DLSS 5 Turns Pac-Man Ghosts 3D in a Glitchy ReShade Multipass Experiment

How the experiment was put together​

This is not a Pac-Man update, an Nvidia release or a developer-supported integration. It is an external hack.

• Emulation: Tom's Hardware says Kryzhanovsky ran Pac-Man through the MAME arcade emulator. GameGPU's separate report says the game stayed in its original 2D form, with no changes to its source code.
• Injection: ReShade injected DLSS 5 into the graphics pipeline, and RenoDX let him tweak the DLSS 5 parameters. GameGPU confirms both tools and the Multipass x4 setting.
• Not native: He stresses the setup is not native. The game was never designed for this, which is why it had to be injected from outside.

A small oddity: the game is described as the MS-DOS version, yet it runs in an arcade emulator. The reports don't resolve this, so treat the exact build as the creator's description.

The four modes​

The modes are Natural, Default, Cinematic and Denoise. Kryzhanovsky's own summary says Natural keeps the maze readable, and Default decides the ghosts need cheekbones. He also says Denoise clears the board of everything, dots included.

GameGPU's description matches this:

• Natural preserves the maze geometry.
• Default gives the flat ghost sprites a pseudo-volumetric look.
• Cinematic shifts contrast and the lighting palette.
• Denoise filters away small dots, interface elements and environmental detail.

Tom's Hardware notes the video doesn't say which mode removes the green ghost's eyes. I won't assign that effect to a mode either.

Why four passes, and why it looks so strange​

Kryzhanovsky's blog post says a single pass does almost nothing for some older games. Several passes are needed for the changes to stack up. He says this usually looks bad, though photorealism is sometimes achievable. That is his explanation. The reports don't independently verify it, and none give performance or image-quality measurements.

On Pac-Man, the report says there is basically no 3D information for DLSS 5 to gather. The maze is flat, and the ghosts' eyes are about the only human-like feature to latch onto. That may be why the model invented the sunken eyes and cheekbones. Repeating the pass lets those inventions compound, so a ghost that is merely odd after one pass becomes unsettling after four.

What Nvidia says DLSS 5 is for​

Nvidia's research page, dated September 1, 2026, describes DLSS 5 as a real-time generative rendering stage. Its framing matters here:

• Nvidia says the model is conditioned on the current rendered frame, engine motion vectors, carried temporal state and artistic-direction values. It calls the approach 3D-guided neural rendering, meant to keep output faithful to developer-authored content.
• Nvidia says it runs locally as a rendering stage inside existing game pipelines on GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs.

The reporting doesn't establish that an emulator feed through ReShade supplies that engine data. That is my inference, not a tested finding. The likely reading is that the Pac-Man result shows what happens when the model gets a flat image with little guidance. It does not show how DLSS 5 behaves in a properly integrated game.

The wider modding scene​

Tom's Hardware calls this another attempt at putting DLSS 5 in games it wasn't designed for. It says running Nvidia's leaked build in non-3D titles has become a meme. Community tooling is spreading too. Public GitHub projects advertise one-click DLSS 5 managers for Windows 10/11 x64 that combine ReShade, RenoDX and multipass routes. One lists emulators among its supported targets. The same listing says the bundled neural model runs on Blackwell (RTX 50) cards.

I haven't tested any of these tools, and the Pac-Man video isn't proof they work on a given system. They are also third-party wrappers around a leaked build, so be cautious about running them on a machine you care about.

What to take from it​

• It's a stress test, not a review. It shows a mismatch between a tool and its input. It says little about DLSS 5 in supported games.
• Image fidelity is the real question. Generative rendering can invent detail, and that is a real concern in a game where the pellets are the point.
• Some claims are unverified. Tom's Hardware repeats Kryzhanovsky's view that the leaked 150MB build is undertrained and that a release version will be more mature and probably larger. None of the other reviewed sources confirm that, so treat it as his opinion.

Pac-Man will keep eating dots in its original form. This demo mostly shows how a generative model behaves when you feed it a yellow circle and four ghosts.