What Is DLSS 5? Release Date, GPUs, Games & RTX 40 Status

What does DLSS 5 do?

Earlier versions of DLSS mostly made games faster: upscaling a lower-resolution image (Super Resolution), generating extra frames (Frame Generation) and cleaning up ray tracing (Ray Reconstruction). DLSS 5 changes how the frame looks. NVIDIA calls it 3D-Guided Neural Rendering: an AI model reads the frame the game rendered — its geometry, textures, lighting buffers and motion vectors — and adds the lighting and material detail that real-time games usually have to leave out, such as softer skin shading, richer bounce light and more realistic surfaces.

NVIDIA announced DLSS 5 in March 2026 and launched it on September 3, 2026 with NBA 2K27 and Game Ready Driver 616.64.

Which GPUs support DLSS 5?

NVIDIA’s position on RTX 40, as given to The Verge on September 4: its current focus is optimizing performance for RTX 50, and once that is tuned it plans to expand official support to RTX 40. The NVIDIA App does not offer a switch to force DLSS 5 into other games.

Which games support DLSS 5?

Officially, NBA 2K27 is the first game, with more announced “in the coming weeks and months”. NVIDIA’s announced list and the current status are on the DLSS 5 games page. You turn it on in the game’s video settings; there is nothing to install. How to use DLSS 5 walks through the settings, GeForce NOW and the unofficial routes for other games.

How the mods differ from official DLSS 5

Community tools such as DLSS 5 Swapper, DLSS 5 Manager and RHI place the DLSS 5 runtime and a ReShade add-on into games that never shipped it:

• Games with DLSS can feed it their own inputs (the “native” route).
• Games without DLSS get depth and motion data from a ReShade add-on called DLSS5-Feeder, which is less exact than engine data.
• Older RTX cards run it through a runtime modified by the community, which NVIDIA does not support.

The result can look close to the official demos, but there are no developer masks keeping faces, logos or art style as intended. In official games, developers can tune structure and tone intensity and exclude objects with masks.

Does DLSS 5 cost performance?

Yes. The neural pass takes several milliseconds per frame. Even on a Blackwell card, an early community test of Control at 4K dropped an RTX 5070 Ti from 71 to 35 FPS (Tom’s Hardware). NVIDIA pairs it with Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation to recover frame rate. With the mods, these settings help most.

Watch NVIDIA’s announcement

The video below is NVIDIA’s official reveal on RTX 50 hardware. Community mods use the same model but not the same per-game tuning.