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DLSS 5 officially launches inside NBA 2K27, limited to RTX 50-series GPUs for now — Nvidia promises to bring neutral rendering tech to RTX 40-series soon
After a heavily scrutinized announcement earlier this year and a very revealing past few days, DLSS 5 has finally, officially launched inside NBA 2K27. A sports game is a bit of an unusual choice to showcase what is seemingly the next big leap in real-time rendering, but it's the only game DLSS 5 works with for now. Fortunately, you don't need an RTX 50-series GPU to enjoy it, as Nvidia has confirmed that the tech is coming to previous-gen RTX 40-series hardware as well, though we don't know exactly when.
Nvidia has worked closely with developer Visual Concepts to leverage DLSS 5 as an aid rather than the foundation of NBA 2K27. The game still uses scanned 3D models of all the players to form the base geometry. Then, DLSS 5 combines training data and engine data to infer things like lighting and shadows, upgrading the scene to look more photorealistic. Such engine-level implementation allows devs to fine-tune the end result as per their creative intent instead of just applying a global AI filter over everything.
(Image credit: Nvidia / Take-Two Interactive)
DLSS 5 will come to other titles soon, but for now it's limited to NBA 2K27, and even then, it's extremely taxing. Nvidia's own marketing shows DLSS 5 netting 370 FPS at 4K with an RTX 5090, compared to 240 FPS with DLSS turned off. What it doesn't highlight as clearly is that the 370 FPS number comes from 6x MFG — five fake frames being interpolated for every real frame. That means the game is actually running at ~61 FPS; turning on DLSS 5 tanked performance by four times compared to native. Not to mention, it's being upscaled from 1080p to 4K, too.
If you don't happen to own the latest-and-greatest in Blackwell silicon, and you also don't want to pay for the Ultimate tier of GeForce Now (RTX 5080), there's still some good news for you. After initially locking DLSS 5 to only the RTX 50-series, Nvidia has confirmed it'll bring the 3D-guided neural rendering tech to RTX 40-series GPUs soon. "Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series," said Ben Berraondo, head of PR at the company.
Hey @firstadopter, Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall. Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series.September 4, 2026
It's likely that modders opening the floodgates for patched DLLs convinced, or perhaps forced, Nvidia to reconsider its initial stance. It's no secret that DLSS 5 has a merciless compute cost, so making it work on older Ada GPUs would only result in negative PR for an already divisive product. But once modders showed it's possible — not just on the 40-series, but also on the 30- and even 20-series — the ball was in Nvidia's court and, to its credit, the game hasn't stopped. It'll be interesting to see the performance, considering the RTX 40-series only has up to 2x MFG.
For now, the focus is entirely on optimizing DLSS 5 for RTX 50-series, and that improvement will, in turn, help the future release on RTX 40-series, too. As more and more games implement the tech, the dataset behind it will mature, and DLSS 5 might one day grow to distinguish itself from AI slop for its critics. At the moment, don't expect granular control like we've seen through ReShade, as that's entirely a community effort. DLSS 5 will simply be an on/off toggle in most titles since the devs would've already tweaked the individual parameters themselves.
Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
