Nvidia's DLSS 5 neural rendering technology launched on September 3 in NBA 2K27, the first game to support it officially, IGN reported on September 1. The technology had leaked the week before, when a DLL file for it was found in the NBA 2K27 beta.
Nvidia bills DLSS 5 as a three-dimensionally bound neural rendering technique. It takes geometry and color data from the game being played and then draws an image generated by an AI model on top of the rendered frame, with the stated goal of increasing photorealism without the computational cost that more traditional methods would demand. Nvidia says that because the model is constrained by the geometry and color information already in the scene, it will not add extra elements or misplace objects.
The performance cost
The renderer is expensive to run, and Nvidia does not dispute that. By the company's own figures, enabling the DLSS 5 neural renderer in NBA 2K27 costs around 50 to 60 percent of performance, though it also changes how the game looks. Nvidia's suggested offset is to turn on other parts of the DLSS software suite, such as super resolution and frame generation, to hold the frame rate up.
IGN reported that mods which appeared after the leak carried some large performance costs of their own, and that the technology's run-up to release had been contentious.
Hardware support is narrow at the outset. The technology works only on RTX 5000 series graphics cards at launch, and IGN's hardware editor Jackie Thomas recommended enabling it only on an RTX 5070 or better. Lowering graphics settings or resolution buys back headroom, but Nvidia says the better the source image, the better the final image will look.