A new melted-connector incident has surfaced involving an MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC during testing of Nvidia's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering feature in NBA 2K27, the only officially supported title so far. A user identified as erek documented the case, reporting that enabling DLSS 5 pushed the card's power draw from around 450 W to over 600 W, exceeding MSI's 575 W rating for the card. A GPU-Z screenshot showed a peak board power reading of 613.5 W that reportedly held steady rather than spiking briefly.
According to the report, the card stopped working shortly after, and a burning smell led to the discovery that the power connector's plastic had melted and fused to the socket. It's noted that GPU-Z measures total board power rather than power through the connector alone, since some power also comes from the PCIe slot, so the reading doesn't confirm the connector itself carried the full load. Melted connectors have been reported under other workloads unrelated to DLSS 5 as well, so it remains unclear whether DLSS 5 was the sole cause or a contributing factor. Nvidia has not commented on the incident or on DLSS 5's power draw in general.
Separately, hands-on testing on an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop with an RTX 5070 Ti found that DLSS 5 caused steep performance drops in certain game states. In menu screens, average FPS dropped from 109.8 to 30.4 with DLSS 5 enabled, and in replays it fell from 92.6 to 26.9, with latency roughly doubling or more in both cases. During actual gameplay, however, average FPS stayed nearly the same, though 1% low FPS dipped, latency increased, and GPU utilization rose sharply. This pattern was attributed to Frame Generation, which is typically active during gameplay but disabled during static menus, pause screens, or camera-cut replays, masking the underlying rendering cost. The findings were said to align with a separate report of a 50-60% performance drop from PC Gamer. Despite the performance costs, the visual quality was described as strong, with fine details like skin texture, fabric, and lighting preserved without noticeable blurring or artifacts.
Meanwhile, a new unofficial tool called DLSS 5 Swapper, published on GitHub, allows users to install DLSS 5's Neural Rendering into games that never received official support, including titles across DirectX 9 through DirectX 12 and select emulators. The tool relies on a community mod called DLSS5-Feeder that emulates DLSS calls, paired with ReShade for depth and motion data. It also extends DLSS 5 support to RTX 20-series and RTX 30-series cards, bypassing Nvidia's RTX 50-series requirement. The tool builds on DLSS 5 files that leaked in NBA 2K27's pre-launch build. Since it is unofficial and unaffiliated with Nvidia, caution is advised when downloading it.