A file called "nvngx_dlssnr.dll" was discovered inside the early-access build of NBA 2K27, identified as NVIDIA DLSSNR version 310.8.0.0. The 158 MB file is digitally signed by NVIDIA with a signing date of August 11, and carries a higher version number than the recently launched DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction DLL (310.7.129), which itself is only 72 MB by comparison. Neither NVIDIA nor 2K Games has confirmed whether NBA 2K27 will actually use DLSS 5, and the file may be a leftover from development. As shipped, the game exposes no setting to enable it, and nothing in the current build appears able to drive it.
A detailed teardown by TechPowerUp found that roughly 90% of the file's size, about 140.9 MB, consists of trained model weights rather than program code, which itself totals under a megabyte. Analysis of the weights and the naming of 111 of the DLL's 231 CUDA kernels indicates the model runs in FP8 precision with roughly 148 million parameters. All 15 cubins found in the file target "sm_120," the architecture used by GeForce RTX 50 (Blackwell) cards, with no code paths found for Turing, Ampere, or Ada architectures in this build. TechPowerUp noted this does not necessarily mean the final release will be exclusive to RTX 50 cards, but reflects development priorities in this particular build.
The parameter list embedded in the DLL is shorter than that used by DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, which accepts around 25 input buffers. DLSS 5's Neural Rendering component instead takes the rendered image, depth and motion vectors, UI-related data, masking parameters, a distortion field shared with Frame Generation, and scaling parameters — suggesting it operates near the very end of the rendering pipeline, after tone mapping. TechPowerUp also found no per-game profile table or game whitelist in the file, and an error string referencing an unported code module and an internal-looking file path pointing to a settings directory used by the Cursor AI code editor, indicating the build is unfinished. The SIGGRAPH demonstration of DLSS 5 reportedly showed developers switching between three different neural network models (A, B, and C) per scene; this build appears to include only one of those.
Members of the RenoDX modding community used the leaked DLL to enable a working demonstration of DLSS 5 Neural Rendering in the game Control, marking the first time the technology has been shown running outside an officially supported title. The implementation currently only affects character models, demonstrated on the character Jesse Faden, and exposes seven different Neural Rendering styles. According to reports, HDR does not function correctly in this setup, so testing was done in SDR, and performance is significantly affected — one developer measured close to a 50% performance loss at 4K using an RTX 5070 Ti, making the current implementation impractical for regular use.
Coverage from Wccftech and TechPowerUp both frame these findings as evidence that DLSS 5 is real, functional to some degree, and closer to release than previously expected, even though the version found is clearly not final. NVIDIA has said DLSS 5 will introduce real-time Neural Rendering capable of improving lighting, materials, and other visual details using AI, going beyond the reconstruction-focused approach of earlier DLSS technologies. NVIDIA has previously indicated it plans to launch DLSS 5 this fall for GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards.