NVIDIA's AI upscaling technology, DLSS 5, has been discovered in the game NBA 2K27, which was released in early access on 2026-08-26. Upon discovering this, users have begun attempting to apply DLSS 5 to other games.
DLSS 5 is a technology announced on 2026-03-16 that improves performance by generating new frames after upscaling the resolution. While it is intended for real-time operation at up to 4K resolution, it has been pointed out in announcement footage that AI processing may significantly alter the appearance of the original imagery.
The discovery originated when a user found a new library, nvngx_dlssnr.dll, within NBA 2K27. Multiple users have since applied this to other games, such as Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA V, to achieve pseudo-upscaling.
According to users conducting these trials, DLSS 5 offers seven different styles, but currently, it is only being applied to character models. Furthermore, performance degradation has been reported in many environments. In a test using an RTX 5070, there was an instance where the frame rate dropped from 138 FPS to 68 FPS.
Currently, DLSS 5 is designed to operate only on the RTX 5000 series featuring the Blackwell architecture. This is reportedly because specific CUDA binaries can only be read on Blackwell GPUs. However, some users have performed modifications to make it work on the RTX 4000 series as well.
Source: NVIDIAの「DLSS 5」がリリース前に「NBA 2K27」の早期アクセス版で発見され他のゲームに適用する試みが流行 (GIGAZINE, 2026-08-31)