Modders got Nvidia's controversial DLSS 5 running early, and it's a huge performance hit

[Daniel Sims]

What we know so far: DLSS 5's neural rendering powered by AI is easily Nvidia's most controversial gaming product, sparking widespread derision when the company unveiled it in March. Nvidia has said little since beyond a vague "this fall" release window, but a recent leak suggests the company isn't just moving forward with DLSS 5, it could arrive sooner than expected.

Data miners discovered what appears to be a DLL for Nvidia's upcoming DLSS 5 tech in NBA 2K27's installation files soon after the game's early access period started this week. While the basketball simulator does not yet officially support DLSS 5, modders have already begun testing its AI-generated "photorealism" filter in Control.

While the DLL does not explicitly mention DLSS 5, it contains the acronym "NR," presumably standing for neural rendering, Nvidia's name for how DLSS 5 uses AI to infer new lighting details using 2D frames and motion vectors.

Furthermore, analysis indicates that most of the DLL's 158MB file size, by far the largest of any DLSS DLL, consists of neural training weights. The file, which contains 148 million FP8 parameters, is likely an unfinished build.

NBA 2K27 contains no controls for activating DLSS 5, and the DLL only supports Nvidia's RTX 50 series graphics cards, but the developers of the popular RenoDX Reshade mod quickly got it working in Control.

The mod features several customization sliders and switches, confirming Nvidia's earlier pledge that developers can tweak DLSS 5 to alter or ignore specific objects with varying levels of intensity.

Videos of the mod show that, even with relatively conservative settings, DLSS 5 significantly alters Control's lighting and its characters' faces. The technology appears to add or deepen shadows, simulate new skin shading techniques, and alter eyes to enhance realism. Characters' faces look dramatically different while adhering to their original structure.

– Renan Maniero (@renan_maniero) August 26, 2026

The mod also shows that DLSS 5 might incur a significant performance penalty depending on how much Nvidia optimizes it between now and and its planned release date this fall.

On an RTX 5070 Ti at 4K, activating the mod drops the frame rate from 71 fps to 35 fps, but lower resolutions are expected to have a significantly smaller impact. One of the many demonstrations online showed an RTX 5090 dropping from 91 fps to 50 fps when engaging neural rendering in 4K.

Nvidia's initial presentation of DLSS 5 drew strong criticism because it attempts something that prior DLSS technologies did not. Super resolution, ray reconstruction, and frame generation simply reconstruct a game's original graphics at higher resolutions, but neural rendering aims to introduce new details via AI models.

While Nvidia stresses that developers will have the final say over what DLSS 5 does, many already argue that it overrides their original artistic vision and might hallucinate unwanted details.

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Modders got Nvidia's controversial DLSS 5 running early, and it's a huge performance hit

 

[Jackwoz]

Looks good, but at the prices of GPU's and the frame rate hit,not sure people are going to use this option for a while. Well, not until the majority of people can afford a powerful enough GPU to use it.

 

[Inthenstus]

I’m excited for this. It needs more time in the oven for us poor folk, but come DLSS 6/7 I expect this to work on all current gen cards.

 

[maestro0428]

So nvidia made a $96,000,000,000 profit this quarter. That total is more than their entire existance combined "before" Ai.... So 20 years of income vs. 3 mos. And they are raking gamers over the coals why again??? It might be time for me to leave the tech industry.... these are the worst times in tech that I can remember.

 

[alexnode]

Well, it looks a bit like a soap opera filter. We are not going to see cards able to run the soap opera filter until the big AI crash... or if we get some Chinese GPUs that aren't rubbish. In cinematography you see a bit less, there are more shadows and more things blend into the background, having every detail popping and the face being lit perfectly every frame is a bit weird ...

 

[guillejp]

Look, let's raise the bar of the discussion here...

For what it's doing, analyzing the image and applying a temporally stable light form of neural rendering on top, I wouldn't even expect it do do it @60fps, to me it's a miracle it can do it even 30 times a second, even of a 5090.
On a source material with decent level of detail, it's a bridge directly onto photorealism. It's jaw dropping, era redefining technology. Be sure to remember and appreciate this moment, like when we got the first polygon based + textured 3D games in the mid 90s.

The rest of the factors come only after that.

 

[godrilla]

Modded Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS 5 Renoxd and rtx 5080.
FYI

 

[R00sT3R]

This tech was so obviously meant to go with the unveiling of the 60xx cards in at CES 2027 which would have had the necessary cores to run it without crippling framerates.

Then they go and delay the 60xx until 2028, so they're releasing it early on 50xx so as to have something to offer in 2027 in what would be otherwise a barren year and RDNA 5 cards releasing in the summer.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

It takes the image, reskins everything and character models suddenly gain skin blemishes, creepy looking eyes, makeup and other changes.....

No thanks.

 

[godrilla]

This tech was so obviously meant to go with the unveiling of the 60xx cards in at CES 2027 which would have had the necessary cores to run it without crippling framerates.

Then they go and delay the 60xx until 2028, so they're releasing it early on 50xx so as to have something to offer in 2027 in what would be otherwise a barren year and RDNA 5 cards releasing in the summer.

Hit can be upto 67% or 2/3 hit even when nothing is happening on the screen on a 5070.

 

[Axeia]

Still think this is done at the wrong part of the process.
Do the same thing, but ahead of time so the game is compiled to run as such and it'd be a great technique for game developers to use. Allows them to fine tune it to match their specific artistic vision as well.

Slapping it on last moment consumes a ton of performance, which will be offset by dedicating more silicone space to it (which will come at the cost of regular performance). Same story as raytracing has been. And I suspect it's gonna make every game look very same'ish.

So who wins by doing it this way?
NVIDIA, because they can finetune it to match their silicon and you already know with how eager they're to adapt upscaling and frame generation that is the next thing they'll consider making a basic feature to make up for them wanting to spend as little time as possible on everything to make more profit.

Who doesn't win?
Developers who give a ****, because they still get little control over how it the end result looks.
AMD/Intel because it doesn't run on their hardware.
Consumers because it pushes people further into the NVIDIA corner and we already know they're not shy about upping prices.

 

[godrilla]

4th game modded overnight with dlss 5. Avatar via Renodx.

FYI.


Last of US part 2

with moving sliders around to see impact visually.

 

[godrilla]

The hit can be more than described initially even the 5080s seeing more than 50% drop in fps in Cyberpunk 2077.

 

[starfalls]

Even if the hit was 5 fps, no thanks. Most of these look worse to me. Even the Nvidia offical videos were a no no for me. I never seem to like the look of it. Idk why, I just dont.

 

[Jack77]

What if the accidental leaking of the DLL was actually a deliberate move by Nvidia knowing that chances were high it would be discovered and try it out? To soften the stance of people against the tech.

 

[wiak]

1. nvidia makes games go slower
2. people think they need to buy a 5090
3. nvidia get more money
4. customers get screwed
5. rinse and repeat

 

[Eldrach]

Well - won't judge by a cracked DLL that is basically forced as an overlay in games. I think it for the most parts look quite good, and I'll reserve judgement until I see how much of a performance impact the actual release has. It's probably going to replace other effects to reduce the performance impact ..We'll see..This is not a very good sample of how the end result will be