NVIDIA announced that it will showcase its new upscaling technology, DLSS 5, on September 4 at 1:00 PM KST. The first supported title is 'NBA 2K27', developed by Visual Concepts and published by 2K. Supported platforms include the entire desktop and laptop lineup equipped with RTX 50 Series GPUs, as well as its cloud gaming service, GeForce NOW.
The previous DLSS 4.5 focused on boosting frame performance by using AI to render 23 out of 24 pixels displayed on screen through Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and Ray Reconstruction. DLSS 5 takes this a step further, shifting focus toward improving image quality rather than pure performance. It uses AI to supplement fine lighting and material detail that previously had to be reduced due to real-time rendering computational limits.
The core technology is 3D-Guided Neural Rendering. While typical generative AI creates images using text prompts, DLSS 5 uses frames actually rendered by the game engine as input data. NVIDIA explained, "Because this method yields consistent results and stable frame-to-frame transitions, it operates on a 1 frame input to 1 frame output basis without issues like character faces or environments randomly shifting each frame." They added, "Leveraging the Tensor Cores of the RTX 50 Series, it can run in real-time at up to 4K resolution on a single GPU, and the higher the quality of the input data, the higher the quality of the final output."
According to NVIDIA's internal benchmark for 'NBA 2K27' at 4K resolution, Ultra Preset, and Ray Tracing enabled, the RTX 5090 achieved up to 370 fps, while at 2560x1440 resolution, results were 590 fps on the RTX 5090, 410 fps on the RTX 5080, 350 fps on the RTX 5070 Ti, and 260 fps on the RTX 5070.
To use DLSS 5, users must install the new GeForce Game Ready driver distributed on September 4 starting at 1:00 PM KST. After downloading the driver from NVIDIA's website or the NVIDIA App, enable the 'DLSS Neural Rendering' option in the game's 'Video Settings'. Other DLSS options, such as Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and Reflex, can be adjusted as desired just as before, and the DLSS Neural Rendering option can be toggled on and off during gameplay or replays by pressing the F9 key on the keyboard.
According to NVIDIA, six months after its initial reveal in March, DLSS 5 transitioned from a dual RTX 5090 configuration to running on a single GPU, achieving an approximately 5x performance improvement. NVIDIA stated that it plans to further boost performance through additional model updates this fall, adding that it will expand the lineup of titles supporting DLSS 5 over the coming weeks and months.
