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Russian YouTuber Valery Kryzhanovsky demonstrated a modified version of the MS-DOS game Pac-Man by applying Nvidia’s DLSS 5 upscaling technology. He achieved this by running the game through the MAME emulator and injecting the graphics engine using ReShade and RenoDX. Kryzhanovsky notes that DLSS 5 was not designed for such older, flat games, yet he managed to create four different rendering modes including Natural, Default, Cinematic, and Denoise.

The experiment produced strange visual results because the game lacks the 3D information required for effective upscaling. In some modes, green ghosts lost their eyes entirely, appearing with sunken eye bags or cheekbones instead. One mode completely removed all dots from the screen, leaving only a single yellow circle and four hollow figures. Kryzhanovsky explains that while multiple rendering passes are often needed to stack changes for photorealism in modern games, this approach failed to find meaningful features in Pac-Man beyond basic shapes.

Kryzhanovsky also shared insights from his blog post regarding the current state of DLSS 5. He stated that the technology is still undertrained and lacks temporal context, making it similar to earlier models. The 150MB build used for this test is described as a small preview before the official release date, which will feature a more mature model and likely a larger file size. While some games like Duke Nukem handled the metal environment and wall occlusion better, Pac-Man resulted in glitchy effects that resemble cursed game Creepypastas.