Fans ran Fallout New Vegas through DLSS 5 seven times and got a real nightmare

Anyone who has been anywhere near the gaming space over the past couple of weeks has probably seen folks messing around with DLSS 5, NVIDIA's AI-driven neural rendering tech that pushes games toward photorealism in real time. The results have been both impressive and downright unsettling.

A recent example involving Fallout: New Vegas shows exactly why. Fans decided to give the 2010 classic a homemade "remaster" by running it through the neural renderer multiple times in a row. What came out the other end is the eeriest version of the Mojave anyone has ever seen.

Several videos have already popped up on YouTube showing off these experiments. DLSS 5 handles image upscaling and uses AI to add photorealistic lighting and textures, but the algorithm doesn't always understand exactly what it's looking at on screen.

One video shows over three minutes of gameplay in Goodsprings run through three passes of neural processing. That's actually the mild version – the starting town stays recognizable, even if the NPCs' faces start acting weird.

Things get a lot more interesting from there. Rose of Sharon Cassidy, better known as Cass, got run through seven neural passes, and almost nothing of the companion original look survived.

Many have compared the DLSS 5 effect to a "bad acid trip," and it's easy to see why. Each additional pass drags the image further from the original, turning characters into a pile of warped features.

Given that the Fallout universe revolves around creatures and people twisted by radiation and the fallout of nuclear war, the neural mutations produced by NVIDIA algorithms fit almost naturally into the wasteland's own internal logic.

An actual Fallout: New Vegas remaster is also in the works, so fans of the series still have a shot at seeing an updated Mojave without any neural network distortions.