DLSS 5 neural rendering is out in NBA 2K27 — and it can tank frame rates by up to 73%

Nvidia's DLSS 5 officially launched on September 3rd with NBA 2K27, bringing its AI-powered 3D-Guided Neural Rendering to players for the first time. The tech had already leaked a week earlier when modders dug a new DLL file — nvngx_dlssnr.dll — out of the game's early access build and started experimenting with it in other titles.

The performance cost is brutal. PC Gamer tested DLSS 5 on a high-end rig running an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 5080 with 32 GB DDR5, and frame rates dropped by up to 73% at 1440p Ultra settings with ray tracing on. Nvidia itself had warned of a 50–60% hit in pre-release briefings, so the real-world numbers are even worse than the company's own estimate. Modders who got there first saw similar pain — a Control mod running DLSS 5 on character models dropped from 95 fps to 53. On the visual side, Nvidia says the tech uses the game engine's own geometry, textures, and lighting buffers as a foundation, then adds AI-generated lighting and material detail on top. The company claims a 5x performance improvement since the March announcement, when it required dual RTX 5090s — it now runs on any single RTX 50 Series GPU or laptop GPU. Nvidia also insists it preserves artistic intent by keeping underlying facial proportions intact and only altering light responses and material detail.

That artistic intent argument has been contentious since day one. When DLSS 5 was first shown in March, the reaction was largely negative — characters in games like Resident Evil Requiem came out looking heavily AI-processed, prompting widespread mockery. The modded builds of Control and The Last of Us Part 2 split opinion sharply on the Nvidia subreddit: one user called the result "deep fried," while another argued characters looked "more photo realistic and less like Pixar characters." Launching with NBA 2K27 — a sports game already aiming for photorealism with real athletes — is a deliberate choice that sidesteps some of the artistic intent debate that erupted around stylised games. The parallel with early ray tracing is hard to ignore: that tech also halved frame rates at launch and took years before most players actually turned it on.

For now, DLSS 5 is exclusive to RTX 50 Series hardware, and even the RTX 5080 — Nvidia's second-fastest consumer card — struggles badly with it enabled. More game support will follow, but until Nvidia closes the performance gap significantly, it's hard to recommend enabling it on anything short of a flagship GPU.