Nvidia’s neural rendering model shrinks to about 118 million parameters, gives back a fifth of its 4K VRAM footprint, and lands in NBA 2K27 on October 16.
Nvidia has pushed out the second big revision of DLSS 5 in as many months, and this one is about cost rather than looks. According to Nvidia’s GeForce announcement, the 3D-Guided Neural Rendering model behind DLSS 5 now runs twice as fast as the September build, needs about 20% less VRAM at 4K, and has been trimmed by roughly 24% to around 118 million parameters. In the company’s words, the result is “half the GPU overhead of the September version while maintaining comparable visual fidelity.”
That is a big change for a feature that has so far come with a hefty tax. Nvidia now says the model is ten times faster than the version it showed off in March, which tells you how rough that first demo really was. Guru3D puts the previous model at roughly 155 million parameters, so this is genuine slimming, not a rounding exercise.
Twice as fast is not twice the frames #
Be careful with the headline number, though. The 2x figure applies to the neural rendering pass, not to the whole frame. Geometry, shading, ray tracing and upscaling cost exactly what they did before. Nvidia’s own in-game claim is a more modest “up to 1.4X” frame-rate boost in NBA 2K27, which picks up the new model in its October 16 update on RTX 50-series cards, RTX Spark laptops and GeForce NOW.
DSOGaming points to Nvidia’s RTX 5080 clip at 4K with DLSS Performance and 6x Multi Frame Generation, where NBA 2K27 climbs from about 240 FPS to about 300 FPS. With frame generation multiplying the output, that clip says very little about how much faster the model itself runs. Independent testing will have to sort that out.
The VRAM saving may matter more than the speed in the long run. A neural model that sits in memory next to the game’s own textures and buffers is a hard sell on cards with 12GB or less, and shaving a fifth off it at 4K gives those cards a little more room to breathe.
Hogwarts Legacy on November 5 #
The next big test is Hogwarts Legacy, which gets DLSS 5 on November 5 for RTX 50-series PCs, RTX Spark laptops and GeForce NOW. The same update brings the game’s existing Multi Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction up to their latest versions. Nvidia says Avalanche Software used the SDK’s controls to tune the effect to “maintain the artistic intent and style of the game,” a pointed line given how much flak DLSS 5 took earlier this year for visibly reworking character faces and materials. The Verge describes the Hogwarts integration as toned down. Where Winds Meet follows in late November.
Modders get the new model too. RTX Remix picks it up on October 23, with the same per-object preset selection and scene masking that game studios use, and Nvidia teased Fallout 4 and Mirror’s Edge RTX projects as early examples.
A lighter Frame Generation for RTX 40 owners #
RTX 40-series owners still can’t run DLSS 5 itself, but they do get something. A new Frame Generation “Preset C”, in beta through the Nvidia app, swaps out the second AI model, the one that handles optical flow for elements such as UI and ray-traced effects, for a lighter algorithm. Nvidia claims up to 35% faster frame generation on an RTX 5060, with what it calls “minor trade-offs in image quality.” It covers Frame Generation, Multi Frame Generation and Dynamic MFG on RTX 40 and 50 cards. If image quality is the priority, Preset B remains the safer choice.
Nvidia says the October model will ship by default in every new DLSS 5 game from here on. DLSS 5’s problem was never that it did nothing; it was that it asked a lot of the GPU for a look plenty of players hadn’t asked for. Halving the cost deals with the first half of that complaint. The second half is up to studios like Avalanche.