meant to touch: the MS-DOS version of Pac-Man. Valery Kryzhanovsky ran the classic arcade title through the MAME emulator and used ReShade to inject DLSS 5 into the graphics pipeline, with RenoDX allowing the upscaler's parameters to be tweaked. The result is a short video showing four rendering modes, each with its own bizarre interpretation of the maze, the ghosts, and even the dots.
The experiment highlights how DLSS 5 behaves when there is almost no 3D information to work with. Kryzhanovsky explains that 1x Multipass does little for older games, so multiple passes are needed to make changes stack up. In Pac-Man's case, that usually makes things look bad: one mode gives the ghosts cheekbones, another puts Blinky in what he calls a film nobody greenlit, and a third removes the green ghost's eyes entirely, making it look genuinely creepy. The flat, 2D nature of the game leaves DLSS with little to enhance except eyes, which is why the results look so unnatural.
Not every retro game fares as poorly. Kryzhanovsky notes that Duke Nukem from 1991 handled DLSS 5 much better, thanks to its metal environments and visible occlusion along walls and ceilings. He also cautions that the leaked 150MB DLSS 5 build is still undertrained and lacks temporal context, comparing it to earlier DLSS models. The final release, he suggests, will likely come with a more mature model and a larger file size.