Nvidia's DLSS 5 has made its first official appearance in NBA 2K27, with more games and eventual RTX 40-series support planned for the future. Tom's Hardware tested the feature across the entire RTX 50-series lineup and found that, despite a steep performance cost, the visual improvement is dramatic — skin, hair, and eyes look far more realistic, moving the game's presentation away from the flat, plastic look it has without the feature.

Performance testing showed that DLSS 5 imposes a large hit, sometimes over 50% on lower-end cards, but that almost any RTX 50-series GPU can run it at 1080p with playable results — even the RTX 5060 managed nearly 60 FPS on average at that resolution. At 1440p, an RTX 5070 is described as the baseline for a good experience, while at 4K only the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 were recommended, with power draw spiking heavily under DLSS 5's Tensor Core load — one unconstrained RTX 5090 variant pushed to nearly 850W on average in testing.

Because DLSS 5's frame-time cost is tied to output resolution rather than input resolution, enabling DLSS Super Resolution upscaling doesn't help performance as much as it has with prior DLSS versions. Nvidia's Multi Frame Generation can still smooth things out on capable hardware, though 8GB cards may need tuning to fit the DLSS 5 and MFG models into VRAM alongside game assets.

Separately, modder danielblnc has found a way to run DLSS 5 on AMD's RDNA 4 (RX 9000-series) GPUs through a closed-source project called "DLSS-NR-on-AMD." It works only in DirectX 12 games with FSR support and cannot be used in titles with anti-cheat protection. The mod is believed to intercept NGX API calls, extract the DLSS 5 model and Tensor data, and convert the calculations for AMD's matrix accelerators via the HIP RT backend, then run frame data from the game's FSR pipeline through the neural model.

Performance on AMD hardware remains poor. Cyberpunk 2077 initially ran at 28 FPS at 1080p on an RX 9070 XT with DLSS 5 enabled, improving to a stable 30 FPS after a patch, with a further update adding a negligible 2% boost. Some user-reported results online have been less optimistic, and one YouTube demonstration showed performance dropping from over 80 FPS natively to just 11-12 FPS with DLSS 5 on. The mod has also been run on RX 7000-series cards, but performance there is worse due to lack of FP8 support; RDNA 3 support is being explored but not yet planned for release.

The stated long-term goal for the AMD mod is to reach performance comparable to an RTX 5070 Ti, since the RX 9070 XT is close to that card in raster and ray-tracing performance. Both the official and modded implementations are expected to improve over time, as Nvidia has said it will keep optimizing DLSS 5's underlying performance, which would also benefit the community mod running on non-Tensor Core hardware.