DLSS 5 Slashes Performance on RTX 50 in NBA 2K27, Early Tests Show

Hardware Unboxed's testing suggests DLSS 5's 3D-Guided Neural Rendering is extremely demanding, and NBA 2K27 is the first game to officially support it. On GeForce RTX 50 graphics cards, the channel found that the new technology can cut performance by up to 75%.

On the GeForce RTX 5090, Hardware Unboxed measured an average frame-rate drop of about 60%. The RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 also lost roughly 60% to 70% of their performance, while the RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5060 could hold more than 60 fps only at 1080p with low settings.

The weakest result in the test came from the RTX 5050. It failed to reach 60 fps even in Full HD and lost about 75% of its performance. Hardware Unboxed also said that simply switching DLSS presets does not meaningfully reduce the load.

On the RTX 5060 Ti, moving from DLAA to DLSS Quality produced only about 9% extra performance, while lower presets changed very little. In its calculations, Hardware Unboxed said the RTX 5080 would need more than 330 fps without neural rendering to reach 60 fps in 4K with DLSS 5.

For now, NVIDIA says support for GeForce RTX 40 is planned later, after DLSS 5 performance on the RTX 50 series is optimized further. That leaves NBA 2K27 as the first public testbed for the technology, but not yet a reassuring one for RTX 50 owners.

Does a first official release that cuts performance this hard make DLSS 5 hard to justify on RTX 50 cards?