GoKawiilWhat we know so far: DLSS 5's neural rendering powered by AI is easily Nvidia's most controversial gaming product, sparking widespread derision when the company unveiled it in March. Nvidia has said little since beyond a vague "this fall" release window, but a recent leak suggests the company isn't just moving forward with DLSS 5, it could arrive sooner than expected.
Data miners discovered what appears to be a DLL for Nvidia's upcoming DLSS 5 tech in NBA 2K27's installation files soon after the game's early access period started this week. While the basketball simulator does not yet officially support DLSS 5, modders have already begun testing its AI-generated "photorealism" filter in Control.
While the DLL does not explicitly mention DLSS 5, it contains the acronym "NR," presumably standing for neural rendering, Nvidia's name for how DLSS 5 uses AI to infer new lighting details using 2D frames and motion vectors.
Furthermore, analysis indicates that most of the DLL's 158MB file size, by far the largest of any DLSS DLL, consists of neural training weights. The file, which contains 148 million FP8 parameters, is likely an unfinished build.
NBA 2K27 contains no controls for activating DLSS 5, and the DLL only supports Nvidia's RTX 50 series graphics cards, but the developers of the popular RenoDX Reshade mod quickly got it working in Control.
The mod features several customization sliders and switches, confirming Nvidia's earlier pledge that developers can tweak DLSS 5 to alter or ignore specific objects with varying levels of intensity.
Videos of the mod show that, even with relatively conservative settings, DLSS 5 significantly alters Control's lighting and its characters' faces. The technology appears to add or deepen shadows, simulate new skin shading techniques, and alter eyes to enhance realism. Characters' faces look dramatically different while adhering to their original structure.
– Renan Maniero (@renan_maniero) August 26, 2026
The mod also shows that DLSS 5 might incur a significant performance penalty depending on how much Nvidia optimizes it between now and and its planned release date this fall.
On an RTX 5070 Ti at 4K, activating the mod drops the frame rate from 71 fps to 35 fps, but lower resolutions are expected to have a significantly smaller impact. One of the many demonstrations online showed an RTX 5090 dropping from 91 fps to 50 fps when engaging neural rendering in 4K.
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