Hot on the heels of a high-profile leak, Nvidia has officially announced that its divisive DLSS 5 neural rendering tech will be released on 3 September, 2026. The first game to support the tech is NBA 2K27, and Nvidia says DLSS 5 will bring “a new level of authentic sports experience” to its players.
An earlier DLSS 5 leak came after a DLL for the new tech was spotted in this exact game, with modders then getting it running in several other titles, including, Control, Cyberpunk 2077, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Now, however, the launch, at least in this game, is official.
Nvidia says in the new announcement, “with DLSS 5, players will see how light naturally passes through player ears, the natural lighting of skin, and how light catches hair,” says Nvidia, “all while preserving the facial geometry scanned from real-world athletes.”
What about the artist’s vision?
DLSS 5’s advanced neural rendering tech was originally showcased at GTC 2026, running on a pair of GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs, and showing a striking improvement in realism when it was enabled. However, there was also a backlash to the demo, with many gamers, including our Sam, feeling uncomfortable with the sweeping changes being made to visuals. In particular, the changes to Grace’s face in Resident Evil Requiem looked as though they compromised the developer’s original artistic vision.
In its announcement, Nvidia is keen to point out that DLSS 5 can be “used by game artists to elevate visual fidelity in alignment with their creative vision.” Earlier, the company’s CEO and founder Jensen Huang also responded to the backlash, describing critics as “completely wrong.”
To this end, Nvidia has also provided a few screenshots showing how its developer controls work. For example, the screenshot above shows the structure and tone intensity of DLSS 5’s effects for individual objects in a scene.
DLSS 5 performance
It looks as though DLSS 5 requires a lot of GPU power, though. Nvidia says you’ll need a GeForce RTX 50-series desktop or laptop card to run it, or a GeForce Now subscription. Earlier benchmarks based on the leak showed frame rates dropping from ~90fps to 40fps on an RTX 5080 machine.
Nvidia has provided its own performance figures, claiming that an RTX 5070 averages 262fps at 2560×1440 with DLSS 5 enabled in NBA 2K27, for example, while an RTX 5090 runs at 594fps. However, when you look at the small print, you can see that these results are achieved with 6x multi frame-gen enabled, as well as DLSS Super Resolution on the Quality setting.
Drop down to 1920×1080, and Nvidia says you can even average 258fps on an RTX 5060, although this is again with 6x multi frame-gen and DLSS Super Resolution in Quality mode. It may be that the game is perfectly playable at these settings, but AI is also clearly doing an extraordinary amount of legwork here. As such, we’ll reserve judgement until we’ve played with DLSS 5 for ourselves.
Performance aside, there’s definitely a big impact on visuals, particularly when it comes to human faces and detail. In NBA 2K27, the shadowing around eyes and facial contours looks much more realistic, with clearly defined skin marks, as well as much more detail in hair.
Hopefully we’ll get to officially try DLSS 5 out for ourselves in the near future, and see if it lives up to the hype, as well as gauging the performance impact. In the meantime, check out our guide to buying the best GPU for your needs, if you’re looking to upgrade now.
