NVIDIA has shared its first official performance figures for DLSS 5, the neural rendering feature set to debut on September 3 in NBA 2K27. According to the company, the model is now five times faster than when it was first demonstrated at GTC in March, when it required two RTX 5090 GPUs to run. It can now run on a single card across the entire RTX 50-series lineup, from the RTX 5060 up to the RTX 5090.
Despite this improvement, NVIDIA says DLSS 5 still carries a significant performance cost compared to native rendering, estimated at around 50 to 60 percent on average. In NBA 2K27 at 4K with the Ultra preset, ray tracing, and Multi Frame Generation enabled, NVIDIA's figures show the RTX 5090 reaching roughly 370 FPS and the RTX 5080 around 233 FPS. At 1440p, the RTX 5090 approaches 600 FPS while the RTX 5070 stays above 260 FPS. NVIDIA also shared 1080p numbers showing the RTX 5090 nearing 800 FPS, though these are described as less relevant to real-world use. The company did not provide comparison figures with DLSS 5 disabled, and further optimization is reportedly planned later this year. Because these numbers come directly from NVIDIA, independent benchmarks are needed to confirm them.
Separately, a leaked DLSS 5 DLL continues to be adapted by modders for hardware NVIDIA has not officially supported. Developer ShortFuse has released new builds, including a version aimed at RTX 20-series 'Turing' GPUs, three generations behind the recommended Blackwell architecture. Results have been inconsistent: Red Dead Redemption reportedly worked, but Red Dead Redemption 2 did not, Hogwarts Legacy became stuck in standby instead of activating the feature, and GTA 5 ran briefly before the display signal dropped.
Community members have also reported progress using an FP16 implementation of DLSS 5, which one X user says is now running on both RTX 20- and RTX 30-series GPUs. This differs from the earlier FP8 approach, which had hurt performance on Ampere cards, since neither Turing nor Ampere accelerates FP8 the way Blackwell does. Testers on the RenoDX Discord reported reasonable performance using this FP16 method on RTX 30-series hardware. The same user also said they got DLSS 5 working with Manhunt through the PCSX2 PlayStation 2 emulator, and others have reported the mod functioning in older DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 titles, outside the APIs NVIDIA has confirmed support for.
The modding effort began after a precursor version of DLSS 5 leaked alongside NBA 2K27, after which the community extended it first to RTX 40-series cards and now further back to RTX 20- and 30-series hardware. NVIDIA has not said which GPU generations will receive official support when DLSS 5 launches this fall, though the pace of community modding raises the possibility that official support could eventually extend to RTX 40-series cards.