Leaked DLSS 5 Reaches RTX 30 Series "Ampere" GPUs, But Performance Falls Apart

Modders have patched NVIDIA's leaked DLSS 5 into RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs, but performance collapses: an RTX 3070 laptop GPU saw render latency jump from roughly 29 ms to over 3,300 ms in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and an RTX 3080 dropped from around 130 FPS to 4 FPS in Deep Rock Galactic. The steep decline is attributed to Ampere's lack of native FP8 support, which the leaked DLSS 5 model relies on, and DLSS 5 officially supports only RTX 50-series "Blackwell" GPUs.

DLSS 5 leaked through an early-access build of NBA 2K27 https://www.techpowerup.com/352026/nvidia-dlss-5-neural-rendering-dll-leak-hints-at-nearby-launch last week, and since then, the modding community has been hard at work patching it into all sorts of different games https://www.techpowerup.com/352076/dlss-5-gets-modded-into-skyrim-with-dramatic-changes-to-lighting-and-character-faces . Modders on the RenoDX Discord have now pushed it into RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs, despite this generation having no official support for DLSS 5. The results, however, are less than stellar. On the RenoDX Discord, a user with an RTX 3070 laptop GPU running Kingdom Come: Deliverance II saw render latency jump from roughly 29 ms to over 3,300 ms with Neural Rendering enabled, resulting in well under 1 FPS. Over on X, user @Flourek got it running on an RTX 3080, and it fared little better. It too, however, dropped from around 130 FPS to just 4 FPS in Deep Rock Galactic, while RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 Ti cards reportedly hovered near 1 FPS across Control, FiveM, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Just a couple of days ago, modders got DLSS 5 running on RTX 40-series "Ada Lovelace" cards https://www.techpowerup.com/352086/dlss-5-patched-to-work-on-rtx-4000-ada-lovelace-gpus-despite-no-official-support , and performance held up noticeably better. As we noted in our DLSS-NR deep dive https://www.techpowerup.com/352033/nvidia-dlss-5-dll-leaked-by-nba-2k27-early-access-build-heres-our-analysis , Ampere lacks native FP8 support, which the leaked DLSS 5 model apparently relies on, so the steep drop isn't surprising. Officially, DLSS 5 only supports RTX 50-series "Blackwell" GPUs, and there's no word about whether NVIDIA even plans to add support for RTX 40-series cards, let alone older ones.