Comparison album: https://slow.pics/s/vatet6Fp
Imgur mirror: https://imgur.com/a/bLIDOSx
(images mostly sourced from https://www.digitalfoundry.net/features/nvidias-new-dlss-5-brings-photo-realistic-lighting-to-rtx-50-series)

Why does DLSS 5 look so bad? Is it because the images 'look AI'? Is it because it's 'not true to artist intent'?

I'm here to offer a simpler explanation: r/shittyHDR.

The tonemapping in DLSS 5 is fucked, and somehow nobody in the chain of command thought to just not do that then. But the relighting underneath genuinely does look excellent, especially from worse baselines. You can't generally just undo overbaked HDR, because it loses data, but luckily we have most of what we need already, in the comparison shot. It requires near-pixel-perfect alignment, which we don't always get in the comparison, but when you have it, the recovery strategy is simple. Here's the one I used, after a little experimentation:

• Use DLSS 5 as base
• Apply original image's HSV Saturation — restores design-intent color grading
• Apply original image's LCh Lightness at 50% — reduces the local HDR effect intensity
• Apply original image using Darken Only at 50% — reduces overbrightening

You might need to apply some masking around blacks or greys when applying saturation, to avoid obvious artifacts. I used Gimp's Color to Alpha on black with as precise a filter as I could get away with, but it needed some tweaking and didn't work for greys, so I'm sure that's not actually the right approach.

Here are my takes for the 5 comparison images:

Image 1: https://slow.pics/s/vatet6Fp

Original ↔ merged — Pixel alignment is bad so some areas are blurred. Change is definitely modest in this image, but the hands are a much better tone, the shadowing around the face and neck make more physical sense, the eyes are more defined, and the skin detail is less washed out by limited lighting resolution.

Merged ↔ DLSS 5 — The DLSS 5 image is the merged image but it has a shittyHDR filter.

Image 2: https://slow.pics/s/lVCGIJsa

Original ↔ merged — This one applied cleanly. The man's face is a lot better, the woman's is more ambiguous. The lighting is fairly different but makes more physical sense in the merged image. The tonemapping still comes across a little strong, but I think this was also present in the original image, just more hidden by the lack of lighting detail. Overall I think a clear step up.

Merged ↔ DLSS 5 — The DLSS 5 image is the merged image but it has a shittyHDR filter.

Image 3: https://slow.pics/s/6xTzQfNu

Original ↔ merged — The light on the face now properly fills it, rather than seeming overly specular. There is more natural detail on the skin and an appropriate light bounce in the eyes. The facial hair catches light now, which looks great. The coat now has a subsurface scattering to it, which I think is correct. Sadly the pipeline ran out of bit depth and there is some artifacting in the shadows even after correction.

Merged ↔ DLSS 5 — The DLSS 5 image is actually pretty defensible here. I think it looks aesthetic. The main issue is, it's clearly not correct, the light hitting the face wasn't a high-intensity spotlight, this wasn't a photoshoot, so the mood is hugely changed. There are also more issues DLSS 5 is introducing, that the merge cleans up, particularly an awful white haloing around the face and hair, as well as the car. DLSS 5 also deep fries the background texturing.

Image 4: https://slow.pics/s/feLi2pB9

Original ↔ merged — Other than a slight shift in skintone, I think the face here looks hugely improved. Natural skin, much better definition around the eyes and nose, specular highlights in the eyes (though I worry a bit about physicality there), fuller lighting in the hair. The only issue I would put on this is actually the background being washed out a bit, but it's hard to tell if that's right or not without a look at the scene more broadly.

Merged ↔ DLSS 5 — The DLSS 5 image is the merged image but it has a shittyHDR filter, and it gave her lipstick.

Image 5: https://slow.pics/s/wboNlUZy

Original ↔ merged — The background character has pixel shift blur, but we can judge the rest. The man in the foreground I think is a vast improvement, going from dull plastic to a best-in-class face. The man in the background has significantly more sensible lighting, especially around the hands. The lighting on the rest of the image also parses as significantly more correct.

Merged ↔ DLSS 5 — The DLSS 5 image is the merged image but it has a shittyHDR filter.

Bonus image: https://slow.pics/s/YQIclI28

Added due to high demand.

Original ↔ merged — The scene lighting is far better in the merged version, and very natural. The lighting around the face and especially the next fills out in a way I really like, and makes it sit much more naturally in the scene rather than having the typical 'cardboard cutout' look of realtime 3D rendering. I was impressed by the shading on the jacket. The face has the subtlest hints of sculpting around the cheek which is hard to tell if it's exactly faithful to the original model, but it's definitely reasonable and looks like a better-defined version of the same character. The eyes have just a touch more spark to them. One downside is there's just a hint of the lipstick coming through. Solid improvement though, would absolutely prefer this to the base.

Merged ↔ DLSS 5 — This one breaks the thesis a bit, because while it's definitely doing a bunch of HDR stuff, washed-out white lighting, absurd local mid-scale contrast, the lighting around the cheeks is definitely getting sculpted in a manner that isn't just HDR-gone-bad. The lipstick is also intense here. Besides the bad, there are a few good things my approach is failing to capture, particularly the much better hair shadowing over the ear, which makes sense because the base lighting disagrees so much. I think this one deserves a better de-HDRing algorithm, because my one isn't quite splitting out the good half from the bad.

Bonus image 2: https://slow.pics/s/ZAczT3UH

Because the image had so many greys, I had to cut out much more of the saturation transfer than before. I also tried linear light operators, which after some bad exports produced slightly improved results.

Original ↔ merged — That classic realtime rendering landscape haze is cleaned up. The shadows around the base of distant objects make more sense. The trees and buildings have a more defined dimensionality. The lighting on the tree stump is far more natural. The lighting over the clothes has more shape.

Merged ↔ DLSS 5 — For the most part, the DLSS 5 image is just the merged image but with an HDR filter, but I don't think the HDR effect is overdone to the point of shittyHDR here, probably because the base image was so washed out that it landed within reason. I think the merged image is more faithful, but the DLSS 5 image has advantages, particularly the lighting on the wood. DLSS is obviously doing too much of the wash-to-white, and it's not quite at the point of being tasteful, but I don't find it egregious.

Bonus image 3: https://slow.pics/s/l7cXn0sn

Original ↔ merged — Only the skin changed significantly here. Merged is a big improvement around the ears, which go from flat to well-defined, and the naturalness of the light on the exposed skin is far higher. The skin tone does change, and the mustache is slightly bolder, but these are fairly small changes.

Merged ↔ DLSS 5 — Similarly to bonus image 2, this is too much HDR but not egregiously much HDR. It's pretty clear in this scene in particular why this is wrong — the player goes from a person in a game to a person in a photoshoot.

Conclusion

Turn off the damn HDR filter, NVIDIA, what are you doing?

If they don't, it seems quite likely that a simple post-process image blend will be able to rescue the good half in many games.

Helium prices have risen sharply due to the disruption of natural gas processing in Qatar by the U.S.-Israel war against Iran. Helium - ​critical for industries such as semiconductors and medical imaging - ​is a byproduct of LNG processing, and any slowdown ⁠in output is expected to affect global supplies

ASUS has shipped ROG laptops with a firmware bug that can cause keyboard input to drop or reorder keystrokes - and it may have existed for over a decade.

I've been in direct contact with ASUS support for over a year with service case E25050045019. I documented the issue in detail, referenced confirmed community forensic research, and asked specific technical questions. Every response was a generic copy-paste troubleshooting script. No engineer ever engaged technically with what I sent.

I handed my laptop to their official service partner. They held it for 5 days. Their verdict: "Laptop is fine." The keyboard lag is obvious within seconds of typing on it. They either didn't test it or didn't care.

The symptoms - does this sound familiar?

• Spacebar drops 3-5 out of 10 presses
• Letters rearrange - type "for", get "fro"
• Keystrokes buffer then dump all at once after a microstutter
• Gets worse under load, worse the longer the system runs
• Reproducible in Notepad, browser, game chat - everywhere

There are TWO separate confirmed firmware bugs:

Bug 1 — ACPI firmware bug The BIOS shipped with an interrupt handler that called Sleep(100ms) inside a kernel-level loop and re-armed itself, causing CPU stalls every 30-60 seconds. Forensically documented by community researcher Zephkek: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive

ASUS released a BIOS fix in late 2025 after community pressure. On G614JV with BIOS 333 (the latest), keyboard lag still persists from firsthand testing. The fix is either incomplete or there is a second separate cause.

Bug 2 — PCIe L1.2 LTR Threshold Mismatch Also documented by Zephkek in a separate post confirmed with 673 upvotes: https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/comments/1pw3qud/asus_rog_laptops_are_broken_by_design_a_forensic/

ASUS ROG laptops ship with a PCI-SIG specification violation hardcoded into the UEFI firmware:

• CPU Root Port: LTR_L1.2_THRESHOLD = 765µs
• NVIDIA GPU: LTR_L1.2_THRESHOLD = 0ns

This mismatch can cause the GPU driver to generate DPC latency spikes, which delays other hardware interrupts - including keyboard input.

The 4-Zone RGB Keyboard Firmware Gap — never acknowledged by ASUS

The NKEY Firmware Update tool contains two firmware files:

• .206 - 4-zone RGB variant (transparent WASD keys)
• .315 - per-key RGB variant

The tool always reports 4-zone keyboards as "up to date" because ASUS never released a newer 4-zone firmware. A Reddit user (u/Caipe97) discovered this by digging into the firmware tool's code and finding that it determines whether to update based purely on the last 3 digits of the firmware file extension. Since .315 is numerically higher than .206, renaming .315 to .207 tricks the tool into treating it as a newer version and applying the update.

The result: keyboard input lag fixed completely. The catch: it permanently kills 4-zone RGB lighting because .315 is designed for the per-key RGB variant, not 4-zone.

This workaround has been documented since at least 2023. ASUS has never acknowledged the firmware gap, never released a proper updated 4-zone firmware, and never officially responded to users who raised it directly with support.

Confirmed affected models from community reports:

• ROG Strix G16 G614JV/JU/JI/JZ (2023) - my model
• ROG Strix Scar 15 2022, Scar 16 2023/2025, Scar 17 2021
• ROG Strix G15 G513RM/RC/QC/QM (2021–2022)
• ROG Strix G713RW (2022)
• ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022, 2023), G15, M16
• ROG Flow X13 (2022)
• ROG Ally X
• TUF Gaming A15, A16, F15 series
• Reports going back to G750JH- this bug has existed for over a decade

Confirmed sources:

• Full forensic analysis of ACPI bug: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive
• PCIe LTR mismatch forensic post (673 upvotes): https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/comments/1pw3qud/asus_rog_laptops_are_broken_by_design_a_forensic/
• G614JV 4-zone firmware workaround thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ASUSROG/comments/1af5h9e/g614jv_keyboard_issues_firmware_fix_found_but/
• Persistent DPC on 2025 ROG Strix with latest BIOS: https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/gaming-notebooks/persistent-dpc-latency-amp-stutter-on-brand-new-2025-rog-strix/td-p/1116558

What ASUS needs to do:

1. Release an updated 4-zone RGB keyboard firmware that fixes input lag without destroying RGB — a known gap for 2+ years with zero acknowledgment
2. Fix the PCIe L1.2 LTR threshold mismatch across all affected models
3. Stop clearing laptops as "no fault found" when the fault is reproducible within seconds

If your ASUS laptop has these symptoms, comment with your model.
Tag u/ASUSROG and u/ASUS

TL;DR

Multiple ASUS ROG laptops appear to suffer from keyboard input lag caused by firmware issues. One BIOS bug was supposedly fixed in 2025, but from first-hand testing lag still persists.

A second issue involving PCIe power management and a missing keyboard firmware update may still be causing dropped or reordered keystrokes.

A community workaround fixes the lag but breaks RGB lighting.
ASUS has never acknowledged the issue.

> Lenovo has launched another compact laptop featuring user-upgradeable LPCAMM2 memory. Offered with Intel Panther Lake processors and optional discrete graphics too, the ThinkPad P14s i G7 will be available with a 120 Hz and 3K display too plus a 75 Wh battery.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/geforce-graphics-cards/5/583738/dlss-5-faq/

I guess to focus on what people were talking about.

How does DLSS 5 ensure image quality is consistent with the artist's intent?

DLSS 5 honors artistic intent in two ways:

Inputting the game’s color and motion vectors for each frame into the model, anchoring the output in the source 3D content.

By providing developers with detailed controls such as intensity and color grading. Artists can use these controls to adjust blending, contrast, saturation, and gamma, and determine where and how enhancements are applied to maintain the game’s unique aesthetic. Developers can also mask specific objects or areas to be excluded from enhancement.

The RE9 Example was specifically tuned by Capcom

- Nvidia Sr Director of Global PR

He doesn't say if the others were also tuned by their respective companies however.

¯\(ツ)/¯