DLSS 5 gets a dedicated GPU in mod that delivers impressive FPS gains

NVIDIA's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering is already proving to be one of the company's most ambitious attempts at bringing photorealistic visuals to games. The technology is officially available in only one title for now, but that hasn't stopped PC enthusiasts from experimenting with it. Now, one modder has found a particularly interesting way to make DLSS 5 less demanding by moving its workload onto a second graphics card.

Modder “maohgad-web” has created a ReShade add-on called Neural-coprocessor, which allows DLSS 5 to run on a secondary GPU rather than the graphics card rendering the game itself. In theory, this could give multi-GPU gaming a new purpose after NVIDIA moved away from technologies such as SLI.

The reason this works is that DLSS 5 Neural Rendering differs from more familiar DLSS features such as Super Resolution, Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction. Rather than being tightly integrated into the game's rendering pipeline, DLSS 5 operates as a post-processing AI workload. That means its calculations don't necessarily have to happen on the GPU responsible for rendering the game.

The performance difference can be substantial. Testing with two RTX 5060 Ti 16GB graphics cards running The Blood of Dawnwalker at 1080p shows how much DLSS 5 can affect performance when everything runs on a single GPU. Moving the Neural Rendering workload to the second card can bring frame rates back close to their pre-DLSS 5 levels.

The largest improvement reportedly appears with DLSS Super Resolution set to Ultra Performance, where offloading DLSS 5 to the second GPU produced a 127% increase in gaming performance compared with running the neural workload on the primary card. 

There's still a major catch, though. DLSS 5 remains computationally expensive despite NVIDIA reportedly improving its performance by around 5x since the technology was first demonstrated. NVIDIA is expected to continue optimizing it, but its performance cost could remain noticeable even after those improvements.

Interestingly, NVIDIA itself demonstrated DLSS 5 running on a separate GPU during its original reveal, showing that the concept is technically viable. However, that doesn't necessarily mean a secondary-GPU feature will become part of the official DLSS package. If upcoming hardware can handle Neural Rendering with substantially less impact on game performance, there would be little incentive for most players to install a second GPU solely for DLSS 5.

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