NVIDIA has now launched DLSS 5, and with it 3D-Guided Neural Rendering: instead of reconstructing a cheaper frame, the AI generates the lighting and materials you see directly. The first game with official support is NBA 2K27, and you need a GeForce RTX 50.

Automobilista 2 is not on that list. But since 31 August there has been a guide on the official Reiza forum, written by a user called Ace, that makes it work anyway — and it went up before DLSS 5 was commercially released.

Worth saying early: this is not a game feature, it is not official, and there is no sign that Reiza plans to implement it.

What looks better

AMS2 has no DLSS integration, so the mod doesn't switch it on: it manufactures, from the outside, the information Neural Rendering needs. When it works, the changes concentrate on how the car receives light:

• More natural lighting on wheels and on exposed suspension components.
• Shading that plants the car on the track, instead of that sense of floating above the tarmac.
• Better ambient occlusion and global illumination in enclosed spaces, especially garages and pit boxes.

What it costs

Here is the real story, and it's the part that barely gets told: performance drops by roughly half. It isn't a matter of having a weak GPU — users on an RTX 5090 describe the same hit. Add visual artefacts on top, and the author of the guide himself does not recommend it for long races.

Some people can't get the game to start at all, and on RTX 3090 cards it hangs at WAITING FOR NGX.

There is a reasonable explanation for a cost that steep. NVIDIA only supports DLSS 5 officially on the RTX 50 series, and it boasts of a fivefold performance gain in six months: at the start it needed two RTX 5090s to run this in real time. Here the same thing is being asked of an engine that was never prepared for it, through a ReShade injection chain.

What you need

• An RTX 50 or RTX 40. The 30 series may work, with no guarantee.
• ReShade 6.8.0 with Full Add-On Support, installed onto AMS2AVX.exe (the DX10-12 build).
• Four files in the game folder: renodx-dlss5-v2.5.addon64, nvngx_dlssnr.dll, dlss5-feed.addon64 and dlss5-dx11-bridge.addon64, plus the DLSS5_Feed.fx shader.
• The iMMERSE Launchpad (Marty McFly), placed in the exact order the guide specifies: if the effects aren't in that order, it doesn't work.

Our take

As a technical demo it's fascinating, and it says something about sim racing: somebody had DLSS 5 running in a simulator before NVIDIA put it on sale, and that somebody was a forum user.

As something to install today, no. If you race in leagues — on our servers or anyone else's — you are trading half your frame rate for an improvement you won't be looking at while you brake into the last chicane. And in a long race, artefacts plus unstable frame rates are exactly what you don't want.

If what you want is for AMS2 to look better without paying for it in performance, start with the settings: it's all in our AMS2 graphics guide.

The images in this article are official Automobilista 2 screenshots (Reiza Studios) and do not show the mod: as of today the only captures of Neural Rendering in AMS2 are the guide author's own, on the Reiza forum.

Sources: Ace's thread on the Reiza Studios forum and NVIDIA's official DLSS 5 page. Via simRacer.es and BoxThisLap.