This Thursday, an interesting demo showcasing DLSS 5 in action went viral among PC gamers. During tests in Grand Theft Auto V, NVIDIA's neural rendering seemed to lose its reference points after the player opened the pause menu: the character's face began to gradually distort, turning into a visual "hallucination." The video sparked a huge reaction on Reddit, with users comparing what they saw to a psychedelic trip and even joking that DLSS was "breaking free from its cage."
However, the most important detail is that Grand Theft Auto V does not have official support for DLSS 5. The feature was injected into the game via community-made tools (such as RenoDX and ReShade), a practice modders have already employed in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Skyrim. Therefore, these results do not necessarily reflect how the technology would perform with an official integration handled directly by the developers.
Things get particularly interesting when opening the pause menu in Grand Theft Auto V. The game blurs the background image, leaving the scene almost static. It is at this moment that the distortion begins. One explanation proposed by the community is that the modified system continues to feed data into the neural renderer, even though it is not receiving all the latest information normally provided by the game engine in standard mode.
Given how DLSS 5 works, this is quite reasonable. According to NVIDIA itself, 3D-guided neural rendering uses not only the current frame but also motion vectors from the game engine, accumulated temporal data, and developer-defined parameters when generating the final image. Without proper integration to specify what should and shouldn't be processed during pauses, the system seems to start repeatedly interpreting elements within blurred images.
Minor changes are treated as details needing reconstruction, and with each frame, the distortion becomes increasingly apparent. This is precisely the point being discussed by Reddit users. Some believe that DLSS 5's output is reused as input for the next step, creating a feedback loop. Others point out that the issue lies in the fact that Grand Theft Auto V was not originally designed to use the technology in this way.
This behavior also clearly highlights a major difference between DLSS 5 and previous generations of the technology. NVIDIA positions the new feature as a real-time generative rendering system. Instead of simply reconstructing images at higher resolutions, the technology can now supplement traditional renderers based on visual knowledge learned by the model, including lighting, materials, skin textures, and other elements that are difficult to simulate in real time.