As we saw in our review of DLSS 5's official debut in NBA 2K27, enabling NVIDIA's new 3D-Guided Neural Rendering technology comes with a huge performance cost. At 4K on a GeForce RTX 5080 or RTX 5090, enabling it can drop FPS by 60% to deliver photorealistic lighting.
Beyond being DLSS's heaviest and most complex model to run in real time, one reason the cost is so high is that DLSS 5 Neural Rendering runs at the final stage of the rendering pipeline. This means that when it runs after DLSS Super Resolution, which upscales from 1080p when using the Performance preset in 4K, the Neural Rendering pass is run in 4K on the final rendered frame.
As DLSS 5 Neural Rendering is still in its infancy, NVIDIA has confirmed it's still optimizing performance on RTX 50 Series graphics cards before officially opening access to the RTX 40 Series and older generations. That said, with DLSS 5 leaking ahead of its launch and modders letting games run DLSS 5 in just about any game and on any GPU, they've also found a way to boost performance.
The mod, called Neural Upstream by matiasLombo, improves DLSS 5 performance by running the DLSS 5 Neural Rendering pass before DLSS Super Resolution upscaling. This means that in 4K, Neural Rendering happens after the 1080p frame is rendered, and then DLSS Super Resolution with the Performance preset upscales that to 4K.
Neural Upstream is available in the DLSS 5 Autopilot tool, one of the few one-click solutions for enabling DLSS 5 in countless PC games. As tested on a GeForce RTX 4080 in Assassin's Creed Shadows (via Reddit), 4K with DLSS Performance and DLSS 5 Neural Rendering goes from 31 FPS using the normal pipeline to 50 FPS with Neural Upstream. That is a 61% performance increase; however, it comes with a loss in image fidelity.
Here's a comparison of the two versions in STALKER 2 from DuffB on YouTube.
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How does Neural Upstream change the DLSS 5 rendering order compared with NVIDIA's default pipeline?
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With NVIDIA prioritizing image quality and photorealism, this is probably why DLSS 5 isn't configured this way, but with the huge performance cost of running it at higher resolutions, we wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing DLSS 5 expanded to include Super Resolution-style Performance, Balanced, and Quality presets in the future.
