DLSS 5 Leak Reveals Nvidia's AI Upgrade Comes at Framerate Cost

A leak of Nvidia's DLSS 5 technology has revealed that it comes at a cost to framerate. The leaked build, which was obtained from an early-access version of NBA 2K27, allows modders to inject the feature into other games. In tests, DLSS 5's Neural Rendering feature was found to reduce framerates by around half on Nvidia's latest RTX 50-series cards.

The leaked build shows that Neural Rendering lays a live AI pass over the existing image, rewriting faces, textures, and lighting on the fly. However, this process adds significant computational overhead, leading to reduced performance. On an RTX 5060, testers saw Control's framerate drop from 86 frames per second to 34 with Neural Rendering enabled.

Nvidia has framed DLSS 5 as a set of controls handed to developers, allowing them to keep artistic direction in their hands. However, the leaked build shows that the technology produces off-model characters and textures by default, requiring tuning to achieve desired results.