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Nvidia’s DLSS 5 technology looks to bring hyper-realistic real-time graphics to gaming, but a major downside may make many PC gamers think twice before enabling it. According to Nvidia, turning on the new AI-powered visual features can currently result in a 50-60% performance hit. DLSS 5 officially releases this week, emerging shortly after an early build was leaked online.
DLSS has become an important part of PC gaming, helping graphics cards render games at higher frame rates through techniques such as upscaling and frame generation. DLSS 5 takes things further by using AI to alter and enhance parts of the image itself, aiming to produce more detailed and realistic visuals, labeled as neural rendering in supported games (NBA 2K27 so far).
DLSS 5 performance benchmarks #
The technology has reportedly become much more efficient during development. Around six months ago, when Nvidia first showed the tech off, DLSS 5 was running on a machine with two RTX 5090 graphics cards (one dedicated to the AI workload). The company has since managed to make it roughly five times faster, allowing it to run on much more accessible hardware.
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Even so, the performance cost remains significant. If a game normally runs at 60 FPS, enabling DLSS 5’s new AI visual processing could potentially bring that figure down to around 24-30 FPS, depending on the workload, representing a 50-60% performance loss.
The impact becomes even more noticeable when looking at Nvidia’s high frame-rate demonstrations. Some of the impressive numbers shown by the company rely heavily on Multi Frame Generation, which can create additional frames between traditionally rendered ones. That means a game showing hundreds of frames per second does not necessarily mean the GPU is rendering hundreds of complete frames itself.
For example, Nvidia has demonstrated NBA 2K27 running at extremely high frame rates with DLSS 5 and frame generation enabled. Without that additional generated output, the underlying rendered frame rate can be dramatically lower.
This is likely to be the biggest challenge for DLSS 5. A technology designed to improve image quality becomes harder to justify when it consumes a large portion of the GPU’s performance budget to do so. Nvidia says further performance improvements are already being worked on, so the 50-60% hit may not represent what we’ll have in the near future. The company has also made clear that users can disable the new AI features and continue using regular DLSS technologies – neural rendering is just an option.