DLSS 5 guide: supported GPUs, games, performance cost and mods for RTX 20-40, AMD and Intel

This is the complete guide to DLSS 5: which graphics cards run it officially and through mods, which games have it, how many frames it costs, how to turn it on, what enthusiasts have done with it on AMD and Intel, and where the facts end and the rumours start. It is a living page: we update it every time a new game, driver or important mod lands, and the latest changes sit in the log right below this paragraph.

The short version as of 26 September 2026. Officially, DLSS 5 is in one game, NBA 2K27, and only on RTX 50 cards. At 1440p it costs between 36 and 65 percent of your frame rate depending on the card. Everything else, from RTX 20 to Radeon and Intel integrated graphics, runs through mods built on a leaked library, and that is worth understanding before you install anything.

Update log

The short answer: will DLSS 5 run on your graphics card

If you have an RTX 50 card you do not need to install anything beyond a driver and the game. On any other card it comes down to whether you are prepared to deal with mods that carry real risks. Those get their own section further down.

What DLSS 5 is, and how it differs from DLSS 4.5

Every earlier DLSS worked on a finished frame: it raised the resolution or generated in-between frames. DLSS 5 steps in earlier. It takes the game's colour, motion vectors and 3D scene data, and a neural network adds lighting and materials on top: light passing through ears, settling on skin and hair. NVIDIA calls it 3D-Guided Neural Rendering and describes the model as a one-step diffusion model, the same family as image generators, except it runs in a single pass and in real time.

The collage above cuts one scene down the player's face: DLSS 5 off on the left, on on the right. The difference shows in skin, the shadows under the brows and the depth of the face, while the stands and the kit barely change. ComputerBase says the same: a big gain on faces and self-shadowing, and in normal play from a mid distance the difference comes down to slightly better contrast.

Timeline: from the reveal to mods on Radeon

Games with DLSS 5: one out, fifteen promised

As of 26 September official DLSS 5 is in exactly one game, NBA 2K27. There is no second one yet: NVIDIA only talks about "more titles in the coming weeks and months". The list the company named back on 16 March looks like this, with no dates attached:

Do not mix this list up with DLSS 4.5. NVIDIA's September news puts Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, the Witcher 3 remaster and others next to NBA 2K27, but those have DLSS 4.5 upscaling and frame generation, not neural rendering. When a second DLSS 5 game ships, it goes straight into the update log at the top.

How many frames DLSS 5 costs: measurements across the RTX 50 range

NVIDIA names the price itself: on average across RTX 50 cards and resolutions, DLSS 5 costs 50 to 60 percent of your frame rate. The measurements agree. ComputerBase tested NBA 2K27 with DLSS 4.5 upscaling on Balanced: at 1440p the RTX 5090 loses 36 percent, the RTX 5080 about half, the RTX 5070 almost two thirds. At 4K even the RTX 5090 drops from 179 to 77 fps.

Why the price is so high, and why upscaling helps less than usual: the model has a near-fixed cost for every output frame, and it scales with output resolution rather than internal resolution. Digital Foundry measured about 8 milliseconds per frame at 4K on an RTX 5090, half of the entire budget at 60 fps.

Tom's Hardware ran the whole range at native resolution, with no upscaling and no frame generation. For choosing a card, the picture is simple:

Latency gets less attention than it deserves. With frame generation it rises because frames are slotted in between real ones. DLSS 5 has no such mechanism, but the model itself eats into every frame. On an RTX 5070 at 1440p latency went from 20 to 39 milliseconds, on an RTX 5060 from 34 to 63. Fine for NBA 2K27, not for a shooter.

And on power: Tom's Hardware measured an RTX 5090 Founders Edition drawing 517 W instead of 316 at 1440p with DLSS 5, and sitting at its 575 W ceiling at 4K. An MSI Lightning Z with two power connectors reached 848 W at 4K and came out 20 percent faster. The first measurements are broken down in our piece on the real cost of DLSS 5.

A word on NVIDIA's big numbers, like 370 fps at 4K on an RTX 5090. That is true, but with 6X frame generation and Performance upscaling, so five frames in six are generated and the card is really rendering about 62. If you want to know what your monitor shows, look at 370. If you want to know what the card is drawing, look at 62.

How to turn on DLSS 5 officially

DLSS 5 has no separate installer and never will, just like every DLSS version before it. You cannot force it into other games through the NVIDIA App either: according to VideoCardz, NVIDIA said plainly there will be no such switch and support depends on developers. How to update ordinary DLSS in any game is covered in our guide to DLSS in almost any game.

DLSS 5 myths doing the rounds

DLSS 5 on RTX 40, 30 and 20: official status and mods

NVIDIA's official position on RTX 40, from its statement to Wccftech: the company is tuning performance on RTX 50 first, with model updates expected this autumn, and only then plans to expand support to RTX 40. There is no date. For RTX 30 and RTX 20 there are no plans at all.

Enthusiasts did not wait. Every mod below runs on the same library that leaked with the NBA 2K27 build, and nearly all of them expect you to source that file yourself. We only link to the projects' GitHub pages: lookalike sites have already appeared around them.

DLSS 5 Swapper: the most versatile

By rakanki911, version 2.2.7 from mid-September. It finds games in Steam, Epic, GOG and Xbox, backs them up and installs DLSS 5 in one click. It has several routes: through a game's own DLSS, through OptiScaler, or through ReShade for games with no DLSS at all, including DirectX 8 and 9, OpenGL and emulators such as PCSX2 and RPCS3. RTX 20-40 cards need a modified library the user sources themselves. The author warns that on the official 616.64 driver and newer the modified routes may crash, and that Windows Defender may remove the unsigned files. More in our Swapper article.

DLSS 5 Autopilot: picks the method itself and can lower the cost

By Kizzuwatnaa, version 2.0.5 from 22 September. It scans your library, picks one of eight install methods, launches the game and checks which libraries actually loaded. Builds are signed, and it needs an RTX 20 or newer with driver 616.56 or later. The useful part is model resolution: per the author, at 75 percent the effect costs roughly half as much as at 100, and at 50 percent a quarter. The image gets simpler as you go down.

Running it before the upscaler: how to halve the cost

The community's most important finding. Officially DLSS 5 runs after the upscaler, at full output resolution. The Neural Upstream and OptiScaler-DLSSNR-PreSR mods move the neural pass in front of the upscaler, to internal resolution. User measurements: in Assassin's Creed Shadows on an RTX 4080 at 4K with DLSS Performance, 63 fps without the effect, 31 with the standard method and about 50 with the early pass, figures reported by VideoCardz. On an RTX 5070 Ti at 4K a Reddit user got 180, 80 and 122 fps respectively, as reported by Wccftech. Facial detail gets softer in exchange.

DLSS5-Patcher and OptiScaler with DLSS NR

DLSS5-Patcher by MRHRTZ, version 1.2.1 from 6 September, installs ReShade 6.8.0 with the DLSS 5 add-on or works through OptiScaler, and handles old DirectX 8 and 9 games through dgVoodoo2. NVIDIA RTX cards only. OptiScaler_DLSSNR by Dagherbou adds the neural pass on top of any upscaler, DLSS, FSR or XeSS, with its own model resolution slider. How OptiScaler itself works is covered in our OptiScaler Client guide.

DLSS Unlocked and FP16 builds for RTX 20 and 30

DLSS Unlocked by ShyVortex, version 0.9.31 from 25 September, bundles DLSS 5 and frame generation for RTX 20, 30 and 40 in a single package. One caveat: the package now ships a modified NVIDIA library itself, which is legally a much greyer area, so we are not linking to it. How it came about is in our breakdown.

For RTX 20 and 30, developer ShortFuse made FP16 builds of the library: Turing and Ampere lack the hardware FP8 the model uses on RTX 40 and 50. Results are weak so far. Tom's Hardware reports most games on Ampere dropping to single-digit frame rates, with only top cards reaching 40 in a few games. Users report 7 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 on an RTX 3080 Ti.

A second graphics card for DLSS 5

The oddest mod: MGPU Bridge hands the neural pass to a second GPU. The author claims a 127 percent gain in The Blood of Dawnwalker at 1080p with DLSS Ultra Performance on a pair of RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB cards. That is the modder's own measurement, reported by Tom's Hardware and PC Gamer, with no independent check.

DLSS 5 on AMD graphics cards: a mod, a rumour and AMD's own path

AMD does not officially work with DLSS 5 and has not made a single statement about it. An enthusiast does: the DLSS-NR on AMD project by danielblnc appeared on 3 September, DLSS 5 launch day, and gathered more than 1,500 stars on GitHub in three weeks. The author wrote his own neural network runtime in HIP, the project contains no NVIDIA code, and users bring the library themselves.

AMD's own answer exists in three forms right now, and none of them can be installed today. The first is a rumour: leaker Kepler_L2 wrote on 16 September that AMD will have its own DLSS 5-style "neural lighting", probably limited to RDNA 5 because "this stuff is pretty heavy". The second is AMD's ECCV research paper, where a network fills in bounced light, which we covered in a separate piece. The third is FSR Redstone, where the promised Radiance Caching has sat at technical preview 0.9.0 since December 2025.

Intel, consoles and the cloud

On Intel this is a proof of concept rather than a way to play: the neural pass alone takes 412 milliseconds per frame at 1080p on the integrated chip. Details are in our Intel story. The most realistic way to see DLSS 5 without an RTX 50 card today is GeForce NOW.

Why people are angry about DLSS 5

The argument is not about frame rates but about who decides how a game looks. In the March demo Grace from Resident Evil Requiem came out with a changed face, and the main charge was that the network repaints what artists made on purpose. The reveal video ended up at 83.7 percent dislikes. Jensen Huang first said critics were "completely wrong", then a week later on Lex Fridman's podcast said he could see where they were coming from, because he does not love "AI slop" himself. Capcom told investors it would not put AI-generated assets into its games, but did not reject DLSS 5 outright.

NVIDIA's answer is the developer tooling shown above: effect strength, colour grading and per-object masks, so an artist decides where and how the network steps in. The company stresses that the model is deterministic and trained to preserve artistic intent. Digital Foundry tested that in practice: in realistic NBA 2K27 the effect works best, while mods on stylised games such as Final Fantasy VII Rebirth produce overdone faces that clash with the art style.

What to avoid

Where things stand on 26 September 2026

Read also

DLSS 5 Is Out. Half Your Frames Go To It, and Here Is What Comes Back

DLSS in Almost Any Game: Turn It On, Update It, Add It Where There Is None