DLSS5 actually has quite a bit of input information, according to their SIGGRAPH presentation.
It has albedo buffers, surface normal buffers, miscellaneous lighting information, motion vectors, and of course engine-level masks.
Most of the differences so far look on-par with something like RT Remix or adding realistic lighting to older titles. That is obviously going to significantly change how things look. Especially the chiaroscuro effect.
It will be interesting to see how games with it as part of the development turn out.
As for performance, model distillation will almost certainly solve that.
I do think small online NN's are the future though. My guess is that we need some sort of generalized meta-optimization model to coordinate thousands of small (hundreds to thousands of parameters) online models/neural shaders through selecting optimal hyper-parameters. It would probably be smaller than DLSS 5's model, on the order of a few million parameters rather than I am guessing 50-400M params for DLSS5.
