DLSS 5 in Hogwarts Legacy: Too Subtle to Notice?

Nvidia's DLSS 5 neural rendering hits Hogwarts Legacy, but players say the visual upgrade is barely visible — and it costs up to 42% of your frame rate on an RTX 5090.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 is back in the hot seat, and this time the complaint is the exact opposite of before. On November 5, Hogwarts Legacy officially rolled out its DLSS 5 neural rendering update — and players are squinting at their screens wondering if it's even on.

If you remember the tech's first reveal, it got roasted for going too far. Early demos showed AI rendering noticeably altering characters' faces in Resident Evil: Requiem, including Grace, and plenty of folks argued that while the AI-driven lighting and materials looked more realistic, they risked trampling the art style and character designs the developers originally intended.

So the Hogwarts Legacy team and Nvidia went back and made targeted adjustments, aiming to preserve character recognizability while improving environmental lighting, shadows, materials and detail. Sounds sensible, right? Well, after watching the official comparison demo, some players feel the new version barely changes anything at all — and they're joking that Nvidia overcorrected and watered the effect down way too much after the backlash.

Third-party testing paints a similarly mixed picture. Some evaluations note that DLSS 5 does improve lighting and shadows in spots like Hogsmeade, but elsewhere the changes are pretty limited, with some scenes making it genuinely hard to tell whether the feature is enabled. Meanwhile, performance is raising eyebrows: the RTX 5090 reportedly saw frame rate drops of roughly 20% to 42% across different test scenarios.

Right now, DLSS 5 in Hogwarts Legacy only supports specified hardware including RTX 50 series graphics cards, and you'll need to switch it on manually in the game's settings. So if you're running older hardware, this particular magical upgrade isn't coming to your castle just yet.

It's a weird spot for Nvidia — criticized for changing too much, then criticized for changing too little. Have you tried the DLSS 5 update in Hogwarts Legacy yourself? Can you actually tell the difference, or are you leaving it switched off? Let us know in the comments.