Earlier today, we reported that a DLSS 5 DLL has been leaked by an early access build of 2K's NBA2K27 early access. NVIDIA announced DLSS 5 earlier this year, and showed more details at SIGGRAPH this year, saying it would ship "this fall." However, we were surprised that it is shipping already, and with a title like NBA 2K27, without any major announcement or review coverage, pushing us to dig what is happening beneath the surface. Maybe the developers just put the wrong file into the release before pushing it out.
Copies of the DLL were mirrored by people and uploaded to Reddit, where we obtained ours. Just to be clear up front: NVIDIA didn't provide any information for this article, there was no briefing, no press build or anything. All findings reported here come from taking a publicly circulating file apart and trying to figure out what is inside it. Also, before you get too excited, the file cannot actually be used in the game—NBA 2K27 exposes no setting to turn it on, and nothing in the shipping build appears able to drive it. You also can't just drop it into any other game's folder—the game has to be coded specifically to load that DLL and feed it the right information, more on that later.