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NVIDIA's new DLSS 5 neural rendering technology launches with NBA 2K27, adding finer skin texture and improved shadow detail to player and crowd models. Testing on an RTX 5090 at 4K showed the feature nearly halved frame rates, dropping from 240fps to 150fps, while offering little visible improvement in wide-angle gameplay shots.
Independent testers have built two unofficial fixes for DLSS 5's steep performance cost, which Nvidia's own benchmarks showed can nearly halve frame rates on RTX 50-series cards. One method, a ReShade add-on called Neural Upstream, reorders the pipeline so the neural pass runs on the smaller pre-upscaled image rather than the full output frame, cutting its processing load by roughly two-thirds of the pixel count. Early tests on an RTX 4080 in Assassin's Creed Shadows show the neural rendering overhead dropping from about 32 FPS to 13 FPS lost, a 61% improvement, with similar gains reported in other titles.
A modder known as ShyVox released 'DLSS Unlocked,' which merges the OptiScaler_DLSSNR and DLSS Enabler projects into one installer that adds DLSS 5 and multi-frame generation support to RTX 20-, 30-, and 40-series cards. On RTX 20 and 30 GPUs, AMD's FSR 3.1 handles frame interpolation since Nvidia's own pipeline isn't supported, while RTX 40 cards use Nvidia's DLSS-G for the first generated frame and FSR 3.1 for the rest, enabling up to 6x frame multiplication.
Developer Marcelo Guibout built a ReShade-based tool called MGPU Bridge that offloads Nvidia's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering step to a second GPU, letting one card handle game rendering while the other applies neural post-processing. Demonstrated on Cyberpunk 2077 and The Blood of Dawnwalker using two RTX 5060 Ti cards, the setup reportedly boosted neural-rendered frame rates by up to 127%, though it requires a second monitor and adds display latency. The project is available on GitHub for others to test.
A HardOCP forum user reported that their MSI RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC suffered a melted 16-pin power connector after testing Nvidia's new DLSS 5 feature in NBA 2K27, currently the only game with official support. The user's monitoring software showed sustained power draw above 610W, more than 150W higher than the card's typical 450W gaming load, before the connector overheated and several pins were visibly scorched.
Developer danielblnc created a tool called DLSS-NR-on-AMD that forces DLSS 5 to run on AMD's RX 9000-series GPUs by intercepting Nvidia's NGX API calls and converting the AI model's calculations for AMD's matrix accelerators through HIP RT. The workaround only functions in DirectX 12 titles with FSR support and without anti-cheat, and currently yields modest results — the RX 9070 XT manages just 30 FPS at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS 5 enabled.
Nvidia's DLSS 5 has launched as an official feature in NBA 2K27, marking the first first-party implementation of the technology after weeks of community mods. Tom's Hardware tested it across the full RTX 50-series lineup, finding it demands a notable performance cost but still runs at 1080p on nearly every Blackwell GPU.
Nvidia has launched DLSS 5 for the first time inside NBA 2K27, built with developer Visual Concepts to enhance lighting and shadows on top of scanned player models rather than replace the game's rendering pipeline. The feature is currently restricted to RTX 50-series cards, though Nvidia says support for RTX 40-series GPUs will follow at an unspecified date.
With frame generation disabled, testing on NBA 2K27 reveals that Nvidia's DLSS 5 imposes a large, largely fixed performance penalty tied to output resolution rather than in-game settings. On an RTX 5090 at max settings, enabling DLSS 5 dropped performance to 76 FPS, and lowering the graphics preset barely helped, gaining just 2 FPS despite a 5% rendering speedup elsewhere.
Nvidia confirmed it will officially extend DLSS 5 support to RTX 40-series graphics cards, though the rollout will happen only after performance tuning for RTX 50-series GPUs is complete. The move comes after modders reverse-engineered and ported a leaked version of DLSS 5 to run on older cards, including RTX 30 and RTX 20 series, with mixed results. Nvidia also clarified that gamers will only get a simple on/off toggle for DLSS 5, while granular controls like Structure Intensity and Tone Intensity remain reserved for developers.
RPCS3 developers publicly criticized Nvidia's unreleased DLSS 5 technology after modders leaked and tested the DLL on games and the PS3 emulator itself, calling the results 'slop' and accusing the industry of using upscaling and frame generation to mask poor optimization. Some users pushed back, arguing that DLSS and FSR frame generation can work alongside optimization efforts, with Reflex helping offset added latency. RPCS3 says it won't adopt such techniques, noting PS3-era games lack the motion-vector data needed for modern temporal upscalers.
NVIDIA is launching DLSS 5, its latest AI upscaling technology, alongside NBA 2K27 on September 3. Early demos from Resident Evil: Requiem and Starfield drew heavy criticism for producing unnatural, over-processed character models, though NBA 2K27's implementation reportedly applies the effect more subtly with improved shadows and texture depth. The feature is exclusive to NVIDIA's RTX 50-series graphics cards.