DLSS 5 No Longer Needs Two RTX 5090s, NVIDIA Says Model is 5x Faster Since March

NVIDIA has shared its first-party performance numbers for DLSS 5, the neural rendering feature arriving September 3 in NBA 2K27. The company says the model is now five times faster than when it was first shown at GTC in March, which required two RTX 5090 GPUs just to run. It now works on a single card across the whole RTX 50-series lineup, from the RTX 5060 up to the RTX 5090. That is a commendable improvement in a span of just 6 months, but DLSS 5 will still incur a significant performance penalty compared to native rendering, contrary to what we have come to expect from DLSS.

In NBA 2K27, running at 4K with the Ultra preset, ray tracing, and Multi Frame Generation, NVIDIA's own figures put the RTX 5090 at roughly 370 FPS with DLSS 5 on, and the RTX 5080 around 233 FPS. At 1440p, the RTX 5090 gets close to 600 FPS, while even the RTX 5070 stays above 260 FPS. NVIDIA also shared some 1080p benchmarks with the RTX 5090 hitting nearly 800 FPS, but those are not relevant to how these cards will be used in the real world. NVIDIA did not provide performance figures without DLSS 5 enabled. Read full story