The arrival of new MacBooks each spring marks the start of the season for potential laptop renewal. Apple updated its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lines with new M5 processors last week and introduced the new MacBook Neo for budget shoppers. This new raft of machines might have you wondering if it’s time to move on from your current MacBook.

We’ve tested and reviewed the MacBook Neo, M5 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with both M5 Pro and M5 Max chips so you can compare the performance and features of these new M5 machines with those of older generations to help you answer the question: Should I upgrade?

Read more: Is the MacBook Neo more than just a student laptop?

If you have an Intel-based MacBook from the previous decade, the answer is easy: Don’t think twice and buy a new M5 MacBook Air. I prefer the larger 15-inch model and think it’s worth the additional $200 over the 13-inch model, but either the 13.6-inch or 15.3-inch M5 Air will be larger than the 13.3-inch display of an older Intel MacBook Air and offer drastically better performance.

If you have a MacBook Air with one of Apple’s M-series processors, the answer to the question varies, based on whether you have an Air with an M1, M2, M3 or M4 chip. Let’s take a run through each generation of Apple’s M-series MacBook Air roster from the past six years and answer the to-upgrade-or-not-to-upgrade question for each.

What’s new with the M5 MacBook Air?

Let’s start with what’s changed and what hasn’t changed with the M5 MacBook Air that Apple just introduced.

The design and displays remain the same, as do the color choices, with this year’s update. The changes are on the inside, starting with Apple’s M5 processor. With 10 CPU cores and either eight or 10 GPU cores, M5 has the same number of cores as the previous M4 chip, but the M5 introduces a new GPU architecture that puts a neural accelerator on each core to boost AI and ray-tracing performance.

The minimum storage and starting price have both increased. Apple did away with the undersized 256GB SSD and now supplies 512GB of storage at a minimum on the M5 Air. Pricing now starts at $1,099 for the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air and $1,299 for the 15-inch model, an increase of $100 for each. When you consider that Apple previously charged $200 to double the storage on the M4 Air, the M5 Air is $100 less than what you would have paid last year for a MacBook Air with a 512GB SSD.

Read more: Should you choose a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro?

The starting memory remains at 16GB, but the M5 chip supports faster unified memory — 153GBps of bandwidth compared to 120GBps on the M4. Storage, too, got faster. Apple says the SSDs on the M5 models offer twice the read and write speeds of the previous M4 model.

The M5 Air also offers improved networking. It incorporates Apple’s N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

Should I upgrade from an M4 MacBook Air?

The MacBook M5 Air has the same design as the M4 model and offers only evolutionary, generation-over-generation performance gains rather than revolutionary leaps over last year’s model. It was roughly 9% to 13% faster on our Geekbench 6 tests and 12% to 18% faster on our Cinebench 2024 tests than the M4 Air. 

Battery life made a huge leap from the Intel-based models to the M1 MacBook Air and has improved slightly since then, but the MacBook Air hasn’t taken another leap in efficiency or battery life. Any MacBook with an M-series processor offers excellent battery life, lasting 15 hours or more on a single charge in our tests.

The only reason to upgrade from an M4 MacBook Air to an M5 model is to move from the 13-inch to the 15-inch model. But if you have an M4 Air and are happy with its size, I’d definitely recommend holding onto it for at least another year.

There’s no urgent need to upgrade from an M4 MacBook Air, and I’d also argue the 15-inch M4 model — even a year after its release — remains a good option for MacBook shoppers looking to save a little money. You can get the 15-inch M4 MacBook Air with the 512GB SSD upgrade for $1,099 at Amazon. That’s $300 less than its full price and $200 less than you’ll pay for the same M5 model.

I wouldn’t make the same argument for the 13-inch M4 MacBook Air. You can get it for $999 at Amazon with a 512GB SSD, which is only $100 less than the same M5 Air. I think it’s worth the extra $100 to get the new M5 model if you’re deciding between it and the M4 Air.

But, again, if you already own an M4 MacBook Air, there’s nothing earth-shattering about the new M5 model that makes upgrading a necessity.

Verdict: Don’t upgrade

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Should I upgrade from an M3 MacBook Air? 

There’s definitely a bigger gap in performance between the M3 and M5 Air than the M4 and M5. On Geekbench 6, the M5 Air was 33% faster on the single-core test and 40% faster on the multicore test than the M3 model. On Cinebench 2024, the M5 Air was 41% faster on the single-core test and 57% to 71% faster on the multicore test. Even with those higher percentages, most people with a two-year-old M3 Air don’t need to upgrade. 

For starters, the M3 chip was the first Apple chip manufactured on the 3-nanometer process, and the M5 is built on the same 3nm process. The M3 has fewer CPU cores than the M4 and M5 chips, but its GPU includes a big advancement. It was the first M-series processor to offer a GPU with hardware acceleration for ray tracing and mesh shaders. (Ray tracing allows for more realistic lighting and reflections in games, and mesh shaders help render complex 3D scenes more efficiently for better frame rates.) So, now that we are three generations deep in 3nm M-series chips, it’s reasonable to expect Apple to move to a new manufacturing process as soon as later this year with the M6, which could result in drastic improvements in power and efficiency.

Secondly, the MacBook Air’s design hasn’t changed since 2022, with the introduction of the M2 Air, which did away with the tapered, wedge shape of the M1 Air in favor of a thinner, flatter design that continues through the M5 Air. Could the M6 Air bring with it a design overhaul? It’s certainly not out of the question.

Verdict: Don’t upgrade

Should I upgrade from an M2 MacBook Air?

Apple first released the M2 MacBook Air in 2022. Along with the new M2 processor, it introduced a new design and a slightly larger 13.6-inch display. And a year later, Apple released the first 15-inch MacBook Air using the same M2 chip.

The M2 chip was the last to be manufactured on a 5nm process before Apple moved to 3nm. The M5 MacBook Air was 59% faster than the 15-inch M3 Air on the single-core Geekbench 6 test and 71% faster on the Geekbench 6 multicore test. (The 15-inch M3 MacBook Air predates the Cinebench 2024 test, so we don’t have results for it.)

The performance gap is large enough between the M2 and M5 chips to justify moving on from an older M2 Air, especially if you bought the 13-inch model in 2022 before the 15-inch Air was released and have been wanting to move up in size. But if you bought the 15-inch model of the MacBook Air in 2023, I might suggest holding onto it for another year in hopes we see a new design and an even greater boost to performance next year with the M6 Air.

Verdict: Probably upgrade

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Watch this: New MacBooks Arrive With M5, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips

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Should I upgrade from an M1 MacBook Air?

If you’ve been holding onto your M1 MacBook Air since 2020, it’s time for an upgrade. You can get better performance from the $599 MacBook Neo, and the latest M5 Air or even last year’s M4 model will feel so much faster. You’ll also get a sleeker design and a larger display, whether you choose the 13.6-inch Air or go big with the 15.3-inch model.

Verdict: Definitely upgrade

MacBook Air performance results

Two NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are about to climb into their spacesuits and enter the vacuum of space, and you can watch the event live.

The first NASA spacewalk in nearly a year will begin at about 8 a.m. ET on Wednesday, March 18. Read on for full details on how to watch.

Americans Jessica Meir and Chris Williams will exit the station’s Quest airlock to carry out work as part of preparations for a future roll-out solar array aimed at upgrading the station’s power supply.

It will be Meir’s fourth spacewalk and Williams’ first. The pair have spent the last few days prepping their spacesuits and equipment and also finalizing the configuration of tools they’ll use during the extravehicular activity.

Wednesday’s spacewalk also happens to be on the 61st anniversary of the first-ever spacewalk in 1965 when Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov left his spacecraft for around 10 minutes during the Voskhod 2 mission. Later the same year, during the Gemini 4 mission, Ed White became the first NASA astronaut to achieve the same feat.

How to watch

NASA’s live coverage will start at 6:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, March 18. The astronauts will exit the Quest airlock at about 8 a.m. ET. and will remain outside the ISS for around six-and-a-half hours.

You can watch the coverage via the video player embedded at the top of this page. NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the agency’s YouTube channel will also carry the same live feed.

What to expect

You’ll see live views from multiple cameras positioned outside the station, including from the astronauts’ helmet cams. You’ll be able to listen in on the live communications between the astronauts and Mission Control on Earth, too. A continuous commentary will also explain exactly what’s happening as the spacewalk proceeds.

ChatGPT has a talent for sounding sure of itself. Ask it a question, and it delivers a polished, coherent response. But should you always trust it?

The tone promises authoritative answers, and the confidence is enticing, but it can also mask the fact that the answer is only one possible interpretation of the problem.

Modern online scams operate across multiple platforms, perhaps spanning social media, messaging apps, email and online marketplaces. Google, Meta and Amazon are among 11 tech, retail and payments companies that have signed a new agreement to combat online scams by sharing threat intelligence across platforms, Axios first reported Monday.

The initiative, called the Industry Accord Against Online Scams & Fraud, is designed to improve how companies detect and respond to fraud that spans multiple services. Participants say they will exchange signals, such as scam-linked accounts and fraudulent domains, and coordinate enforcement actions.

By sharing intelligence in near real time, companies hope to identify these scams earlier and stop them before they spread.

The effort reflects how modern scams operate. A victim might encounter a fake celebrity investment ad on social media, move to a messaging app where the scammer builds trust, then faces prompts to send money through a fraudulent website, payment app or crypto wallet — spanning multiple companies’ ecosystems.

Google said it now blocks hundreds of millions of scam-related results every day using AI, underscoring how both attackers and defenders are increasingly relying on the same technology. Meta removed more than 159 million scam ads in 2025 and is expanding AI tools to detect impersonation and warn users.

Online scams are growing rapidly, in part because generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry. AI can be used not only to produce realistic phishing emails but also to clone voices and deepfake videos that impersonate executives, public figures and even family members.

The agreement is voluntary and doesn’t create new legal obligations, but it comes after regulators’ increased pressure on tech platforms to address fraud more aggressively. The companies say they will begin building frameworks for reporting and intelligence-sharing, though it’s not yet clear how quickly those systems will be deployed or how effective they will be in practice.

from the seems-bad dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.

Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists.

But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers.

“None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.”

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it.

Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.”

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.

Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies.

Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government. 

Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections.

“The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica.

Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.”

Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach.

Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns.

“There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information.

A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats.

National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups.

In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes.

President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information.

More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations.

The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law.

Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.

The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here.

On Sept. 22, the Trump administration also designated the loosely organized antifascist political movement antifa as a terrorist group, despite the lack of any federal law authorizing it to do so. Weeks later, the administration named four European militant groups said to be aligned with antifa to the government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments.

The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.

The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system.

That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government.

Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy.

Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said.

However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so.

The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces.

The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard.

The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement.

“The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.”

The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.”

Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said.

The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons.

Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said.

“You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.”

Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons.

But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals.

Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said.

The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same.

Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism.

The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided.

In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times.

Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation.

In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said.

“We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director.

When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDETF and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said.

The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared.

Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said.

While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it.

The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it.

The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.”

In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups.

At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States.

The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, cia, criminal records, domestic surveillance, fbi, intelligence community, law enforcement, odni, ron wyden, tulsi gabbard

• Nvidia reveals hardware for use in orbital data centers
• Space-1 Vera Rubin Module will offer huge increases in power and efficiency, with RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU back on Erath to process the data
• Six space companies have alreadt signed up to work with Nvidia

Nvidia has laid out its plans to help launch the next generation of “space innovation” – namely through boosting data centers in space with the latest AI capabilities.

At Nvidia GTC 2026, the company revealed how its hardware is helping partners and “space operators” become more effective and powerful, particularly for operations such as disaster response, climate and weather predictions and more.

Nvidia opened its GTC conference with a keynote by CEO Jensen Huang, revealing the company’s latest tech. Among the raft of the company’s AI developments, gamers were treated to the imminent version of its AI-powered upscaling and optimization technology, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), touted as the “biggest breakthrough in computer graphics”. 

Nvidia published a video illustrating how DLSS 5 can enhance graphics in Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield and other games, showing before-and-after takes. But gamers weren’t thrilled. In fact, the response to DLSS 5 resembles more of a collective backlash, replete with memes, ridicule and outrage. 

Gamers were quick to point out that DLSS 5 transformed the original graphics into something vastly different. Some called the visuals “AI slop” because they look like “yassified” AI-generated filters. 

Many worry that DLSS 5 could deviate from a creator’s specific artistic vision. Critics also fear that if this technology becomes the industry standard, video game graphics might start to look the same, losing their unique visual identity. 

“Everything about this is a betrayal of these game’s artistry,” said YouTuber The Sphere Hunter in a post on X Monday. “Painting over handcrafted, intentional 3D art with shiny, wrinkly, sunken-in, porous, puckered, fraudulent, filtered nonsense is deeply disrespectful. If you want this, just watch gen-AI videos all day.”

Countless memes mocking the tech’s exaggerated features flooded the internet. Others on social media parodied the effects DLSS 5 could produce in other games. 

In a Q&A on Tuesday, Huang addressed the backlash from gamers, calling them “completely wrong.” Huang underlined that DLSS 5 “enhances and adds generative capability, but it doesn’t change the artistic control” and that “it’s in the direct control of the game developer.”

The team at Digital Foundry, which specializes in game technology and hardware reviews, called it “disruptive and transformative” but was generally positive about it, though they saw some hiccups. 

“[The images] looked a little bit uncanny, I would say, but definitely the overall portrayal of those characters is much more sophisticated,” said Oliver Mackenzie, video producer and writer for Digital Foundry.

Bethesda’s official X account replied to comments from members of Digital Foundry about Starfield and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, both published by Bethesda.

“This is a very early look, and our art teams will be further adjusting the lighting and final effect to look the way we think works best for each game. This will all be under our artists’ control, and totally optional for players,” the publisher said. 

DLSS 5 is set to be released sometime in the fall. 

What is DLSS?

Nvidia first released its DLSS tech back in 2018 with its RTX 2080 card: The RTX architecture introduced the Tensor cores, which are essential for accelerating the calculations used by the DLSS AI. The deep learning technology was designed to upscale images and video from low resolution in real time to achieve higher frame rates. 

Gamers weren’t impressed at first, but later versions of the technology did perform better in games that supported it. DLSS 4, released last year and tweaked to 4.5 as of January, made significant improvements to detail rendering, reducing motion artifacts, boosting frame rates, and generating more realistic lighting via path tracing (which incorporates interactions with ray-traced lighting). 

What does DLSS 5 do?

DLSS 5 works a bit differently than previous versions of the technology. According to Nvidia, DLSS 5 shifts from processing simple pixels to understanding 3D elements. By deconstructing characters into specific components — such as skin, hair and clothing — the AI can render them more consistently. This results in faster performance and much more realistic details, especially for textures and lighting. 

Game developers control how DLSS 5 enhances images and to what degree, ensuring it matches the game’s aesthetic. The demo video showcased some positive enhancements, but others looked like sweeping changes to the characters and the environment. 

Which games will support DLSS 5 at launch?

On Monday, Nvidia released a list of games slated to support DLSS 5:

• AION 2 
• Assassin’s Creed Shadows
• Black State 
• Cinder City
• Delta Force 
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Justice
• Naraka: Bladepoint 
• NTE: Neverness to Everness
• Phantom Blade Zero
• Resident Evil Requiem
• Sea of Remnants
• Starfield
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• Where Winds Meet

What cards will support DLSS 5?

Nvidia has yet to provide a list of GPUs that will support the new technology. In an FAQ, the company says it will release a list of supported cards closer to its release.