After several months since it’s first reveal, which was met with almost-universal backlash, NVIDIA has finally released it’s much-touted and advertised DLSS 5 Neural Rendering Tech in NBA 2K27, but currently it’s only available for the current-generation RTX 5000 series of graphics cards. However, it seems that may change in the near future and DLSS 5 could actually arrive for the older generation of GPUs such as the RTX 40 series. Although the new upscaling tech may not provide the best results on the older cards as the newer 5000 series of GPUs have been built from the ground up for Neural Rendering.
On the Nvidia’s forums, an employee has recently claimed that the company will be extending DLSS 5 support to the older RTX 40 series of graphics cards at some point in the future. The employee has stated that “Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall,” while also noting that “once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series.”
NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 has evidently resulted in a more crisp and realistic image quality, even making surprising visual overhauls in many older titles, however the caveat is that the new technology comes with around a 50% drop in performance which is practically unacceptable as a trade-off for the increased realism, if you don’t own the top-of-the-line cards, that is. The whole point of upscalers is to get higher FPS with marginal loss in visual quality, but DLSS 5 has bucked the trend by coming with a massive hit in performance which makes it’s usage questionable for the mid-ranged graphics cards out there.
NBA 2K27 is currently the only title built for DLSS 5 utilization, which results in an unprecedented amount of realism when playing the game.
