DLSS 5 has officially arrived, and its first playable home is NBA 2K27. A basketball simulation is an unconventional launch title for what Nvidia positions as a major step forward in real-time rendering, but for now it is the only game that supports the technology. The good news for gamers who haven’t upgraded to the newest hardware: Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 5 will eventually expand to the older RTX 40-series lineup, though no firm date has been set.
Nvidia collaborated with developer Visual Concepts to integrate the feature as a supporting tool rather than the core of NBA 2K27. The game continues to rely on scanned 3D models of players to build the base geometry. From there, DLSS 5 blends training data with engine data to infer elements such as lighting and shadows, pushing the visuals toward a more photorealistic look. Because the implementation happens at the engine level, developers can fine-tune results to match their creative vision instead of layering a single AI filter across the entire scene.
Steep Performance Cost on Current Hardware
The technology is heavily demanding, even on top-tier silicon. Nvidia’s own marketing figures show DLSS 5 reaching 370 FPS at 4K on an RTX 5090, compared with 240 FPS when DLSS is disabled. What is less obvious is that the 370 FPS figure relies on 6x MFG, meaning five generated frames are interpolated for every rendered frame. In practical terms, the game is running near 61 FPS, a roughly fourfold performance drop compared with native rendering, and the image is upscaled from 1080p to 4K.
DLSS 5 is expected to reach additional titles over time, but at launch it remains exclusive to NBA 2K27 and to RTX 50-series cards. Cloud players can also access it through the Ultimate tier of GeForce Now, which is backed by RTX 5080 hardware.
Nvidia Reverses Course on Older GPUs
After initially restricting the neural rendering feature to the RTX 50-series, Nvidia has committed to broadening compatibility. “Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series,” said Ben Berraondo, the company’s head of PR. Model updates aimed at optimizing performance for the RTX 50-series are expected later this fall, and those refinements are intended to inform the eventual RTX 40-series release.
The policy shift followed community efforts, as modders demonstrated that patched DLL files could enable 3D-guided neural rendering not only on RTX 40-series cards but also on the RTX 30- and even RTX 20-series. Given that DLSS 5 carries a heavy compute cost, running it on older Ada-generation hardware raised concerns about performance, particularly since the RTX 40-series tops out at 2x MFG rather than the 6x available on the newest cards.
For now, Nvidia’s engineering attention is centered on tuning DLSS 5 for the RTX 50-series, with the resulting improvements set to carry over to the future RTX 40-series rollout. As more games adopt the technology, its underlying dataset is expected to m
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Image: tomshardware.com
