DLSS 5 hits War Thunder and Hogwarts Legacy: 403 FPS at 4K, one frame in six rendered

War Thunder is the third game getting DLSS 5 this month. NVIDIA announced on November 3 that Gaijin will add neural rendering with the big Eagle's Shadow update in mid-November. Hogwarts Legacy goes first, on Thursday, November 5, and Where Winds Meet follows on November 23. NVIDIA also put a number on it: 403 FPS in War Thunder on an RTX 5090 at 4K. That figure is real, but it is measured with 6X frame generation, which means only about one frame in six is actually rendered.

Officially DLSS 5 runs on GeForce RTX 50 cards, RTX Spark laptops and GeForce NOW Ultimate, nothing else. How modders get it going on Radeon, Intel Arc and RTX 40 is covered in our DLSS 5 guide, which we keep updated.

What changes in War Thunder and Hogwarts Legacy

In War Thunder the network works on light and materials: reflections on armour and wet mud, deeper shadows under tracks and camo netting, and what NVIDIA calls a new level of microcontrast. Eagle's Shadow also brings dozens of new planes, ships and tanks plus cluster bombs. There is no exact date yet, just "in a few weeks".

Hogwarts Legacy is the more interesting case. Early DLSS 5 demos took a beating over faces, because the model reshaped characters until they looked like someone else. Avalanche Software chose to leave faces alone. DLSS 5's masking separates characters from the scene by itself, so the studio pushed the effect on environments and kept character identity intact. Characters still get better texture detail, lighting and shadows. After the update it is a single "Neural Rendering" toggle in the options.

Where Winds Meet gets DLSS 5 on November 23, and according to NVIDIA Everstone Studio turned the model settings all the way up. All three games ship with the October model, which is 24% smaller (about 118 million parameters), uses 20% less VRAM at 4K and runs twice as fast as the previous one. The matching Game Ready driver is due on November 4.

403 FPS, with one frame in six rendered

NVIDIA tested everything on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D with ray tracing, Ray Reconstruction and 6X frame generation, using Super Resolution Performance at 4K and Quality at 1440p and 1080p. At 6X every frame the GPU draws is followed by five generated ones. Divide NVIDIA's numbers by six and War Thunder on an RTX 5090 at 4K renders roughly 67 real frames per second, about 44 on an RTX 5080. Hogwarts Legacy lands around 50 and 34. That is our estimate, and since generation has its own cost, the real figures are probably a touch lower.

Motion still looks smooth. On a 240 Hz monitor 400 frames look like 240 anyway. Input response follows the rendered frames though, and in a tank shooter you feel that more than on a walk through Hogsmeade. Further down the range, NVIDIA lists 257 FPS for the RTX 5060 in War Thunder at 1080p, around 43 rendered. Perfectly playable, just not what the counter suggests.

Read also

How to get DLSS 5 on AMD and Intel GPUs: mods run even on RX 6000, at a cost in FPS

DLSS 5 is now twice as fast, Hogwarts Legacy gets it November 5 and RTX 40 still waits

What the announcement leaves out

RTX 40 again. NVIDIA promised DLSS 5 for the previous generation back in September and has not given a date since; this post does not mention it at all. Radeon and Arc owners are where they were: DLSS 5 there means mods such as DLSS-NR on AMD and AMDNR, and those will not show up in official game settings.

One game dropped off the list, too. Phantom Blade Zero was among the titles expected to get DLSS 5, yet it launched on October 28 without it. Wccftech reports that the game director hinted on social media at a change of plans, and neither NVIDIA nor S-GAME would comment. I would not write it off, given that modders had DLSS 5 running in it less than a day after launch. Independent Hogwarts Legacy tests should appear after November 5, and they will go into the guide.