Nvidia DLSS 5 now has a firm release date. After announcing the technology earlier this year, and just days after the file leaked inside NBA 2K27, Nvidia has confirmed that its most talked-about upscaling technology will arrive on September 3. Beginning at 9 p.m. PT, NBA 2K27 will support DLSS 5 across all RTX 50 Series desktop GPUs, laptops, and GeForce NOW. The company also released its first internal benchmarks alongside the announcement.
Why NBA 2K27 Is the Debut Title
NBA 2K27 is an unusual choice to launch the feature, since the basketball series is not widely known for pushing graphical boundaries. Even so, Nvidia says it worked closely with Visual Concepts and 2K to deliver what it calls “a new level of authentic sports experience.”
Nvidia officially refers to the feature as 3D-guided Neural Rendering. According to the company, it renders effects such as light passing naturally through players’ ears, light catching hair, and realistic skin lighting, all while preserving facial geometry scanned from real-world athletes. This marks the first time the technology appears in a playable title, allowing for the first genuine assessment of its capabilities.
CEO Jensen Huang described DLSS 5 as “the GPT moment for graphics,” blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver what he called a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.
How DLSS 5 Works and Why It’s Divisive
DLSS 5 has drawn considerable debate since its reveal. The AI model is trained to infer how complex features of a scene, including characters, skin, hair, and environmental lighting, should appear in the real world. It draws on inputs from the game engine, such as the color buffer and motion vectors, combined with an input frame.
Deep integration with a game’s engine and assets is intended to make results more consistent and predictable than typical generative AI imagery. Still, that approach has not stopped critics from raising strong objections to the premise since the technology was first shown.
Performance, Benchmarks, and Hardware Requirements
The feature is resource-intensive, and early testing points to significant frame rate drops when it is enabled. Nvidia has confirmed that DLSS 5 will work only with RTX 50 Series desktop and mobile GPUs, as well as through GeForce NOW. Older generation cards are not officially supported at this time.
Nvidia’s first internal benchmarks cover only one game and, like all marketing material, should be viewed with caution. Notably, the company shared 4K results only for the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, which may hint at lower expected performance on weaker hardware. Cards further down the stack do appear, but at resolutions below 4K.
Following the recent file leak, some modders have ported the technology to older RTX 40 Series cards, and even to earlier Ampere and Turing GPUs, with varying results.
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Image: tomshardware.com
