Modders turn Super Mario Odyssey into an uncanny valley nightmare with a leaked DLSS 5 build

Credit: EDMIRE Published Aug 31, 2026, 3:46 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary DLSS 5 applies over-the-top, realistic neural rendering to Switch/Switch 2 games. Modders routed the Switch's video output through a capture card hooked up to a PC. The unfinished version of DLSS 5 is creating uncanny-valley results. Nvidia's unfinished and unreleased DLSS 5 AI-powered neural rendering is undeniably controversial, and now someone has figured out a way to add the over-the-top filter to Switch and Switch 2 titles. Modders have shown off what Super Mario Odyssey and Mario Kart World look like with DLSS 5 rendering, adding a sheen of painfully unnecessary realism to Nintendo's trademark cartoony art style (via: VideoCardz). To be clear, DLSS 5 isn't actually running on the Switch or Switch 2. Instead, the console's output is fed through a capture card connected to a PC, where the neural rendering process is applied. While this seems more like a post-processing filter to me, @EDMIRE says that's not how their setup works. According to the Twitter user, DLSS 5 receives information directly from a game's engine, which can't happen from just a Switch 2 video signal. To get around this, they used a scene-aware algorithm that converts information from the capture card into data that DLSS 5 can use. To me, this still sounds like a filter, albeit a complicated one with multiple layers. DLSS 5 leaked in an NBA 2K27 early-access build In some games, the neural rendering technique looks fine, but in others it's very off-putting In terms of the console space, we've also seen DLSS 5 running on Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong Bananza, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. While the results are undeniably fascinating and, at times, even kind of cool-looking, I don't think I'd necessarily say it makes any of these titles look better. All DLSS 5 seems to do is alter the original artistic intent of the title it's applied to, while also making it look far too realistic in an uncanny valley-style way. Last week, an early version of DLSS 5 leaked in NBA 2K27's early-access build. As expected, modders quickly got to work and brought the filter-like AI neural rendering feature to games like Skyrim, Control, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and more. While Control actually doesn't look that bad, DLSS 5 basically turns Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's Cloud into pure nightmare fuel. It's important to note that this is based on an unfinished, unreleased version of DLSS 5. With that in mind, while it's amusing to poke fun at the very awful-looking AI upscaling tech, we don't know how the final version will perform.