Official DLSS 5 running on unsupported games delivers up to 90% better performance than the leaked version

A new version of DLSS 5 on NBA 2K27 was just released, and modders have already extracted it and are running it on unsupported games. Modders are comparing performance between the older and newer Neural Rendering (NR) model and found it up to 40% faster than the previous one.

While many are still experimenting with leaked and first-release builds, Renan Maniero has already extracted the new 310.9.16.0 DLSS NR build, letting other modders use it in unsupported games and compare performance. Gaming Optimized on X compared the new NR model to the old one and found massive improvements of up to 90% in The Witcher 3 running DLSS 5 natively.

Running a full NR model to modify your game's image is resource-intensive, just as LLMs require a lot of RAM; DLSS NR does, too. To improve performance, Nvidia made the AI model 24% smaller, using 20% less VRAM at 4K, and, according to Nvidia, processes its neural rendering workload up to 2x faster.

Typically, improving an AI model means increasing its parameters and size—in other words, giving it a bigger brain. However, because consumer GPUs have limited, non-upgradable VRAM, Nvidia can't improve by adding a bigger model; instead, the AI needs to become more efficient while reducing resource usage.

These comparisons were much easier than switching back and forth between updates, since the latest version still includes the older model as a preset. The new DLL has two Neural Rendering presets: Preset A is the old model, and Preset B is the newer model.

As with many other DLSS 5 experiments like those Valery Kryzhanovsky does, DLSS is injected into the graphics pipeline using RenoDX or OptiScaler, both of which let you tweak the DLL settings to get different results. To run DLSS NR on older RTX GPUs, the modding community also modified the runtime to support RTX 20-series GPUs, as the OptiScaler GitHub README notes.

Nvidia plans to release DLSS 5 to RTX 40-series GPUs, but there are no reports of it officially coming to RTX 30- or RTX 20-series cards; the modding community seems to have done it anyway.

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