Engadget's explainer walks through how NVIDIA DLSS works: the GPU renders a game at a lower internal resolution, then a machine-learning model trained by NVIDIA upscales the image to the monitor's native resolution, trading some fidelity for frame rate. It details the Quality, Balanced, Performance and Ultra Performance modes and their starting resolutions, and covers related technologies bundled under the DLSS brand, including DLAA, frame generation and ray reconstruction, plus DLSS 4's 2025 move to a transformer-based architecture. On DLSS 5, the article says it no longer upscales but instead uses a game's color and motion vectors to apply AI-driven lighting and materials, which lowers rather than raises frame rate; as of October 2026 it is officially available in just one game, NBA 2K27, and whether developers will adopt it widely is unclear.