With the official release of DLSS 5 Neural Rendering, it's clear that NVIDIA's new tech is a big step toward actual photorealistic lighting in games. Although it's only officially available in a single title, NBA 2K27, with DLSS 5 leaking ahead of its debut, modders and PC gamers have been going a little DLSS 5 crazy, tweaking and modding it into just about any game you can think of.
That said, when it comes to DLSS 5, enabling it comes with a massive performance cost - to the tune of around 60%, even on the flagship GeForce RTX 5090. Although NVIDIA has confirmed it's still working on improving DLSS 5 performance, modders are already coming up with their own solutions. The latest is a blast from the past: offloading DLSS 5 to a second GPU.
Developer Marcelo Guibout has seemingly brought back the SLI and CrossFire multi-GPU era, connecting two GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB cards to the same motherboard (via PCIe 5.0 x8). You can probably guess where this is headed: one GPU renders the game, while the second GPU handles the final DLSS 5 render pass. This isn't really like an old-school SLI setup where both GPUs work together, since each GPU works independently, but it's still impressive.
Basically, the second GPU applies DLSS 5 to the rendered frame, doing all of the neural heavy lifting. The second GPU also displays the final frame, so there is some additional latency there. However, offloading DLSS 5 to a second GPU boosts performance because the DLSS 5 rendering cost and performance aren't tied to DLSS Super Resolution's output resolution.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Does running DLSS 5 on a second GPU add noticeable input latency?
Can Neural Coprocessor be used in Cyberpunk 2077 or only in the games shown by the developer?
Why does DLSS 5 carry such a large performance hit on a single GPU in the first place?
Is Neural Coprocessor limited to DLSS 5 Neural Rendering, or can it also offload other DLSS features?
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The mod is called Neural Coprocessor, and it's available via GitHub as a ReShade add-on. So, if for some reason you have a second GeForce RTX 50 Series GPU sitting around, and you've been playing around with DLSS 5, it's probably worth looking into. Here's a video of the developer showcasing it in Cyberpunk 2077.
