DLSS 5 Will Be Coming to Older Graphics Cards After All

Nvidia's DLSS 5 neural rendering tech officially debuted yesterday in NBA 2K27, and it's only supported on current-generation RTX 5000 graphics cards. But it seems like that'll change over time.

On Nvidia's forums, an employee claimed that the company will be expanding DLSS 5 support to RTX 40 series graphics cards at some point, but we're probably going to wait a while for it. He said, "Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall," but noted that "once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series."

So, it seems like the company's focus, at least for now, is to get it running smoother on current-generation graphics cards before retrofitting it to its Ada Lovelace architecture. That makes a lot of sense, too. I've briefly messed around with the technology in NBA 2K27, and I was surprised by how subtle the changes were, at least compared to some of the nightmare fuel I've seen on Reddit. But even though the technology did make NBA 2K27 look better, it had a massive impact to performance, and I was testing it on an RTX 5090.

Turning on DLSS 5 on my main system brought the pre-frame-gen frame rate down from around 57-60 fps down to around 37 fps, a pretty massive 43% performance drop. If that's the performance hit on the most powerful graphics card on the market, I'm not confident about how well something like the RTX 4080 would handle it, especially with its older Tensor Cores.

It's clear that Nvidia has made a lot of headway in optimizing the technology since it was first revealed back in March, though. Back then, Nvidia needed two RTX 5090s to even run it, and now Team Green claims that it has improved model performance by around 5x. There's a possibility that with enough optimization, the performance hit will shrink over time. But, until I actually see that, I'm going to remain skeptical.

Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra