Nvidia DLSS 5 is here and it can make your games look more realistic than ever

Nvidia has been working on making PC games look better without asking gamers to sacrifice performance, and now the company is taking another big step in that direction. The company has officially launched DLSS 5 today, its latest attempt at using AI to improve graphics in real time. Unlike previous versions of DLSS that mainly focused on boosting frame rates and reconstructing images, DLSS 5 is designed to add more realistic lighting and material details to games. It will make its debut in NBA 2K27, and the feature will be available for all GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs and laptops.

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Nvidia DLSS 5 release date and supported GPUs

Nvidia DLSS 5 will be available from today (September 3) at 9 PM Pacific Time, which means 9:30 am IST on September 4. NBA 2K27 will be the first game to support the new technology. It will be available on all GeForce RTX 50 Series desktop and laptop GPUs. Nvidia is also bringing the feature to GeForce NOW Ultimate, where games are streamed using Nvidia’s RTX 5080-powered cloud gaming rigs.

Players will also need a new GeForce Game Ready Driver launching at the same time. Without the driver, the DLSS Neural Rendering option will not appear in NBA 2K27.

Once the driver is installed, players can head to the game’s Video Settings and switch on DLSS Neural Rendering. Nvidia also says the feature can be toggled during gameplay and replays using the F9 key on a keyboard.

What is Nvidia DLSS 5 and how does it work?

This is where DLSS 5 gets a little different from what we have seen before. Earlier DLSS technologies focused heavily on performance, with features such as Super Resolution, Frame Generation and Multi-Frame Generation helping games deliver higher frame rates.

DLSS 5 introduces something Nvidia calls 3D-Guided Neural Rendering. So instead of simply reconstructing the image or generating additional frames, the technology uses AI to add lighting and material details that developers may otherwise have to simplify to keep a game running in real time.

The technology works using the game’s rendered frame, along with information such as colour and motion vectors. Nvidia says this allows DLSS 5 to understand objects, materials, spatial relationships and light sources in a scene before adding extra detail.

This can include things such as more natural light scattering through skin, realistic light transmission through hair and foliage, deeper contact shadows and improved global illumination.

More importantly, Nvidia says DLSS 5 is designed to preserve the geometry and structure created by the game’s artists. This means the AI is not supposed to randomly change a character’s face or proportions while trying to make them look more realistic.

NBA 2K27 is the first game to get DLSS 5

NBA 2K27 will be the first game where gamers can actually see what DLSS 5 can do. This makes sense considering how much the NBA 2K series focuses on recreating real athletes and making them look as close to their real-world counterparts as possible.

Nvidia says Visual Concepts has used DLSS 5 to improve the way lighting interacts with players’ skin, hair and clothing while keeping the facial geometry created from real-world athlete scans intact.

For example, Nvidia highlights Cade Cunningham, where DLSS 5 adds more natural warmth to the skin under arena lighting and creates tighter shadows around his neck and jersey collar. The company also says the technology improves how light interacts with his hair.

Tyrese Haliburton is another example. Nvidia says DLSS 5 adds more realistic warmth to his face, sharper contact shadows around his nose and chin, and more defined shadows across his compression sleeve.

Developers also get several controls to decide how much of this enhancement they want in different parts of a game. Nvidia says DLSS 5 includes Structure Intensity and Tone Intensity controls, along with semantic masking that can apply different levels of enhancement to characters, environments or individual objects.

For gamers, however, it remains fairly simple. It is essentially an on or off setting.

Nvidia claims DLSS 5 can deliver high frame rates too

While DLSS 5 is primarily being positioned as a visual upgrade, Nvidia says it does not require gamers to give up high frame rates.

With NBA 2K27 running at 4K using the Ultra preset and ray tracing, Nvidia says the GeForce RTX 5090 can reach up to 370 FPS when using the full suite of DLSS technologies. At 1440p, the company claims up to 590 FPS on the RTX 5090, 410 FPS on the RTX 5080, 350 FPS on the RTX 5070 Ti and 260 FPS on the RTX 5070.

Nvidia also says it has managed to significantly improve the performance of DLSS 5 since its initial announcement. The technology originally required two RTX 5090 GPUs, but Nvidia says optimisation has brought it down to a single graphics card, resulting in a claimed five-times performance gain over the past six months.

For now, NBA 2K27 is the first game to showcase what Nvidia’s new technology can do. The company says more titles will integrate DLSS 5 in the coming weeks and months, so we could soon get a better idea of whether this new approach to AI-powered graphics can make a noticeable difference across different types of games.

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