Key Points
- DLSS 5 was first made available in NBA 2K27 on 3rd September, restricted only to RTX 50 Series GPUs and GeForce NOW Ultimate subscribers, being guaranteed to have a 50 to 60 per cent native performance hit before frame generation takes place.
- DLSS 5 became available to modders on RTX 40 Series, RTX 30 Series, and RTX 20 Series graphics cards within a few days, compelling NVIDIA to promise public availability of RTX 40 by this autumn.
- GeForce NOW remains the least advertised but most straightforward way to access DLSS 5 from PCs, Macs, smartphones, and televisions using an RTX 5080 card in the cloud.
DLSS 5 Goes Live, and the Internet Goes to War Over It
What if NVIDIA’s latest and greatest technology turns out to be the clumsiest political move by the company in years? Well, this exact thing happened on 3 September, as soon as DLSS 5 was introduced into NBA 2K27 and in just two days, gaming society has analysed, hacked for additional hardware and made NVIDIA’s senior director of global PR make a U-turn in front of everyone. Now DLSS 5 is available in NBA 2K27, introducing AI-based rendering of lighting and material detail in real-time games on all GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs and GeForce NOW. It was real, it was impressive, and the backlash was immediate.
It is not another upscaling algorithm with a fresh title tag. Unlike DLSS, which was primarily designed for optimisation, frame, texture and image generation, and reconstruction purposes, DLSS 5 targets visual quality improvement through the introduction of AI rendering of realistic lighting and materials in the scene. Each and every version of DLSS tried to chase frames, but this one chases photorealism, and there are conflicts between these two concepts that will be significant for any competitive gameplay.
In this case, the game engine creates the scene in the same way, it does all the rendering work as usual: geometries, textures, lighting, and everything else, while DLSS 5 takes this output, analyses the colour and motion vectors and improves the visual representation of lighting and materials in the scene with the help of AI. Visual Concepts, creators of NBA 2K27, used this opportunity to introduce subsurface scattering on player skin and improve hair lighting based on scans of Cade Cunningham, Tyrese Haliburton, and Jayson Tatum. Here is how Peter Kavic, Senior Producer, describes his experience working with this technology: “What’s great is the level of control that it gives us. We can set the overall tone and style to match our existing art direction and then really get precise where it matters most, using a per-pixel uplift control mask to fine-tune detail on characters.”
GeForce NOW Is the Angle Everyone Missed
However, while DLSS 5 got covered extensively due to the GPU rule, few realised that at the same time, NVIDIA released DLSS 5 to non-NVIDIA PC owners. GeForce NOW Ultimate subscribers from NVIDIA’s own territories can now play NBA 2K27 on their PC, Mac, handheld, mobile, and television, with DLSS 5 working perfectly since the rendering is performed by a GeForce RTX 5080 in the data centre. It means that Steam Deck users, MacBook users from 2020 and any other individual with a supported device will receive the same neural rendering output as someone using an RTX 5090 because none of them does the job of the rendering themselves. It is not some buried info from a press release, but the best argument NVIDIA ever gave in favour of cloud gaming services.
The RTX 40 Lockout That Collapsed in Under 48 Hours
A highly contentious point is the fact that DLSS 5 only works on the RTX 50 Series, despite modders managing to make DLSS 5 compatible with every generation of RTX, even as far back as the RTX 20 Series. What hurts is that the RTX 40 Series looks like it should be able to handle DLSS 5. The RTX 4090 is actually faster than the RTX 5080 in many gaming scenarios.
This discontent is clear on r/NVIDIA.
User frankiewalsh44 posted: “Not supporting a modern architecture is insane, at least you can argue that RTX3000 and 2000 series were supported long enough, but the 4000 series is still new and modern and the 4090 is the second fastest GPU on the market.”
User oyvese, who himself is an owner of the 4090, added: “I don’t disagree. I have a 4090 and I think it’s laughably bad that they’ll release this for a 5070 but not a 4090. and with current prices of hardware, which NVIDIA are directly responsible for”
AMD faced the exact same problem with FSR 4. As soon as they announced the feature as only being available on RDNA 4 hardware, the backlash prompted AMD to add FSR 4 to the RX 7000 Series via FSR 4.1. But NVIDIA saw what happened, and decided to walk straight into the wall anyway.
The Modders Moved First, NVIDIA Had to Follow
Despite the company’s intention to limit DLSS 5 to RTX 50 Series GPUs only, Berraondo of NVIDIA announced that the technology would be expanded to RTX 40 Series cards.
It is highly possible that the community members who opened up the gates by applying patches to the CUDA binaries pushed the company to make a U-turn on the issue. There was a modder named Uncle Burrito who had made DLSS 5 compatible with the RTX 40 Series. Some videos demonstrated how DLSS 5 Neural Rendering worked on the RTX 4090 in Control. The game’s frame rates decreased by 36% from approximately 130 FPS to 83 FPS. It was unofficial, of course, but the hardware capabilities were confirmed by a modder. NVIDIA had no argument to keep the technology from being implemented on this hardware. Therefore, the commitment of Berraondo came almost right after the proof of this possibility. The expansion of support to the RTX 40 Series will occur after releasing an updated version of DLSS 5 later this year. This means that we can expect the expansion of support in late 2026 or early 2027.
The reactions on X from general users were cautious or even hostile. For instance, one user named RaS x BeasTz issued a warning: “DO NOT GET. IT COMES WITH MONITOR FLICKERING/ON AND OFF.”
What DLSS 5 Actually Costs in Frame Rate?
Activating DLSS 5 will eat up about half of your frame rate, according to NVIDIA. According to the same, the average performance penalty is around 50 to 60%, which is applicable to all 50 series GPUs across all resolutions. The company also confirmed that it is not going to change much from game to game as there is no tuning for each particular game; the model is the model. This sentence gives one an uneasy feeling. This means that the performance hit is not just some temporary issue at the NBA 2K27 launch but is inherent in the DLSS 5 implementation.
DLSS 5 performance hit was measured by PC Gamer using an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D with an RTX 5080 and turned out to be up to a 73% drop in some scenarios at Ultra settings with ray tracing enabled on a system that costs more than £2,500. While in NVIDIA’s slide, NBA 2K27 at 4K went from 227 FPS to 370 FPS when enabling DLSS 5. However, what was hidden in these numbers is that 227 FPS is native 4K rendering and 370 FPS uses both Performance-mode Super Resolution and 6X Multi Frame Generation. Thus, the actual render rate when enabling DLSS 5 would go down to 62 FPS. While it looks like the headline figure is very good, the underlying data tells another story.
NVIDIA says that it expects the optimisation work to bring the performance of the model up to 7 to 10 times better in comparison with its initial March release. As of now, since March, there has already been a 5X performance boost, so the version, which RTX 40 users will eventually get, will be significantly better than the version from 3 September.
Our Take
But we have watched NVIDIA lock DLSS 3 Frame Generation to RTX 40 Series hardware, shrug off the criticism as artificial gating, and do exactly the same thing again with DLSS 5. Our take on this is that this is not carelessness but cold-blooded calculation. Gating the most exciting feature to the latest generation of GPUs is good for sales, and NVIDIA knows that well. The problem is that it has done the same trick with its latest generation, and again, modders demonstrated that the feature works on the previous-generation hardware in a matter of days. When does the “technical necessity” argument of NVIDIA cease to be valid?
The RTX 40 Series is definitely not a legacy product yet. The RTX 4090 outpaces the RTX 5080 in terms of speed in most of the gaming workloads. And the RTX 40 Series user base in autumn 2026 is tremendous. The fact that NVIDIA locks owners of RTX 40 GPUs out of a feature that is supported by the RTX 20 Series hardware (albeit with very poor performance) and claims that “AI model demands” require it should be explained better. Edward Liu of NVIDIA stated at TechPowerUp that the performance hit from DLSS 5 does not depend on the particular game since there is no tuning for games. That means the only parameter that NVIDIA manipulates is the hardware support.
As for the GeForce NOW angle, that is a more interesting strategic move from NVIDIA. Streaming DLSS 5 via the cloud hardware kills the whole argument about gatekeeping GPUs completely. In that context, GeForce NOW is not just a streaming platform but the early access subscription for the latest GPU features. Whether it will maintain this positioning depends on how many games actually ship with DLSS 5 by the end of the year. Currently, there is only one such title available. The bigger list announced in March that included such games as Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield, and Hogwarts Legacy does not include any concrete release dates. Until they appear, DLSS 5 is a technically valid solution that is available for a single sports title with a substantial performance cost for most current hardware owners.
