Nvidia DLSS 5 Launches in NBA 2K27 on September 3

Nvidia will release DLSS 5 for NBA 2K27 at 9 p.m. Pacific Time on September 3, making Visual Concepts’ basketball game the first official release for the company’s new 3D-Guided Neural Rendering technology. The feature will require a new GeForce Game Ready Driver and will be available on GeForce RTX 50 Series desktop and laptop GPUs, as well as GeForce NOW Ultimate.

Unlike earlier versions of DLSS, which mainly focused on reconstructing higher-resolution images or generating additional frames, DLSS 5 is designed to change the visual detail inside a rendered scene. Nvidia says the system uses the game engine’s existing frame—including its geometry, textures, motion vectors, and lighting data—as its foundation, then applies neural rendering to materials and lighting.

The company says the model does not build frames from text prompts. Instead, it works as the final stage of the graphics pipeline and is intended to preserve the structure of the original frame. DLSS Neural Rendering will also be optional in NBA 2K27, with players able to switch it on or off during gameplay and replays using the F9 key.

Why DLSS 5 has divided players

Nvidia’s examples highlight effects such as light passing through skin and hair, more detailed contact shadows, and improved material responses. Visual Concepts can tune the result with controls for structure and tone, while semantic and engine-level masks allow developers to limit the effect to selected characters, objects, or areas of a scene.

Those controls are especially important after Nvidia’s earlier DLSS 5 demonstrations drew criticism for appearing to change character faces. Eurogamer noted that the initial presentation of Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace Ashcroft prompted a backlash over how different her face looked. Nvidia’s latest explanation puts greater emphasis on preserving artistic intent, while its NBA 2K27 material says the scanned facial geometry of real athletes remains intact.

The advertised frame rates need context

DLSS 5 also carries a substantial performance cost. Nvidia advertises up to 370 frames per second at 4K on a GeForce RTX 5090 with the Ultra preset and ray tracing, but those results combine DLSS 5 with Performance-mode upscaling and 6X Multi Frame Generation.

PC Gamer’s analysis puts the underlying rendered frame rate at roughly 62 fps in that RTX 5090 test. The outlet also calculated that Nvidia’s advertised 258 fps result for an RTX 5060 at 1080p corresponds to an underlying rate of about 43 fps before 6X frame generation. Nvidia developers separately told PC Gamer that enabling DLSS 5 currently reduces performance by an estimated 50 to 60 percent.

Nvidia says the technology has already become five times faster since its March announcement, when it required two RTX 5090 GPUs, and now runs on a single RTX 50 Series card. Further model optimizations are planned for the fall.

The September 3 driver marks the first supported public implementation. Unofficial DLSS 5 experiments have already reached older RTX cards and PCSX2, but those community modifications are separate from Nvidia’s supported RTX 50 Series rollout.