NVIDIA announced DLSS 5 at GTC 2026, and it is genuinely different from every previous version. It is not upscaling. It is not frame generation. DLSS 5 is a real-time neural rendering model that takes a game frame's colour and motion data and adds photoreal lighting, skin detail, fabric texture, and material response directly on top of it, all on a single RTX 50-series GPU in real time. This guide explains exactly what DLSS 5 is, how it works, what changed from DLSS 4.5, which GPUs will support it, which games are confirmed, and what the honest concerns are from early demos.