Modders Get Leaked DLSS 5 Neural Rendering Running on RTX 40 Series GPUs

A DLSS 5 Neural Rendering (NR) DLL file leaked this week through an early-access build of NBA 2K27, giving modders their first look at NVIDIA's next-generation upscaling technology ahead of its official release. The tool is designed to use rendered frames and motion vectors to improve image quality, and was reportedly built for the upcoming Blackwell RTX 50 series GPUs.

Members of the RenoDX community moved quickly, first enabling an experimental implementation of DLSS 5 NR in the game Control using tools like ReShade and RenoDX. Within about two days, the modding effort expanded to multiple other games as well.

A modder known as Uncle Burrito found that the CUDA binaries in the leaked file were limited to NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture (sm_120), with nothing built for Ampere or Ada Lovelace chips. By swapping in binaries compatible with Ada Lovelace, the modder got DLSS 5 NR running on an RTX 4090, and reported that it also worked on the RTX 4080. Tom's Hardware separately confirmed the patch functioning on an RTX 4080, according to TechPowerUp, and other developers in the same Discord community are said to be working on their own versions of the fix.

Performance was affected by the experimental patch. On the RTX 4090, frame rates dropped from a range of 135-145 FPS down to 83 FPS, a reduction of about 39%, according to Wccftech's report of the demonstration.

It remains unclear whether older cards such as Ampere-based RTX 30 series GPUs will support the mod, since Uncle Burrito does not own an RTX 20 or RTX 30 series card to test. TechPowerUp notes that Ampere GPUs could pose a bigger challenge because they lack native FP8 support, which the DLSS 5 NR AI model relies on and which Ada Lovelace supports.

NVIDIA has not indicated whether it plans to officially support RTX 40 series or older GPUs with DLSS 5 NR at launch. Both outlets note that the implementation remains experimental and unofficial, though TechPowerUp suggests the speed of the modding community's progress may put pressure on NVIDIA to consider broader support.