Nvidia’s DLSS 5 makes its debut this week alongside NBA 2K27 worldwide

Nvidia is officially taking the wraps off DLSS 5 tomorrow, with NBA 2K27 becoming the first game to support the company's latest neural rendering technology. Exclusive to GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs, DLSS 5 introduces 3D-Guided Neural Rendering, which Nvidia says could bring games closer to Hollywood-style photorealism.

Unlike previous DLSS technologies that primarily focused on upscaling and frame generation, DLSS 5 uses AI to enhance lighting, materials, and other visual details within a game's existing rendering pipeline. Nvidia claims the technology can produce effects that would otherwise require an enormous number of ray-tracing calculations, potentially pushing visual quality beyond what conventional rendering techniques can realistically achieve.

The system is also designed to give developers considerable control over how the neural rendering is applied. DLSS 5 uses the game's existing output as its foundation, ensuring that the generated visuals remain tied to the original artistic direction. Developers can adjust the intensity of the effect, determine which objects or characters are affected, and choose between different neural rendering models depending on the visual style they want to achieve.

Nvidia is demonstrating the technology first in NBA 2K27, where DLSS 5 is used to improve lighting and skin rendering while preserving the accuracy of facial scans from real-world basketball players. More realistic interaction between light and skin is intended to make the athletes look less artificial without altering their underlying facial geometry. That distinction is important because changing character geometry would potentially undermine the detailed scans used to recreate real NBA players. Instead, DLSS 5 focuses on how those existing models are illuminated and rendered.

Performance is another interesting part of Nvidia's launch announcement. The company says NBA 2K27 can reach nearly 600 FPS on an RTX 5090 with DLSS 5 enabled. However, that figure also includes DLSS upscaling and multi-frame generation, so it doesn't provide a clear indication of how much performance DLSS 5's neural rendering itself consumes compared with native rendering.

DLSS 5 launches tomorrow, September 3, alongside NBA 2K27. Nvidia says additional games will adopt the technology later this year, while ongoing development will focus on improving both performance and image quality. For RTX 50-series owners, DLSS 5 could represent Nvidia's most ambitious attempt yet to use AI as part of the actual rendering process rather than simply generating more pixels.

As always, for the latest news on NVIDIA's DLSS technology, RTX 50-series GPUs, AI-powered rendering, and developments across the PC gaming industry, be sure to follow our dedicated hardware coverage.