When Nvidia unveiled DLSS 5 to the world at GTC in March 2026, it pitched it as its most significant graphics breakthrough since real-time ray tracing. Much of the headlines were dominated by the uncanny image previews and “DLSS 5 ON” memes, but that opening line said more about Nvidia’s plans for the technology than anything it has talked about since. Ray tracing launched as a premium feature that came with a steep performance cost, had sparse adoption at launch, and if you had a GTX 1080 Ti, you couldn’t run it properly because it didn’t have the RT cores to do so.