Nvidia's controversial DLSS 5 will launch September 3 with NBA2K27, company shares first benchmarks — available on all RTX 50 series GPUs, laptops, and GeForce NOW

Following its announcement earlier this year, and just days after the DLL leaked inside NBA2K27, Nvidia has today confirmed that its controversial DLSS 5 will launch on September 3. Starting at 9 pm PT, the aforementioned NBA title will support DLSS 5 for all RTX 50 Series GPUs, laptops, and GeForce NOW. The company also shared its first in-house benchmarks of DLSS 5, which is expected to impact GPU performance.

As a series not primarily renowned for its graphical fidelity, NBA2K27 marks a fairly strange launch title for the tech, but Nvidia says that it has closely partnered with Visual Concepts and 2K to achieve "a new level of authentic sports experience for its players." The technology, which Nvidia officially dubs as 3D-guided Neural Rendering," will reportedly show players the natural passing of light through players' ears, light catching hair, and the natural lighting of skin "all while preserving the facial geometry scanned from real-world athletes."

DLSS 5 is not without controversy. As we explained during our first look at DLSS 5 back in March, DLSS 5's AI model "is trained to infer how certain complex features of game scenes like characters, skin, hair, and environmental lighting “should” look in the real world given certain inputs from the game engine (including, but not limited to, the color buffer and motion vectors) in combination with an input frame." While deep integration with a game's engine and assets should make it more consistent and predictable than run-of-the-mill generative AI imagery, that promise hasn't stopped some critics from raising severe objections to its premise since its initial reveal.

CEO Jensen Huang described DLSS 5 as "the GPT moment for graphics — blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

Its launch in NBA2K27 will mark the first time the technology debuts in a playable title, marking our first "fair" assessment of its capabilities.

DLSS 5 is very resource-intensive, with early testing and indications hinting at quite severe drops in frame rate when using the tech. As expected, Nvidia has confirmed DLSS 5 will only work with RTX 50-series GPUs and mobile GPUs, as well as through GeForce Now. Other older generation cards are left out in the cold for now. Along with the announcement, Nvidia has shared its first in-house benchmarks of DLSS 5 RTX Desktop performance.

While these are difficult to contextualize (they only show one game) and should be taken with the usual grain of salt for marketing material, they are interesting in one clear sense. Nvidia has pointedly only shared 4K results for its RTX 5090 and 5080, possibly hinting at the company's expectations of diminished results on anything less powerful, though cards lower in the stack do appear below 4K resolutions.

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(Image credit: Nvidia)

(Image credit: Nvidia)

(Image credit: Nvidia)

The recent DLL leak has led to some modders porting it to older RTX 40-series cards, or even older Ampere or Turing GPUs, with predictably varying results.

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