In addition to improving the model and developer controls, NVIDIA has spent considerable effort over the past six months optimizing the performance of its latest potentially game-changing technology, DLSS 5. When we first saw DLSS 5 earlier this year, NVIDIA confirmed that its real-time demos of the still-early, in-development technology were running on two GeForce RTX 5090 cards.
"We have really tremendous progress since we initially debuted DLSS 5 back at GTC," Edward Liu, Director of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, explains. "There we were showing it running on two 5090s. But, even after just two months, we managed to make it run on a single GeForce RTX 5090. And today, DLSS 5 is running over five times faster compared to where we started."
It's already an impressive achievement to go from foundational models that couldn't run on a modern GPU in real time without becoming a slideshow, to a version built for one specific purpose that required two RTX 5090s to deliver a playable experience. NVIDIA chalks up the 5X improvement to hardware and software optimizations, kernel optimization and co-design, and training and research model-side improvements.
"The DLSS 5 model that you see today is actually smaller, runs faster, delivers more realistic output, and is more controllable compared to what we showed at GDC," Edward Liu adds. On hardware optimizations, NVIDIA confirms it has focused on the latest RTX Blackwell architecture, which features advanced AI hardware, Tensor Cores, and optimizations built specifically for neural rendering.
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That is why DLSS 5 performance focuses on the latest GeForce RTX 50 Series, whether that's the mainstream RTX 5060 or the flagship RTX 5090. DLSS 5 will still run on older GeForce RTX hardware, including cards from the RTX 40 Series, but the performance gains and improvements made in recent months heavily favor Blackwell. More importantly, NVIDIA hasn't stopped optimizing and improving DLSS 5, as this NBA 2K27 debut is just the first step, and the company expects performance and other elements of the technology to improve over time.
