Nvidia’s groundbreaking DLSS 5 neural rendering technology officially landed yesterday in NBA 2K27, promising a massive leap in visual fidelity and performance. However, the initial rollout is exclusive to current-generation RTX 5000 series graphics cards. But hold on, gamers! It appears that Nvidia has plans to expand DLSS 5 support to the RTX 40 series… eventually.
The Road Ahead: DLSS 5 and the RTX 4000 Series
According to a post on Nvidia’s forums, an employee hinted that the company intends to bring DLSS 5 support to the RTX 40 series at some point. However, be prepared for a potential wait. The employee stated, “Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall,” but added that “once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series.”
This suggests a phased approach, prioritizing optimization for the latest hardware before retrofitting DLSS 5 onto the Ada Lovelace architecture of the RTX 40 series. This makes sense from an engineering perspective, allowing Nvidia to fine-tune the technology and ensure a smoother experience on its flagship GPUs.
I’ve had a brief hands-on with DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27, and while the visual improvements are noticeable, the performance impact was significant. I was testing it on an RTX 5090, which is no slouch, but even there, the frame rate took a hit.
Turning on DLSS 5 on my main system brought the pre-frame-gen frame rate down from around 57-60 fps down to around 37 fps, a pretty massive 43% performance drop. If that’s the performance hit on the most powerful graphics card on the market, I’m not confident about how well something like the RTX 4080 would handle it, especially with its older Tensor Cores.
Optimization is Key
It’s worth noting that Nvidia has made significant strides in optimizing DLSS 5 since it was first revealed back in March. Initially, two RTX 5090s were needed to even run the technology. Now, Team Green claims to have improved model performance by approximately 5x. This suggests that further optimization could mitigate the performance impact on lower-tier cards.
However, until I see concrete evidence of this optimization in action, I remain cautiously optimistic. The prospect of DLSS 5 on the RTX 40 series is exciting, but only time will tell how well it performs in real-world scenarios.
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
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