War Thunder Is Getting NVIDIA DLSS 5 With Neural Rendering in Its Next Major Update
Gaijin says War Thunder's upcoming Eagle's Shadow update will support DLSS 5 with 3D-Guided Neural Rendering on RTX graphics cards, promising more realistic lighting, weather and materials.
War Thunder is getting a major graphics upgrade on PC. In a Steam announcement on November 3, Gaijin Entertainment said NVIDIA DLSS 5 support is coming to the game in its next major update, Eagle's Shadow.
What DLSS 5 does
Earlier versions of DLSS focused on upscaling a lower-resolution image and, more recently, generating extra frames. According to Gaijin, DLSS 5 goes further with what NVIDIA calls 3D-Guided Neural Rendering.
The developer explains that DLSS 5 uses a specialized AI model that analyzes the rendered frame together with color, motion vectors and depth information. The result, Gaijin says, is real-time enhancement of "lighting, material properties, and shading for a more photo realistic image, all while preserving the original 3D scene and the developer's artistic intent."
In War Thunder, the studio expects that to show up as:
- Deeper, more realistic lighting.
- Richer atmosphere in overcast weather and rain.
- More convincing wet surfaces.
- Subtler material detail.
Hardware requirements
Gaijin says DLSS 5 "will be enabled for RTX devices in the update." It singles out GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards and RTX Spark devices as the hardware that unlocks the "full potential of the engine," including path tracing and other ray-traced effects, with high frame rates even in demanding scenes.
The announcement doesn't detail exactly which features will be available on older RTX cards, so owners of RTX 20, 30 and 40 Series GPUs should wait for the update notes before setting expectations.
Building on Dagor Engine 6.0
War Thunder has supported NVIDIA technologies for years. Gaijin notes that since the New Power update and the move to Dagor Engine 6.0, the game has used DLSS 2.0 to improve performance and image quality on RTX cards. The studio says Dagor was built with modern upscaling and ray tracing in mind.
When is it coming?
The DLSS 5 post doesn't give a release date for Eagle's Shadow. Gaijin has been previewing the update on Steam in a series of dev blogs, including posts about new visual effects and the F-15EX and F-15IA Ra'am aircraft.
Why it matters for PC players
War Thunder is free to play and has a huge PC audience, which makes it a high-profile showcase for new graphics technology. If DLSS 5 delivers the visual gains Gaijin describes without a big performance cost, it's a meaningful upgrade for anyone with a recent RTX card. As always with new rendering tech, independent testing after release will be the real measure.
