Community testing of leaked DLSS 5 builds suggests the tech may already be hitting a wall on NVIDIA's own flagship GPU. Tom's Hardware ran the neural rendering model through Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, and Control on an RTX 5090 Founders Edition, as well as an MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z. Surprisingly, the results point to power delivery as the potential bottleneck rather than compute horsepower. The test used a community Optiscaler injection method built on the leaked DLSS 5 DLL, not NVIDIA's official Streamline path, though the cost lined up closely with NVIDIA's own published 8 ms-per-frame figure.
The Founders Edition, limited to a single 12V-2x6 connector, dropped framerates by 42 to 49 percent with DLSS 5 enabled and consistently hit its 575 W power limit while doing so. The MSI Lightning Z, with a dual-connector setup and a 1000 W limit, took a smaller hit and held better 1% lows, while pulling far more power. In Hogwarts Legacy, it jumped from 480 W to 720 W with neural rendering active, which is a sizeable 50% increase. That leaves single-connector RTX 5090 cards apparently underprovisioned for a feature this demanding, at least unofficially.