NVIDIA Finally Announces Launch Date For Its Controversial DLSS 5
Unsurprisingly, it comes with a huge performance hit.
Just days after the internet went wild over leaked DLSS 5, NVIDIA has revealed its launch date, supported GPUs, in-house performance benchmarks, and other details. For anyone who missed the drama, NVIDIA first unveiled DLSS 5 this spring, but the technology quickly drew criticism for how it handles characters' faces, which often look like AI-generated imagery, despite NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's attempts to defend it by saying he isn't a fan of "AI slop."
It's official now: DLSS 5 will be available starting September 3 at 9 PM Pacific Time in NBA 2K27, with support for all GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs and laptops. In the video above, NVIDIA's Edward Liu and Gabriele Leone provide an in-depth look at DLSS 5 and its developer controls.
"While previous DLSS technologies focused on reconstructing existing scene data to deliver higher-resolution images, additional frames, or cleaner ray-traced lighting, DLSS 5 with 3D-Guided Neural Rendering takes the next step by using AI to generate the rich lighting and material details that real-time performance constraints once forced developers to strip away, allowing them to realize their original artistic vision.
And instead of generating frames from text prompts, 3D-Guided Neural Rendering uses the game engine's rendered frame, complete with its artist-designed geometry, textures, and lighting buffers, as an unyielding foundation. DLSS 5 becomes the final rendering stage of the graphics pipeline, infusing scenes with lifelike lighting and materials while ensuring the engine frame defines what must remain, and the artist directs what may change."
NVIDIA
NVIDIA
NVIDIA
DLSS 5 is still optional and can be disabled at any time. Here's how NVIDIA's FAQ explains how much control developers can have over it:
DLSS 3D-Guided Neural Rendering provides several layers of artistic control:
- Model Selection: Offers distinct model weights with different training parameters to guide the final output.
- Structure Intensity: Controls high-frequency details added by the model, such as ambient occlusion, contact shadows, and subsurface scattering.
- Tone Intensity: Controls low-frequency details added by the model, including lighting and color response.
- Automatic Masking: Detects and isolates objects in the frame (like characters) to apply DLSS 5 dynamically, eliminating the need for manual object tagging.
- Developer Masking: Offers per-pixel, custom masking control, allowing effects to be applied to specific objects.
Of course, performance has been a concern since the beginning. NVIDIA initially demonstrated DLSS 5 running on two GeForce RTX 5090s, reducing the requirement to a single graphics card now and "achieving a 5X performance gain in just six months." However, NVIDIA's results were captured using Multi Frame Generation in 6X mode. Without it, the reported 233 FPS and 370 FPS figures suggest a very low native render rate, potentially well below 60 FPS in some cases.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA
It's difficult to judge the technology's actual performance impact right now, as these are NVIDIA's own benchmarks and the company hasn't provided a direct DLSS 5 on-versus-off comparison. There's reportedly more optimization work coming later this year.
You can also check out NVIDIA's technical report for a deeper dive into DLSS 5 here.
NBA 2K is a little bit of an odd choice for a debut title, since the series isn't exactly renowned for its graphics. Hear directly from the development team on how they integrated the technology:
The lack of any mention of the RTX 40 Series is interesting, given that we saw over the weekend modders get DLSS 5 running on older GPUs with roughly the same performance impact.
We'll see how things look at launch, because DLSS 5's current implementation seems to ask too much from your GPU even if you want AI enhancements in games. Read more about DLSS 5 here and subscribe to our Newsletter, join our 80 Level Talent platform, Discord, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
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