Gamer ran GTA 4 with DLSS 5 on his 22-year-old CRT monitor – it looks phenomenal

A gamer going by Pete_Love combined two technologies from completely different eras. He ran Grand Theft Auto 4 from 2008 with Nvidia neural rendering DLSS 5 and pushed the image out to a professional CRT monitor about a quarter century old.

He shared the results with a community of old-school monitor enthusiasts. He noted that CRT monitors typically get paired with old games while running on beefy modern graphics cards, but after watching a YouTube video showing DLSS 5 running in older titles, he wanted to test the technology on a display it clearly wasn't built for.

Obviously everyone trying this is doing it on modern hardware and monitors, so I decided to try mine on my CRT. Visually, in my opinion, it looks great, but performance suffers, I'm getting around 40 frames per second. But I expect that to improve with further optimizations.

The setup looks like this:

• GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics card

• Sun Microsystems X7149A CRT monitor, which owners of similar devices believe is a rebrand of the Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2070SB

• 2048×1536 resolution at a 4:3 aspect ratio

• FusionFix mod installed, fixing frame rate and numerous bugs in the PC version of GTA 4

• balanced DLSS 5 preset

The most interesting part of this setup is the graphics card. Nvidia officially rolled out DLSS 5 on September 3, but only for RTX 50 series cards and the GeForce NOW cloud service, with RTX 40 support planned for later this fall. NBA 2K27 remains the only game with official support so far, meaning the RTX 4070 Ti Super running DLSS 5 in GTA 4 only works thanks to a leak.

It's worth understanding how DLSS 5 differs from previous versions. Earlier generations of the technology handled upscaling and frame generation, while the new component, which Nvidia calls 3D-controlled neural rendering, alters lighting and material detail based on the finished frame and engine data, including color, motion vectors, and surface information.

That explains the heavy load. The leaked model contains 148 million parameters in FP8 format, meaning full neural inference runs on every single frame. Nvidia says the technology costs 50-60% of performance on average, and independent tests back that up.

Pete_Love's experiment turned up another quirk. He tried lowering the graphics settings and switching to performance mode hoping to boost frame rate, but FPS barely changed, and in some scenes it even dropped, as if the neural network worked harder on simpler visuals. The balanced mode ended up being the best option.

The CRT monitor plays a role in this combo too. Unlike LCD panels, a CRT has no fixed pixel grid, since the image forms from a scanning electron beam hitting a phosphor layer, which naturally smooths object edges and makes motion look sharper than on most modern displays. Many enthusiasts believe that softness is what hid some of the neural processing artifacts.

The change turned out especially noticeable in GTA 4. The original game is known for its warm yellowish color grading, which made Liberty City look murky and washed out, but with DLSS 5 the city gets more neutral colors, and night scenes with rain-slicked asphalt look noticeably more realistic.

Characters are a trickier matter. Niko Bellic ended up with a more "photographic" face, which not everyone liked, since altered character appearances have been the main complaint against DLSS 5 since it was first announced.

At the March presentation, character faces in Resident Evil Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy, and Starfield changed noticeably, and many players compared the technology to social media filters that make people unrecognizable and distort the developer original intent.

The leaked version only fuels the debate further. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has claimed DLSS 5 stays fully under developer control and differs from generative AI, but injecting a DLL into an old game involves no developer oversight at all, and the neural network pulls any art style toward photorealism. For GTA 4, whose muted aesthetic was part of a bleak story about an immigrant in a big city, that question carries extra weight.

These experiments carry practical risks too. The mod relies on DLL injection, a mechanism that essentially mirrors how cheats work and gets flagged by systems like VAC, Easy Anti-Cheat, and BattlEye. Take-Two has already set a precedent by getting an AI mod for GTA 5 removed from Nexus Mods over a copyright complaint.

The official version of DLSS 5 promises to get faster. Nvidia has said the optimization curve hasn't plateaued yet and that fall updates to the model will push performance beyond current levels, with the list of supported games set to expand in the coming weeks and months.