DLSS 5 Leak Sparks Modding Frenzy, But Performance Falters on Older GPUs
The recent leak of DLSS 5 through an early-access build of NBA 2K27 has ignited significant interest within the gaming and modding communities. Since the leak, enthusiasts have been working diligently to integrate the advanced upscaling technology into a variety of games, pushing the boundaries of what current hardware can achieve.
Modders Bring DLSS 5 to RTX 30-Series GPUs
Members of the RenoDX Discord community have managed to patch DLSS 5 into NVIDIA’s RTX 30-series “Ampere” GPUs, despite the lack of official support for this generation. However, the results have highlighted the limitations of running DLSS 5 on unsupported hardware. For example, a user with an RTX 3070 laptop GPU reported a dramatic increase in render latency—from approximately 29 milliseconds to over 3,300 milliseconds—when enabling Neural Rendering in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. This resulted in performance dropping to less than 1 frame per second, making the game virtually unplayable.
Similar issues have been observed elsewhere. On X (formerly Twitter), user @Flourek demonstrated DLSS 5 running on an RTX 3080, where frame rates in Deep Rock Galactic plummeted from around 130 FPS to just 4 FPS. Reports from other users indicate that RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 Ti cards experienced similar performance drops, hovering near 1 FPS in titles such as Control, FiveM, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.
Better Results on RTX 40-Series, But Official Support Remains Unclear
In contrast, modders have recently succeeded in running DLSS 5 on RTX 40-series “Ada Lovelace” GPUs, where performance has proven to be noticeably better. This improvement aligns with technical expectations: as detailed in previous DLSS-NR analyses, the Ampere architecture lacks native FP8 support, a feature that the leaked DLSS 5 model appears to require. This hardware limitation explains the significant performance degradation observed on RTX 30-series cards.
Officially, DLSS 5 is designed to support only the upcoming RTX 50-series “Blackwell” GPUs. NVIDIA has not announced any plans to extend support to the RTX 40-series, and there is no indication that older generations will receive compatibility. As the technology continues to evolve, users of previous-generation hardware may find themselves limited to earlier versions of DLSS, while the latest advancements remain exclusive to the newest GPUs.
