In a stunning display of 'we heard you, but we'll do it our way anyway,' Nvidia has officially decided to bring its controversial DLSS 5 AI rendering to older RTX 40-series GPUs. The feature was supposed to launch this evening exclusively on the latest RTX 50 GPUs, with exactly one game, and with developers maintaining total artistic control. But as is tradition, modders already leaked and ported DLSS 5 to run on just about anything, cranking sliders to their heart's content. Now Nvidia is playing catch-up.

'Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall. Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series,' said a statement from Nvidia spokesperson Rajal Maharaj.

And what about those poor souls on RTX 30 and 20-series GPUs, which modders also targeted - assuming you count 'not exactly playable framerate and plenty of crashes' as a success? 'Right now the focus is of course on 50-series,' Maharaj told The Verge. 'One step at a time.' Translation: don't hold your breath.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, will gamers finally get full control over DLSS 5's granular sliders, as modders already do? Absolutely not, says Nvidia. 'For gamers, DLSS 5 is a simple on-or-off toggle,' the company confirmed. 'The more granular artistic controls are for developers, including model selection, Structure Intensity, Tone Intensity, automatic masking and custom per-pixel masking.' But hey, developers could theoretically pass along some controls in their own settings menus, as they've done with other graphics tech. Remember when DLSS Super Resolution was just an on/off toggle? Now you can pick quality levels or even exact percentages. So there's hope, maybe.

If you can get past the controversy, DLSS 5 does have some nifty features. It's easy to integrate because developers don't need to label every object as 'silverware' or 'furniture' - the AI can automatically recognize and isolate objects like faces, textiles, and foliage, applying different AI processing to each. Game engines that already know what's what can help too. For more targeted control, semantic AI masking can auto-recognize scene objects, while engine-level masking lets artists isolate specific props like glassware or water droplets for custom neural lighting. Unreal Engine 5 has a native plugin, and Nvidia offers SDKs.

Developers can apply DLSS 5 to an entire game, or use it differently per scene, cutscene, or gameplay segment. And Nvidia says the models run on every frame, so there's no minimum framerate requirement.

But the big question remains: has the early backlash scared away some publishers and developers who originally committed to DLSS 5? When asked to reconfirm support for Assassin's Creed Shadows, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, Resident Evil Requiem, and the other 12 originally-announced titles, Nvidia's response was a masterpiece of vagueness: 'More games are on the way. Many developers are actively integrating DLSS 5, and we'll share updates on upcoming titles as partners finalize their integrations.' We'll take that as a 'maybe' and a 'please stop asking.'