Although NVIDIA formally released its impressive DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction update last week, leveling up path tracing image quality and detail in a big way, the biggest DLSS story this past week has been the DLSS 5 leak. Discovered in the files for the upcoming NBA 2K27 release from Take-Two, this early version of NVIDIA's new DLSS Neural Rendering technology has now been modded into several games, and the overall discourse has shifted from the "AI slop" narrative of its debut to it being a game changer.
With the ability to adjust the intensity of the effect, which leverages a powerful AI model to make lighting and detail more cinematic by simulating advanced path-tracing-like effects, we've seen several impressive examples of it in games like Control, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, and Skyrim.
Modders over on the RenoDX Discord have also been able to get DLSS 5 working on older GeForce RTX 40 and even GeForce RTX 30 Series hardware, even though the assumption is that it's going to be exclusive to the GeForce RTX 50 Series. However, as the GeForce RTX 30 Series 'Ampere' generation lacks native FP8 support, the performance hit is huge. So, if we're seeing performance cut in half with DLSS 5 on a GeForce RTX 5080, performance basically evaporates on a GeForce RTX 3080.
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Which games have modders successfully enabled DLSS 5 on using the leaked files?
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With the updated mod, @flovreq on X posted a clip of DLSS 5 running in Deep Rock Galactic on a GeForce RTX 3080. Here we see the 130+ FPS performance drop all the way down to 4 FPS - turning the game into an unplayable slideshow. With the size of DLSS 5's DLL file being close to 150MB, double that of DLSS 4.5's biggest model, Ray Reconstruction, this definitely highlights how DLSS 5 was built for the GeForce RTX 50 Series.
