NVIDIA has officially confirmed that DLSS 5 will be introduced to previous-generation RTX 40 series GPUs. NVIDIA issued a statement (reported by TechPowerUp), clarifying that Ada Lovelace would get DLSS 5, but noted that support will not arrive until the company further optimizes DLSS 5 performance on Blackwell GPUs. NVIDIA is planning to introduce new DLSS 5 models this fall, so development work on 40 series enablement won't come until after those models are complete.
The news comes days after NVIDIA launched DLSS 5 with NBA 2K 27, when the company initially announced DLSS 5 would be RTX 50 series exclusive. NVIDIA even went so far as to say there is no fallback path for RTX 40 series GPUs, seemingly suggesting that they were not going to make a version of DLSS 5 for Ada Lovelace.
However, the modding community already confirmed prior to DLSS 5's launch that DLSS 5's hardware limitation was purely artificial. A couple of days before NBA 2K 27's launch, modders were able to use DLSS 5 early through a DLSSNR DLL found in an early access version of NBA 2K 27. After modders successfully injected DLSS 5 into Control, the mod spread like wildfire across the internet, with a number of gamers and tech influencers testing DLSS 5 across dozens of titles.
Modders were not only able to upgrade existing DLSS-supported titles with DLSS 5, but some were also able to figure out how to run DLSS 5 on games that don't feature DLSS support at all with additional mods. On top of that, modders discovered how to unlock DLSS 5 support for older GPUs, including the RTX 40 and RTX 30 series. However, the RTX 40 series was the only previous-generation lineup that had enough performance out of its tensor cores to run DLSS 5 at playable frame rates.
DLSS 5 is our most computationally demanding model to date. Since we initially announced it in March, we've achieved a 5X performance gain and there's more to come. Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall. Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series.
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NVIDIA -- via TechPowerUp
