It's another day, and gamers have figured out yet another way to use DLSS 5 in a way NVIDIA does not officially condone, thanks entirely to the modding community. Bang4BuckPC gamer on YouTube showed off a new method of tuning DLSS 5's neural renderer for maximum image fidelity, beyond what DLSS 5 does in its default configuration, by running the neural renderer twice per frame.
In testing with an RTX 5090 in Rise of the Tomb Raider, running DLSS 5 with two passes resulted in a subtle but noticeable improvement to image quality at a severe cost to performance. Switching from single-pass to dual-pass neural rendering with DLSS 5 saw slight improvements to texture clarity and lighting fidelity on Lara Croft's character and the environment around her.
Using the second neural rendering pass in Rise of the Tomb Raider incurred a 73% performance penalty, dropping the game's frame rate from 350 with DLSS 5 off down to 95 with DLSS 5 on. It's worth mentioning that the YouTuber is running DLSS 5 with a performance optimization despite the huge performance drop-off, by running the neural renderer before the upscaling pass to gain back performance. If the YouTuber ran two-pass rendering with DLSS 5's neural renderer rendering the game after the upscaling pass (which is how DLSS 5 runs by default), performance would be even lower than 95 FPS.
Frequently Asked Questions
Open a question for an answer from TweakTown's coverage of this news, or ask your own below.
How does two-pass DLSS 5 change image quality in Rise of the Tomb Raider compared with the default single-pass mode?
Why does running DLSS 5’s neural renderer twice per frame cut performance so sharply on the RTX 5090?
What settings or modding steps are needed to enable DLSS 5 two-pass rendering in Rise of the Tomb Raider?
Can DLSS 5 two-pass rendering be used in games that don’t natively support DLSS 5?
Have a question about this content not listed here? Ask below and TweakBot will answer it.
There's not much reason to use two-pass rendering with DLSS 5, the visual gains are not worth the massive performance cost that occurs on the GPU. Regardless, it demonstrates how many knobs NVIDIA's developers have implemented into DLSS 5 for running the model in different ways for different purposes. So far, DLSS 5 has been modified to run in several ways NVIDIA has not intended, including being modified to run on RTX 20 and 30 series GPUs, in games that don't natively support DLSS, and even render the Windows desktop. Modders have also figured out how to run DLSS 5 on a second GPU to reduce the performance penalty DLSS 5 has in games.
