Nvidia’s controversial DLSS 5 arrives September 3rd and requires serious GPU horsepower

Nvidia is officially launching DLSS 5 this week, following a divisive announcement in March where we likened the AI upscaling tech to a “real-time generative AI filter for video games” and “motion smoothing for video games, but worse.” DLSS 5 will officially be available on RTX 50-series desktop and laptop GPUs and through GeForce Now cloud gaming, though the only game with the tech so far is NBA 2K27 — which is launching September 3rd at 9PM PT on PC.

When it was announced, Nvidia lauded DLSS 5 as “the company’s most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018,” and highlighted how the tech uses AI to make games look more realistic by enhancing a game based on its source content. Nvidia also stressed that DLSS 5 gave developers controls that let them decide how changes from DLSS 5 appeared in their games.

But accompanying examples shared by Nvidia were widely criticized and meme’d on for significantly changing how characters looked, such as the “yassification” of Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace Ashcroft. With the official launch, Requiem still doesn’t support DLSS 5, and neither do other games shown in the March reveal, including EA Sports FC, Starfield, and Hogwarts Legacy, so we don’t know how the final version of the tech might now appear in those titles.

Nvidia did not answer our questions about when DLSS 5 might come to any game beyond NBA 2K27, nor reconfirm that previously confirmed titles will still include the tech.

In examples from NBA 2K27 we saw in a press briefing, though, changes from DLSS 5 don’t appear to be quite as dramatic as the types of adjustments shown in the initial reveal. The shadows and textures added by DLSS 5 generally made the players in the game look more realistic instead of turning them into AI caricatures. You can see more in our deeper dive here.

In briefings, Nvidia showed how developers will have many sliders at their disposal to determine exactly how much DLSS 5 changes things, and that developers can choose to amp up whichever parts of the scene they prefer. They can even leave characters’ faces alone and just enhance silverware or food or foliage, Nvidia says.

While Nvidia’s original DLSS 5 demos required a pair of RTX 5090 gaming graphics cards, the company claims even a single mid-range RTX 5060 can manage to play NBA 2K27 at 1080p with ray tracing and DLSS 5 at ultra spec — if you have one of he fastest gaming CPUs and enable 6x frame generation (meaning the game is only producing one “real” frame for every six frames you see).

DLSS 5 is still a huge performance hit. Nvidia estimates it at 50 to 60 percent, and we saw performance cut in half when we tried an unofficial DLSS5 mod in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

So far, Nvidia has shown us examples that demonstrate the ideal version of what’s possible with DLSS 5 (and promote NBA 2K27). We haven’t yet tested an official build of DLSS 5 ourselves to get an idea of how the tech might look, but we have tried the unofficial version that modders are using to mess with older games like Control and Skyrim. With older games, it seems, a little sprinkle of DLSS 5 goes a long way.