GoKawiilDLSS 5 is coming a lot sooner than you might think. You've probably seen the leaked DLLs and the various mods putting the technology into existing games, but DLSS 5 will officially arrive later this week, on September 3, launching in exactly one title: NBA 2K27.
That's right, the launch title for DLSS 5 is a basketball game.
We have some interesting information to share today, including Nvidia's first-party performance data for the official implementation of DLSS 5, although not quite as much as we would have liked. A proper hands-on analysis will have to wait until we can test it ourselves in NBA 2K27.
Nvidia's DLSS 5 Performance Claims
Let's get into the biggest question we had about DLSS 5: performance. Not the performance of the feature when modded into games using RenoDX or OptiScaler, but the actual performance of an official game implementation. Nvidia provided some rather... interesting performance charts showing exactly that.
At 4K, Nvidia is showing NBA 2K27 running with ray tracing enabled and the Ultra preset. It's a slightly strange chart because only two GPUs are included: the RTX 5080 and Nvidia's flagship RTX 5090. And boy, are those frame rates high.
Then you check the footnotes.
The results were captured using Multi Frame Generation in 6X mode, with DLSS Super Resolution set to Performance mode. When you strip away 6X frame generation, the RTX 5080's 233 FPS result implies a render rate of just 39 FPS. Multi Frame Generation then turns that into the final output rate shown on the chart. The RTX 5090's 370 FPS result similarly implies a render rate of about 62 FPS with DLSS 5 enabled.
That also helps explain why Nvidia only shows those two GPUs at 4K. Anything below the RTX 5080 would presumably be operating at an even lower render rate, despite potentially producing a very high final frame rate after 6X Multi Frame Generation.
Actual render performance should be somewhat higher with frame generation disabled because frame generation itself carries an overhead. Nevertheless, the RTX 5080 will almost certainly run DLSS 5 with Performance upscaling at a render rate below 60 FPS at 4K.
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