Leaked DLSS 5 Is Already Running in Dozens of Games, but NVIDIA Still Has Plenty to Worry About

The neural rendering library, found in the files of NBA 2K27, spread across gaming forums faster than NVIDIA could react. In less than a day, enthusiasts not only got the tech running in Control—which, by the way, didn’t show great results—but also adapted it for Cyberpunk 2077, GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us Part II, Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth: Wukong, Starfield, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and at least a dozen other titles.

It all started with a file called nvngx_dlssnr.dll, roughly 158 MB in size, which was discovered in the early PC build of NBA 2K27. In Windows, the library identifies itself as NVIDIA DLSSNR version 310.8.0.0. Members of the RenoDX modding community hooked it into existing games' rendering pipelines via a ReShade add-on. The kicker is that the mod works without any official developer support—the tech was successfully "strapped onto" games that were never designed for DLSS 5 in the first place. According to the modders, the integration uses the same inputs as regular DLSS, and Unreal Engine 5 titles are relatively easy to adapt to the new technology.

The mod comes with a control panel offering seven image-processing styles. In practice, here's what that looks like: character faces change beyond recognition—social media is already flooded with screenshots of Michael from GTA V, and in Control, the protagonist Jesse Faden, under one of the presets, turns into a figure that barely resembles the original model. Player reactions are mixed. Forums are buzzing over screenshots of Ellie from The Last of Us Part II—one user noted that the tech "aged her by about 40 years."

Performance remains the biggest sticking point. On an RTX 5070 Ti at 4K, frame rates in Control dropped from 71 to 35 FPS. In Cyberpunk 2077 on an RTX 5070 at 1440p, the drop was even more dramatic: from 138 to 68 FPS in rasterization, and from 71 to 45 FPS with path tracing enabled. An added issue: with repeated toggling of the mod on and off, VRAM usage crept up by roughly 1 GB each time—though that might be down to the implementation quirks of RenoDX rather than the tech itself.

The official release of DLSS 5 is scheduled for fall 2026. According to NVIDIA, developers will get control over intensity, color correction, and effect masking. At their March GTC demo, the tech was running on two RTX 5090s, but by SIGGRAPH 2026, the company claimed it could run on a single card. NVIDIA itself, judging by the DLL's name (DLSSNR), will likely rebrand DLSS 5 as DLSS Neural Rendering to distinguish it from traditional upscaling.

What do you think—should NVIDIA even release a technology that, in its current state, turns familiar characters into something unrecognizable and eats up half your FPS? Or is this just "teething troubles" that'll get ironed out by launch?