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Russian modder slaps DLSS 5 onto Pac-Man with 4x Multipass
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Russian DLSS 5 experimenting YouTube channel Valery Kryzhanovsky showcases the MS-DOS version of Pac-Man with 4x Multipass in four different rendering modes. The video shows weird and glitchy effects, with some rendering modes completely removing green Inky’s eyes and the dots.
This cursed experiment is another attempt at putting DLSS 5 in games it wasn’t designed for, nor are the games designed to use such upscaling technology. While Nvidia’s leaked upscaler has been used for modern 3D games it’s designed for, it has become a meme to run it in games that aren’t even 3D at all, and some attempts aren’t even games at all.
Valery was able to do this by running Pac-Man through the MAME arcade emulator and using ReShade to inject DLSS 5 into the graphics pipeline, and RenoDX to allow the DLSS 5 parameters to be tweaked. Valery emphasizes that this is not native, and of course it isn’t; the game was never designed to accommodate anything like it — that’s why it needed to be injected externally.
Valery elaborates why 4x Multipass is needed in his blog post, saying that 1x basically does nothing for some older games. Multiple passes are needed in order for the changes to stack up, stating that this usually makes it look bad, but in some cases, photorealism could be achieved. However, for Pac-Man, there is basically no 3D information DLSS 5 could gather. The game is flat, and it has barely any human-like features for DLSS to enhance, except eyes, which is probably why it gave it sunken eye bags or cheekbones, as Valery described in the description of the video. Duke Nukem, however, fared a lot better with the metal environment and occlusion along the walls and ceiling.
In the video, Valery tries out 4 different rendering modes: Natural, Default, Cinematic, and Denoise. Valery describes each mode: “Natural keeps the maze readable. Default decides the ghosts need cheekbones. Cinematic puts Blinky in a film nobody greenlit. Denoise clears the board of everything, dots included. One yellow circle, four ghosts, and four different opinions about what any of them are supposed to look like.”
The video doesn’t state which modes are enabled, but one of the modes definitely removed the eyes from the green ghost, making it look genuinely terrifying, as if it were one of those cursed game Creepypastas. All it needs is some red dots in that hollow chasm, and you’d have a stereotypical 2013 scary meme.
Valery further explains in his blog post that DLSS 5 is still undertrained, lacking temporal context, and is similar to earlier DLSS models. The 150MB DLSS 5 build is only a small peek into what it could be come release date — which will come with a more mature model and likely a larger file size.
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